Chicago/Washington - US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain planned one final race across the country on Monday as state officials braced for record turnout in Tuesday's general election.

As Chicago prepared for a throng of 1 million people at a public park in anticipation of Democrat Obama's victory Tuesday, Republicans were wishing them bad weather and a surprise electoral victory for the underdog McCain.

Washington - US President George W Bush has been a no-show on the campaign trail as the election season comes to a close, with Republicans worried that his unpopularity will hurt their chances with voters heading to the ballot box on Tuesday.

Bush has not made any public campaign appearances with Senator John McCain or any other Republican running for office in the past few months, limiting his role to a handful of fundraisers behind closed doors.

Harare/Johannesburg - Most of the patients lay limp as corpses, on the ground in the open, some of them with their drip bags of saline solution suspended from tree branches. All 28 of them had been brought in during the day.

Flies hovered over a nearby overflowing garbage bin and there was a pool of vomit, almost certainly brimming with the cholera pathogen, near the entrance to the cholera isolation area.

San Francisco - Worldwide threats from malicious software that cripple computers with spy programs, viruses and worms have increased 43 per cent over the past year, Microsoft said Monday in its Security Intelligence Report.

The software giant said that the rise occurred despite a significant improvement in the security of its operating systems, as hackers targeted individual programs and naïve users.

Microsoft said that 90 per cent of new vulnerabilities over the past year targeted programs, while only 10 per cent honed in on operating systems.

Beirut - Syrian authorities have asked the staff of the American school and cultural centre in Damascus to leave Syria within 48 hours, Lebanese radio reported Monday.

A week ago, Damascus ordered the closure of the facilities, in what appeared to be a response to a US commando raid inside Syria on October 26.

Syria says four helicopters attacked a building near its border with Iraqi, killing eight people. Washington has not formally acknowledged the raid, but US officials say the target was a top al- Qaeda figure in Iraq.

Amman - Prince Ghazi bin Mohammad on Monday opened the the new Jordan-based Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) in the presence of a number of prominent scientists from across the world.

The centre would provide the Middle East with "several facilities for basic scientific research and applications that will help boost sciences and technology" in the region, Jordan's Nuclear Energy Commission Chairman Khalid Touqan said at the opening.