Secretary of State James Baker arrives in Israel on his latest peace mission.
And the International AIDS Conference opens in Amsterdam.
This is the CBS Evening News.
Good evening everyone. I'm Giselle Fernandez sitting in tonight for Connie Chung.
A possible breakthrough toward peace tonight in the Middle East.
Secretary of State James Baker opened a new round of negotiations with Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Just hours after his new cabinet agreed to freeze planned settlements in the West Bank.
Chief Middle East correspondent Bob Simon reports.
It was Baker's 10th visit to Israel, but what a difference from the last night.
He was seeing a new government, a new philosophy, new possibilities.
I think that there is now some new opportunities presented.
And I hope that we will see those reflected in movement.
When Shamir was in power, Baker was invariably greeted by the defiant construction of a new Israeli settlement.
Today he arrived hours after the new cabinet declared it would build no new settlements
and review all building contracts drawn up by its predecessor.
Under Shamir, Baker often arrived amidst violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians.
On Friday, the Rabin government negotiated a peaceful solution to a confrontation at a Palestinian university
which could have easily ended in bloodshed.
With the new mood, the Bush administration now has a chance of recapturing some of the Jewish votes it lost
when relations took a dive under Shamir.
Key to that would be the granting of at least part of the $10 billion worth of loan guarantees.
There are new possibilities, I think, as a consequence of the fact that there is a new government here.
Palestinians have listened to Rabin, promised to accelerate negotiations,
leading to full autonomy for people on the West Bank and Gaza.
Baker will meet Palestinian leaders here tomorrow who will find them optimistic but cautious.
Rather than the verbal declarations and changes in attitudes and tone,
we are looking for the right steps for the implementation in order to give us some reason to hope.
This could be Baker's last trip here for a while.
Israeli officials got the clear impression that the secretary is under heavy pressure
to leave the State Department and manage the Bush campaign.
Getting relations with Israel and the peace process back on course
would be important steps for American diplomacy and Republican politics.
Bob Simon, CBS News, Jerusalem.
Iraq said today it would allow experts from so-called neutral countries to enter a building
from which U.N. inspectors have been barred for two weeks.
It's believed the building contains documents on Iraq's ballistic missiles program.
The chief U.N. arms inspector had no immediate comment on the Iraqi proposal.
In Bosnia Herzegovina, heavy fighting is reportedly disrupting the ceasefire
that was to have gone into effect there tonight.
There seems to be no stopping the exodus of refugees trying to escape the bloodshed.
As Alan Pizzi reports, among the many caught on the front lines trying to get out
are those who belong in playgrounds, not battlegrounds.
They had suffered too much to care about promises of ceasefires,
and even this trip was almost too much to take.
But it was perhaps their only chance to be children again.
After months of living under siege in Sarajevo,
a hundred children, half of them orphans, escaped.
They had to brave more than 20 checkpoints.
A doctor who accompanied them said all factions searched the convoy,
but the Serbs were the worst.
I was shocked, she said, that anyone could be so hard with children.
Drenched in sweat, hungry and tired,
it took them 27 hours to reach the coastal city of Split.
They were all but dehydrated.
Don't drink too fast, older children admonished toddlers.
You'll throw up if you do.
For the last two months, the children have spent most of their time underground,
hiding in basements to escape shelling.
Fifty of them, mainly the orphans, are headed for two months of sunshine and safety in Italy.
Twelve-year-old Sabina Tatarovic is alone in the world,
and her priorities are simple.
I hope we'll be able to sleep without the noise of bombs, she says,
and play and eat as much as we want.
The reality that they were safe at last finally struck the children
when they saw the military transport plane and met its Italian crew.
It must be a nice feeling to be able to do this, though.
Yeah. It touched you, you know? It's moving.
Uncounted thousands of children are still trapped in the war zones.
The effort it took just to get these few out shows how hard it will be
to give any of them a chance to be children again if the truce fails.
Alampezi, CBS News, Split.
The eighth international conference on AIDS got underway today in Amsterdam,
the biggest ever held with more than 10,000 people attending.
Health correspondent Edie Magnus is there.
AIDS activists from around the world opened the conference by protesting
against countries that restrict the entry of people infected with the virus,
chief among them, the U.S.
It was the Bush administration's refusal to lift a ban on travel and immigration,
provoked conference organizers to move this year's meeting out of the U.S.