WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, convicted last month on federal ethics charges, on Tuesday appeared to have lost his bid for a seventh term as final ballots were counted, giving Democrats at least 58 seats in the Senate for the first years of the Obama administration.
With an estimated 2,500 votes outstanding late Tuesday and other election-certification steps still to take place, Democrat Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, had taken a 3,724-vote lead out of more than 315,000 cast, and he declared victory.

The final votes are being counted in Alaska’s knife-edge Senate race between incumbent Republican Ted Stevens and Democrat Mark Begich.
With 24,000 votes still to be counted, Mr Begich leads by just 1,022 votes.
Meanwhile, the close senate race in Minnesota is set to go to a recount, and campaigning is under way ahead of a runoff vote in Georgia on 2 December.

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has welcomed Senator Obama’s election as a “great day for American democracy” and one that brought hope to the world.
“The great democracy that is the United States of America has once again demonstrated to the world the greatness of the democratic idea at work,” Mr Rudd told a media conference after Cabinet in Launceston.

They streamed out of Mama Sarah’s compound, dancing and singing loudly in the local Luo language: “We are going to Obama, we are going to the White House.”
It was 7am in Kenya, and CNN had just called the US election for Barack Obama.

Race didn’t turn out to be much of a factor in the historic election of Barack Obama. And that’s a good thing.
But there’s a chasm between the nonracial campaign (it really was the economy, stupid) that vaulted Obama into America’s highest office and a truly post-racial America, where ideas and energy trump skin color. I’m not sure if Tuesday’s election was a giant stride forward into a future that this nation may have been more ready to accept a generation from now.

From Harlem, to the avenue in Atlanta where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was born, to Oakland, Calif., Americans black and white celebrated Barack Obama’s election with tears, the honking of horns, screams of joy, arms lifted skyward — and memories of civil rights struggles past.
An estimated 100,000 people who had crowded into Grant Park in Chicago to greet Obama erupted in cheers and jubilantly waved American flags as TV news announced the Illinois senator had been elected the first black president. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had …

ORLANDO, Fla. — Lew Oliver’s McCain-Palin T-shirt advertised his intentions, and the woman in the S.U.V. gave him an opening. “I’m undecided,” said Nicole Ellington, 31, a paralegal with two young children. “You have two minutes. Go.”
Mr. Oliver knew that her family leaned Republican because she was on his get-out-the-vote list, and he rapidly delivered a pitch honed over 22 years of volunteering for local campaigns. “Wow, you’re good,” she said. And as she drove away, Mr. Oliver smiled with satisfaction.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain goes into the campaign’s final weekend a bigger underdog than any victorious candidate in a modern election.
With four days until Election Day, national polls show his Democratic rival Barack Obama leading by an average of 6 percentage points, and battleground polls show Obama ahead in more than enough states to win the decisive 270 Electoral College votes.

JERUSALEM: An Israeli pollster says that if the country were on the U.S. election map, it would be bright red.
A survey of Americans in the Holy Land released Thursday found that absentee voters supported Republican John McCain over Barack Obama by a three-to-one margin.
The survey interviewed 817 Americans who have cast absentee ballots for next week’s presidential election. It was conducted by Vote from Israel, a nonpartisan group that has encouraged Americans to vote.
An estimated 40,000 Americans living in Israel are expected to vote.
Pollster Mitchell Barak said there is no …

NEW YORK: A growing number of voters have concluded that Senator John McCain’s running mate, Governor Sarah Palin, is unqualified to be president, weighing down the Republican ticket in the closing stages of the campaign, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The poll shows that 59 percent of voters believe Palin is unqualified to be vice president – up nine points from a week earlier. Fully a third of voters said that the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor in their vote for president – much …