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Walter F. Mondale and Norm Coleman will make time during their six-day sprint to replace the late Sen. Paul Wellstone for a debate on the eve of the election, their campaigns announced Saturday. Meanwhile, both sides turned their attention Saturday for the first time to trustworthiness and national security -- the topics that had divided the race before Wellstone was killed in a plane crash Oct. 25.

It's been spotted in the hands of celebrities, a murky-looking drink with an exotic name: kombucha. The beverage originally hails from China, where it first earned a reputation as a health tonic nearly 2,000 years ago. In the U.S., kombucha has gone through several reincarnations. Its benefits haven't been proved. What has been shown, for the home-brewed versions, is that it isn't always safe. Kombucha became popular in the 1980s among the elderly and people with HIV.

Writing a book is one thing. Making people aware that you've written it is another thing entirely -- and because we live in a busy, crowded, hyperactive world, creating that awareness can constitute an even more colorful ordeal than the writing act itself. Two new authors are fighting the good fight right now. M. Glenn Taylor, an English professor at Harper College in Palatine, Ill., and Marianne Herrmann, who lives in St. Louis Park, Minn.

Strother MacMinn, influential automotive designer, writer and teacher at the prestigious Art Center College of Design for 50 years, has died. He was 79. MacMinn, who designed cars for General Motors and Opel, died at his Pasadena home Monday, college officials said Friday. He helped make auto design a cameo industry in the Los Angeles area with his teaching and in helping to establish Toyota's Calty Design Research Inc., the first automotive design satellite in Southern California.

Walter F. Mondale's son, Ted, 32, is going to run for the Minnesota Senate. Young Mondale, a lawyer who worked on his father's campaigns for the vice presidency and the presidency as well as Michael S. Dukakis' 1988 campaign, will seek the endorsement of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in challenging incumbent State Sen. Phyllis McQuaid.

President Bush declared northwestern Minnesota a disaster area Friday, making federal aid available to a region where up to a foot of rain fell in recent days. The city of Roseau, about 10 miles south of the Canadian border, was hardest hit. Nearly every building in the town of 3,000 people was damaged by the Roseau River, which remained about 6 feet above flood stage Friday. Flooding was reported in 13 counties.

Minnesota voters elected a black Democrat as the first Muslim in Congress after a race in which he advocated quick U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and made little mention of his faith. Keith Ellison, a 43-year-old lawyer and state representative, defeated two rivals to succeed retiring Democratic U.S. Rep. Martin Olav Sabo in a seat that has been held by Democrats since 1963.

Alan Keyes got a surprising second-place finish in Minnesota's GOP straw poll, but he finished in single digits in most of Tuesday's Republican presidential contests. In the straw poll, Texas Gov. George W. Bush got about two-thirds of the vote, and Keyes was second, with McCain a few points behind. Outside of his performance in Minnesota, Keyes' strongest finish was in his home state of Maryland, where he picked up roughly 7% of the vote. Minnesota brought Keyes his only delegates of the day.

ROSEAU, Minn. -- Exhausted residents were rescued from their flooded homes Thursday, and National Guard helicopters air-dropped sandbags to those still fighting record floods that inundated much of Roseau, authorities said. More than half of the 2,800 residents of the northwestern Minnesota town hard by the Canadian border boarded National Guard trucks to be evacuated, said Roseau Police Chief Ward Anderson.

The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled today that smokers or their survivors may sue tobacco companies in state courts over health risks. The ruling was believed to make Minnesota the first state to allow lawsuits over the industry promotion of the safety of smoking. The court said the warning on cigarette packages does not prevent health-risk lawsuits. The decision, which was considered likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court, reinstated a suit brought by John Forster of Golden Valley, who sued the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in April, 1985--two months before he died of lung cancer.