Saudi Arabia

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Often depicted as a country of almost infinite wealth, Saudi Arabia has exhausted its reserves of cash by spending tens of billions of dollars for the war against Iraq and is seeking to borrow money from foreign banks, diplomats here say.Foreign financing is needed, they say, if the kingdom is to fill pledges of financial support made to the United States and other countries and to help Saudi Arabia manage serious war-related disruptions...

KING FAHD of Saudi Arabia is the fourth son of founding monarch Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud to succeed his father, who died in 1953. Fahd is 74, fat, diabetic, pleasure-seeking, Westernizing and suffered a stroke in November. On assuming power in 1982 he named his half-brother, Abdullah, to be crown prince, heir apparent, second-in-command and head of the tribal-based National Guard. Abdullah is 72, thin, ascetic, traditionalist, pious and speaks no English.King Fahd's New Year's Day appointment of Prince Abdullah to perform royal duties until he recuperates reassured the kingdom that there is no power struggle or change, at least not now. Much is made of Abdullah's stronger Arab traditionalism, compared to Fahd's modernizing.

AMMAN, Jordan -- Faced with growing diplomatic and economic pressure to break with Iraq, Jordan's King Hussein condemned yesterday Iraq's occupation of Kuwait but urged the United States to drop its demand for an unconditional Iraqi withdrawal.Addressing his televised remarks directly to the United States, the king said Washington would have to soften its demands if the region was to avoid a war that would cause "untold death, destruction and misery." He asked the United States and its allies to withdraw their forces from Saudi Arabia at the earliest possible date.

WASHINGTON - Seeking to blunt any political gains President Bush derives from the war on terror, Howard Dean and other Democratic presidential hopefuls are making the case that the administration's close ties with Saudi Arabia have led it to overlook a major source of anti-American extremism. Seizing on a generally low opinion of Saudi Arabia among Americans, the Democrats have portrayed the administration as so wedded to Middle East oil that it is blind to extremism and terror financed by oil profits.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - U.S. officials said yesterday that the U.S. Embassy and two consulates in Saudi Arabia would be closed until Sunday because of an "imminent" threat of terrorist attacks inside the kingdom. Britain and Germany also closed their embassies until late this week. The decision to close the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh and the consulates in Jiddah and Dhahran came in response to new intelligence reports warning of a sharp increase in communications among suspected terrorists describing plans for a series of attacks here, U.S. officials said yesterday.

NEW YORK - On the way home from the hajj, his emotion-laden pilgrimage to Islam's holy shrines in Saudi Arabia, Shamsul Quadir began to worry that he might get in trouble for coming back a changed man. "I left clean-shaven and with a full head of hair, and now look at me," Quadir said Friday after clearing the immigration and customs booths at Kennedy International Airport in New York. Quadir, a Pakistani-born shopkeeper from Louisiana, wore a five-day growth of dark beard, and when he shyly lifted his baseball cap he revealed a bare, shiny scalp.

LONDON -British police said yesterday that they had extended until tomorrow the detention of eight Muslims arrested this week in connection with the seizure of 1,000 pounds of a bomb-making compound near central London. At the same time, a spokesman for the police antiterrorism branch said the recent arrests in Canada and Saudi Arabia of two men of Pakistani origin - a father and son - are connected to the investigation into the possible bomb-making activities in London. The police fear that those activities might have been in support of plans to strike a prominent target in London, but a spokesman said that no direct physical evidence of bomb-making, such as detonators, timing devices or other bomb paraphernalia, was discovered in the raids.

THE PREVENTABLE DEATHS of 19 American servicemen were needed to wrest Saudi approval for security measures at the Khobar Towers apartments in Dhahran that should have been made last year. The perimeter will be pushed from 30 to 400 feet away, enough to have foiled the truck bomb that exploded last Tuesday.Much is heard about Saudi sensitivities and the need to tread cautiously with the strange royal house that runs the world's largest oil reserve as a family property. It is denounced by extremists as too beholden to the secular U.S. while guarding the sacred sites of Islam.

DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia -- Iraq launched more waves of Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia yesterday and early today, not long after a senior U.S. commander said that U.S.-led military forces were "nowhere near" the goal of eliminating the missile threat.All the Iraqi medium-range ballistic missiles -- at least five in all -- were either intercepted by air-defense missiles or fell in areas where they caused no serious damage or injuries.The first attack, a lone missile launched before dawn at Dhahran, fell harmlessly into the Persian Gulf off the coast of Al Jubayl, U.S. military officials said.

A LOT of criticism has been heaped since Sept. 11 on the royal family that rules Saudi Arabia. No one should be surprised by that - least of all the ailing King Fahd and his family of obscenely wealthy princes. The Saudis are protected by America - which drives Osama bin Laden nuts - but they aren't enthusiastic about giving up much in return. Not much attention has been paid to President Hosni Mubarak, the ruler of Egypt, the other country that produced terrorists who acted against America on Sept.