Kaboos Ibn Said

--Harpsichord maker Peter Redstone is a man in tune with the past. In his ramshackle frame house on an isolated country road in Claremont, Va., the British-born Redstone painstakingly handcrafts the instruments that inspired 18th-Century composers Bach, Handel and Scarlatti, sometimes taking up to a year to finish just one. His love of harpsichords started at age 3, when he took one apart.

Arab leaders arrived here Tuesday for a crucial summit whose outcome has been thrown into doubt by failure to agree on an agenda and pessimism about the viability of the Arab League. "This meeting is very important," Moroccan Foreign Minister Abdellatif Filali told foreign reporters. "If it fails, then the Arab League may be finished."

Every spring, Sultan Kaboos ibn Said, "the Great and the Blessed," takes his royal court out into the desert and mountains of his Persian Gulf country for a meet-the-people tour. Driving a racing-green Mercedes jeep with a cavalcade of cabinet ministers and courtiers in tow, the 47-year-old sultan journeys for nearly a month, calling on villages and remote tribal communities by day, pitching his tent at night.

The Clinton Administration is making plans for a full-dress White House signing ceremony next week for the precedent-shattering Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, but officials conceded Tuesday that lingering disputes over details could delay the event for weeks. White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said President Clinton has suggested signing the pact next Monday if the Palestine Liberation Organization satisfies Israeli conditions for mutual recognition by then.

Arab sheiks and emirs of the Persian Gulf concluded a summit Tuesday without any new breakthroughs on a peaceful resolution to the crisis in Kuwait but issued a last, uncompromising demand for Iraqi troops to withdraw or face "the perils of a devastating war." Clearly backing the United States in its effort to stare down Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the countdown before the United Nations' Jan.

An Arab princess visited the office of neurosurgeon William Hyman for her annual checkup Saturday, her fourth since Hyman operated successfully on a pinched nerve in her neck in 1981. Just how the aunt of the ruling monarch of Oman, a mountainous, oil-rich country in the Mideast, became his patient at the Atlantic Medical Center is like "something out of 'The Arabian Nights,' " Hyman said.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell plans to visit India and Pakistan late this week, kicking off the post-bombing phase of U.S. diplomacy by talking with two nuclear-armed rivals who have joined the anti-terrorism alliance. In other diplomatic efforts, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Powell conducted an intense round of telephone calls Sunday to explain to world leaders the reasons for the attack on Afghanistan, where terrorist leader Osama bin Laden makes his headquarters.

The United States has secretly offered the Persian Gulf sultanate of Oman a temporary deployment of U.S. jet fighters to make up for the aircraft carrier Saratoga's hasty reassignment last week from its station nearby in the Arabian Sea, Reagan Administration sources said Friday. Acceptance of the fighters would mark a major increase in the U.S. military presence in Oman, which is now limited to a liaison office, an agreement on emergency use of bases and ports, the storage of some U.S.

The three Arab leaders who have gone the furthest to promote peace with Israel said Wednesday that the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's next prime minister will neither derail the peace process nor prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

Allied warplanes streamed over a crowded shoreline Wednesday, notching up Kuwaiti confidence one year after the U.S.-led Desert Storm forces swept the Iraqi army out of the capital. For an emirate whose own military remains undermanned and marginally trained, the thundering Liberation Day parade of allied air power underscored the government's reliance on Western powers for its defense.