Livni eyes Prime Minister's office after bagging Kadima leadership

Fresh from her election as the head of Israel's ruling Kadima party,Tzipi Livni on Thursday set out to become the country's second woman prime minister and avert snap elections that could stall Middle East peacemaking.

In her victory speech, the foreign minister said she wanted to form a new government as quickly as possible, a daunting challenge for the new leader of a party dogged by corruption scandals and involved in uneasy alliances with groups that include religious fanatics and advocates of ethnic cleansing.

Livni, 50, narrowly won Wednesday's party leadership vote to replace scandal-plagued Premier Ehud Olmert, who is standing down to battle a number of corruption allegations.

Livni secured 43 percent of the vote and a lead of just one percentage point – or 431 votes – over her main rival,Transport Minister and hawkish former military Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz.

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Obama not closing racial divide: poll

Americans are sharply divided by race ahead of the first presidential election in which a black candidate will represent a major party, a New York Times/CBS News poll showed on Tuesday,

The poll found that blacks and whites hold vastly different views of Sen. Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat who would be the first black president, and are also divided on the state of race relations in the United States, the newspaper reported.

In the survey, 83 percent of blacks had a favorable opinion of Obama, compared with 31 percent of white voters.

Obama will face John McCain, a white Republican senator from Arizona, in the November 4 presidential election.

On the status of race relations, 59 percent of black respondents thought they were generally bad, compared with 34 percent of whites who thought the same way.

The nationwide telephone poll of 1,796 adults showed that 39 percent of blacks said there had been no real progress in recent years in getting rid of racial discrimination. Only 17 percent of whites said the same thing.

Twenty-seven percent of whites said too much had been made of problems facing black people, while half of blacks said not enough had been made of racial barriers faced by black people.

The poll was conducted July 7-14 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll found Obama leading McCain by 50 percent to 42 percent among registered voters nationwide. The poll also had Obama with a 19-point lead over McCain on the economy, the issue topping the list of voter concerns.

The poll of 1,119 adults and 971 registered voters was conducted July 10 through 13. The results had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.