Assad looks past US for talks with Israel

PARIS - Syrian President Bashar Assad has told a French newspaper his country is unlikely to enter direct peace talks with Israel while President Bush is in office. However, Assad said he was betting that the next US leader would get more involved in the peace process. In the interview published on the website of Le Figaro yesterday, Assad said Syria and Israel were looking for common ground to start face-to-face negotiations, adding that it was vital to find the right country to mediate. "Frankly, we do not think that the current American administration is capable of making peace," Assad said. "It doesn't have either the will or the vision, and it only has a few months left." (Reuters)

CANNES - European Union nations gave their support yesterday to a French-drafted pact calling for tightening immigration and asylum rules across the 27-nation bloc by 2012. Justice and interior ministers backed an eight-page declaration that would bind their governments to accelerate negotiations on a common immigration policy. The plan sets five goals for attracting highly skilled workers while managing or expelling unwanted, illegal, and mostly poor migrants. (AP)

BOGOTA - A rose-laden US cargo plane headed for Miami crashed near the Colombian capital yesterday, killing two people on the ground, local authorities said. A hospital director said one crew member was in serious condition. It was the second time in about six weeks that a Boeing 747 flown by Kalitta Air of Ypsilanti, Mich., has crashed. The plane's crew told air traffic controllers that an engine was on fire, said Donald Tascon of Colombia's civil aviation agency. Mayor Diego Humberto Sicard of Madrid village said the plane hit a house on a ranch about 15 miles northwest of Bogota at 3:50 a.m., killing two people inside. (AP)

BERLIN - The Austrian government collapsed yesterday after months of acrimonious dispute between the nation's two largest parties. New elections, pending parliamentary approval, will probably be held in September after the People's Party withdrew from the coalition. The leftist Social Democratic Party and the conservative People's Party had been locked in an uneasy coalition since January 2007. Fears about rising prices have aggravated tensions over immigration. (New York Times News Service)

LA PAZ - Bolivian officials unveiled journals written by Marxist guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara during his failed attempt to spread revolution in the Andean country, where he was killed in 1967. The journals included a diary the left-wing icon wrote in two frayed notebooks, along with a logbook and black-and-white photographs. "Several transcripts of the diary have been published . . . but this is the first time the public will be able to look at the handwritten journals," the country's vice minister of culture, Pablo Groux, said yesterday. (Reuters)