VoteKansas.org

PARIS (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has told a newspaper his country is unlikely to make peace with Israel while President George W. Bush remains in office.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lifting the congressional ban on offshore drilling would likely increase U.S. oil and natural gas production above the government's current estimates, the U.S. Interior Department said on Monday.

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Police found six charred bodies, one still on fire, dumped on a street in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana on Monday, in the latest brutal killing on the U.S.-Mexico border.

PARIS (Reuters) - Colombian President Alvaro Uribe should soften his tone when dealing with the Marxist FARC guerrillas, freed hostage Ingrid Betancourt said on Monday, urging him to break with the language of "hatred".

ST. LOUIS (Reuters) - A Midwest Airlines MD-80 carrying U.S presidential candidate Barack Obama made an unscheduled landing on Monday in St. Louis after pilots found they were having difficulty controlling the plane, U.S. safety investigators and airline officials said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski met U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday to salvage negotiations on a missile defense system opposed by Russia, but there was no early sign of a deal.

Daniel Flynn, correspondent for West and Central Africa, joined Reuters in 1998 and has worked in Venezuela and Spain. In the following story he describes his experience of the trial of Simon Mann in Equatorial Guinea.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaves on Monday for the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Georgia and perhaps Poland on a trip that illustrates their deepening U.S. ties despite Russia's objections.

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Three Colombians were killed early on Monday when a 747-200 cargo plane crashed into their house near the capital city Bogota while all eight crew members on board the aircraft survived, authorities said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Barack Obama will accept the Democratic presidential nomination next month at a Denver football stadium that can hold more than 75,000 people after the political party decided to open the event to a broader audience, officials said on Monday.

SUKHUMI, Georgia (Reuters) - The death toll from a bomb explosion in Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia on Sunday has risen to four, separatist officials said on Monday, further worrying the West with fears the violence could worsen.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain took a veiled swipe at Democratic rival Barack Obama over trade on Thursday in the final leg of a Latin American trip aimed at showcasing the Arizona senator's foreign policy credentials.

TOYAKO, Japan (Reuters) - Italy on Monday proposed increasing margin requirements on futures markets to deter speculative buying of oil, which Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said could reach $200 a barrel.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Having clinched crucial political support, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrived in Japan on Monday for a G8 summit where he may formally press ahead with a civilian nuclear deal with the United States.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani investigators scouring the scene of a weekend suicide bomb attack on police found a severed head on Monday as the leader of the ruling party said his government would do everything to stop the bombers.

LUKAVAC, Bosnia (Reuters) - Three sets of bones are neatly displayed next to each other in aluminum cases in a basement in northeast Bosnia: they are three of four brothers killed in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday his country would not stop enriching uranium and rejected as "illegitimate" a demand by major powers that it do so, the official IRNA news agency reported.

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe urged the world on Monday to accept President Robert Mugabe's re-election and said any move to impose U.N. sanctions on his government would hurt everyone involved.

KABUL (Reuters) - A suicide car bomb hit the Indian Embassy in Kabul on Monday, killing 41 people and wounding 139, in an attack Afghan authorities said was coordinated with foreign agents in the region, a likely reference to Pakistan.

PARIS (Reuters) - Freed Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt, a devout Catholic who prayed daily during six years in captivity, will visit the shrine of Lourdes in southwest France this week, a source close to her said on Monday.