AFP - Iraq's capital throbs to the hum of thousands of polluting generators, but now the authorities in Baghdad want to regulate the private power network that has developed amid the ruins of the public grid.

AP - Five days a week, Linda Graham trolls tattered neighborhoods of this once thriving steel city outside Pittsburgh for unregistered voters she can sign up as Democrats — one of thousands of unknown volunteers whose work outside the limelight has already altered the basic arithmetic of the November election.