Week In Review A Look Back At The Top Stories From The Last Week

WORLD

A draw in the sand

Iraq battled the United States to a draw last week as Russian negotiators appeared to have pulled the two nations back from the brink of another armed confrontation.

U.N. inspections will resume in Iraq and include U.S. inspectors, but Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime is unshaken - and free to continue its relentless campaign to undermine the international sanctions that were imposed to prevent Iraq from building weapons of mass destruction and waging war on its neighbors.

“The good news is that we achieved our basic objective, and that the coalition has survived to struggle another day,” said Richard Haass, a former senior official in the Bush administration. “The bad news is that Saddam Hussein hasn’t paid a price for … refusing to meet his obligations.”

The United States must still struggle to maintain the U.N. sanctions against Iraq - even as Russia and France step up their efforts to lift some of the embargoes. “As long as Saddam is there, as long as we have a policy of containment, he’s going to have a potential to challenge that,” the official said. “His ultimate aim is to break out of the sanctions regime.”

Death on the Nile

Islamic militants opened fire on foreign tourists gathered at an ancient Egyptian temple near the Nile River on Monday, killing 58 tourists and three Egyptians in the country’s deadliest terrorist attack by anti-government extremists.

Most of the victims were Japanese, Swiss and German.

“They shot everyone in the arms and legs,” a surviving Swiss tourist, Rosemarie Dousse, told Swiss national radio. “Then they killed everyone who was still alive with a shot to the head.”

A statement issued in the name of Egypt’s most prominent Islamic militant group said that the massacre had begun as an effort to take hostages in order to secure the release of a leader imprisoned in New York for his role in the World Trade Center bombing. But the accounts by survivors gave no hint of any attempts to take tourists alive - only to kill and, perhaps, to butcher them.

SPOKANE

Tough act to follow

The citizens committee assigned the task of reviewing Spokane’s plans for a Lincoln Street bridge endorsed the project. But the 9-8 vote vote left some City Council members more confused than convinced of the merits of the project.

“We put this in the hands of a committee to look at,” Councilman Orville Barnes said Tuesday. “Almost, in a sense, they didn’t come up with an opinion.”

Only 19 of 34 committee members attended the third and final meeting. One man left the meeting before the secret ballots were cast, and Chairman Don Barbieri didn’t vote.

“I wanted to know where the heck the rest of the people were,” Councilman Jeff Colliton said.

The council was counting on the committee’s report to help it decide the bridge’s fate. Now, some say they’re not sure what the vote means.

“This is not a unanimous decision by any means,” Colliton said. “That’s a difficult decision to follow.”

NATION

Lucky number

In what her doctors called a miracle, a 29-year-old Iowa woman gave birth Wednesday to four boys and three girls. Doctors said the babies - weighing just 2 ounces short of 20 pounds - have a promising chance to become the world’s first set of surviving septuplets.

Doctors were encouraged by the relatively robust weight of the newborns, ranging from 2 pounds 5 ounces to 3 pounds 4 ounces.

“We are all very, very happy,” said Dr. Paula Mahone, who delivered the infants to Bobbi McCaughey at Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines.

Disunion

A federal overseer on Monday ruled that Teamsters President Ron Carey, the most effective reformer in the union’s troubled history had taken part in illegal schemes to pump union money into his 1996 re-election effort.

The ruling, which bars Carey from running for re-election, leaves challenger James P. Hoffa as the only name on the ballot and union reformers scrambling to find someone to oppose him in an election rerun in March.

Carey blamed unnamed “enemies of reform” for his undoing. “While I intend to fight this with everything that I have, reform of the Teamsters never has depended upon one man.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by Assistant News Editor Gary Crooks from wire reports