Minnesota

Democrat Al Franken was quickly turned down Monday when he asked Minnesota's governor and secretary of state to issue an election certificate that would let him take office in the Senate. In letters the campaign sent to Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, Franken's lawyers argued that a seven-day waiting period for issuing the certificate after an election has passed and he should get the signed certificate.

Tall and lean, with a wispy mustache and shy smile, 17-year-old Burhan Hassan chalked up A's last fall as a senior at Roosevelt High School, vowing to become a doctor or lawyer. After school and on weekends, he studied Islam at the nearby Abubakar As-Saddique mosque. He joined its youth group. "He wanted to go to Harvard," said his uncle Osman Ahmed. "That was his dream." Instead Hassan has gone to Somalia, the anarchic East African nation that his family fled when he was a toddler.

It is the election that never seems to end. Voters in Minnesota were no closer Wednesday to knowing whether their second U.S. senator will be Democrat Al Franken or Republican Norm Coleman, even as the latest installment, a trial in St. Paul challenging the Nov. 4 election, comes to a close. It's been a bitter battle to figure out whether Franken's narrow lead -- 225 ballots over incumbent Coleman, out of 2.9 million cast -- is the actual, final result of the race.

Officials in North Dakota and Minnesota issued urgent pleas for volunteers to help fill sandbags as a Sunday storm increased the threat of flooding in an area already expected to be swamped by a record river crest. "We need this help," Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney said. "We need to stay calm, we need to stay cool, but we need to get serious and get this done." The National Weather Service said the Red River was about 3 feet above flood stage Sunday in Fargo, and more water was on the way.