World

With votes imminent in Congress on a resolution authorizing force against Iraq, the Baghdad government invited President Bush to send American inspectors to see "immediately" and first-hand "that we have no weapons of mass destruction and no intention to produce them." But the offer extended only to two suspected weapons-development sites and was expected to be declined. Meanwhile, in a shift of position, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien said Canadian forces "will go there" if the UN approves military force against Iraq.

There was no immediate hint by British Prime Minister Blair about whether he'd expel Sinn Fein from the power-sharing government of Northern Ireland. Blair left a "cordial" meeting with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams saying only that there still is an "unacceptable" level of paramilitary activity in the province by Catholic republicans. Adams, whose party is allied with the Irish Republican Army, said it would be a "mistake" to suspend the joint Protestant-Catholic administration. Protestant First Minister David Trimble has threatened to quit the government Tuesday if Sinn Fein isn't expelled for its alleged role in spying on Britain for the IRA. Britain already has suspended the Northern Ireland assembly on three occasions.

Another Palestinian bomber struck at a bus stop in a Tel Aviv, Israel, suburb, killing himself and an elderly woman and wounding four other people. The casualty count would have been higher except that the attacker fell bckward out of the bus he was about to board, exposing the explosives around his waist. The driver then pinned his arms, allowing passengers time to flee the scene. The blast came as the bomber got to his feet and ran toward another crowd of people.

A mortar shell attached to a timing device exploded inside a crowded bus station in the southern Philippines, killing at least six people. Twenty-four others were hurt, many of them critically. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Muslim and communist radical groups operate in the area as well as independent extortionists, and police said it was too soon to assign blame.

The Nobel Literature Prize was awarded to Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." Kertesz, who survived the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and, later, the Buchenwald concentration camp, has devoted much of his work to a trilogy on the Holocaust.