By BETH FOUHY

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin tells audiences the election is about the “truthfulness and judgment” needed to be president. But the Alaska governor often stretches the truth herself.

She has exaggerated the nature of Barack Obama’s personal ties to a former 1960s radical and falsely claimed the Democratic presidential candidate plans to raise most people’s taxes.

On Tuesday, she tried rebutting the Illinois senator’s criticisms of Republican presidential candidate John McCain over health care and Social Security. She said Obama was misleading and wrong, but she herself told less than the full story.

To be sure, most of Palin’s assertions about Obama echo claims McCain himself has made or lines from Republican TV ads.

At a rally Tuesday, Palin tried to link Obama to the failure of housing giant Fannie Mae by noting that two Obama supporters once led the troubled company. The government seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, another housing finance company, last month to prevent their collapse from worsening the global credit crisis.

“What’s next, claiming that he didn’t know two of his biggest supporters were running Fannie Mae, the subprime mortgage giant?” Palin said. “That has done harm to the American economy.

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At a summit on the issue, the Los Angeles mayor says both groups must ‘face up to’ the racial strains and address the poverty that causes them. Tense relations are not ‘endemic to our DNA,’ he said.

By Phil Willon

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Monday said Latinos and African Americans must “face up to” existing racial strains over jobs, language differences and violent crime by addressing the underlying causes of those tensions, primarily poverty and the lack of opportunity.

At the same time Villaraigosa dismissed those who believe that such tensions define the relationship between blacks and Latinos “as if it’s endemic to our DNA to have conflict.”

Villaraigosa waded into the volatile issue of race at the National Black Latino Summit, a conference of community leaders and organizers who came to Los Angeles to tighten bonds between the nation’s two largest minority groups and counter the “hyperventilating” over perceptions of a racial divide.

Though he acknowledged that recent gang violence and schoolyard brawls between blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles have drawn national attention and must be addressed, Villaraigosa emphasized the long history of blacks and Latinos working and living together. Blacks and Latinos joined together in the fight for civil rights, he said, and today Los Angeles is filled with thriving multiethnic neighborhoods.

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(CNN) — Fannie Mae said it will set aside the loan of a woman who shot herself as sheriff’s deputies tried to evict her from her foreclosed home.

Fannie Mae foreclosed on the Akron, Ohio, home of Addie Polk, 90, after acquiring the mortgage in 2007.

Addie Polk, 90, of Akron, Ohio, became a symbol of the nation’s home mortgage crisis when she was hospitalized after shooting herself at least twice in the upper body Wednesday afternoon.

On Friday, Fannie Mae spokesman Brian Faith said the mortgage association had decided to halt action against Polk and sign the property “outright” to her.

“We’re going to forgive whatever outstanding balance she had on the loan and give her the house,” Faith said. “Given the circumstances, we think it’s appropriate.”

Residents of Akron have rallied behind Polk, who is being treated at Akron General Medical Center. She was listed in critical condition Friday afternoon, according to Akron City Council President Marco Sommerville.

U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, mentioned Polk on the House floor Friday during debate over the latest economic rescue proposal.

“This bill does nothing for the Addie Polks of the world,” Kucinich said after telling her story. “This bill fails to address the fact that millions of homeowners are facing foreclosure, are facing the loss of their home. This bill will take care of Wall Street, and the market may go up for a few days, but democracy is going downhill.”

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Don’t believe the hype TRUST ME. According to people close to this latest development, Rodney Noel does not approve the following press release. He is not apologizing for what he said because not only is he a man of his word but he truly believes what he called Djakout to be the truth! This press release was orchestrated by his marketing team in Haiti who was feeling the pressure of what transpired in the past week or so. Until you hear Rodney go on the air like before to apologize then this is all marketing.

FRENCH

Port-au-Prince, le 1er octobre 2008

Communiqué de Presse

Les Productions Noël and Cecibon et Rythm and Harmony présentent des excuses publiques aux musiciens de Djakout Mizik

Les Productions Noël and Cecibon et Rythm and Harmony regrettent les propos mal placés, particulièrement le terme vicieux, tenus à l’endroit de certains musiciens de Djakout Mizik à l’émission Plateforme Magik 9, le lundi 22 septembre écoulé. Noël and Cecibon et Rythm and Harmony présentent des excuses publiques aux musiciens, aux fans du groupe et à tous ceux qui se sont senti blessés par ce mot.

Continue To View English Translation….

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VIENNA, Austria (AP) — A U.N. nuclear conference of 145 nations indirectly criticized Israel on Saturday for refusing to put its atomic program under international purview.

But the Jewish state managed to evade being targeted by Islamic countries pushing for a vote to link it to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

Iran, Israel’s most outspoken foe, spearheaded the verbal attack on the Jewish state, as it has done at past general conferences of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Israel is widely considered to have nuclear arms, but has a “no tell” policy on the issue.

Chief Iranian delegate Ali Ashgar Soltanieh said Israel’s nuclear capabilities represent a “serious and continued threat to the security of neighboring and other states.”

He took the United States and other Western backers of Israel to task for their “shameful silence” on what he said was the menace posed by Israel’s atomic arsenal.

The meeting voted for a resolution urging all nations to open their nuclear activities to outside inspection and work toward the establishment of a Mideast nuclear weapons free zone. With Israel the only country in the region considered to have atomic arms, passage of the resolution constituted indirect criticism of the Jewish state.

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