Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia remains the world's leading source of money for Al Qaeda and other extremist networks and has failed to take key steps requested by U.S. officials to stem the flow, the Bush administration's top financial counter-terrorism official said Tuesday. Stuart A.

A top fundraiser and advisor in Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign has resigned, becoming the latest of five aides to leave in recent days as McCain moves to sever ties with lobbyists. Thomas G. Loeffler, a lobbyist whose clients have included Saudi Arabia, stepped down as national finance committee chairman, the senator's campaign said Sunday.

For decades, Saudi Arabia worked with its dominant customer, the United States, to keep world oil markets stable and advance common political goals. But the surging price of oil, which soared more than $10 a barrel Friday to a record-high $138.54, has made it plain that those days are over. New forces, including a weak dollar and an oil-thirsty Asia, have blunted the United States' leverage and helped sour the two countries' relationship.

Saudi Arabia plans to increase its oil production by 200,000 barrels a day next month to help tame high fuel prices, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday. The planned output of 9.7 million barrels per day would be an increase of more than 6% since May and would take Saudi crude output to its highest monthly rate since August 1981, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

ONE OF the best developments in contemporary crime fiction of late is how willing, even eager, writers are to explore uncharted territory. What with the mini-boom of translated Scandinavian novels by Arnaldur Indridason, Karin Fossum and Jo Nesbo (to name just a handful), Deon Meyer's and Michael Stanley's criminal investigations in the wilds of Africa and Matt Beynon Rees' elegant mysteries set in Palestinian territories, readers have an embarrassment of global riches to choose from.

Facing strong U.S. pressure and global dismay over oil prices, Saudi Arabia said Sunday that it would produce more crude this year if the market needed it. The vague pledge fell far short of U.S. hopes for a specific increase and may do little to lower prices immediately.

Up the corniche, along a coast where boats carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca sailed for centuries, a thicket of cranes rises over whitewashed mosques along the Red Sea. Steel flashes and blowtorches glow as 20,000 workers build a $10-billion university ordered up by a king who hopes Western ingenuity will revive the economy of this ultraconservative Muslim nation.

Zoe Ferraris' Ukrainian American grandmother thought her so spoiled that she would only marry a sheik. But Ferraris, then a San Francisco teen, didn't quite catch her meaning. "I thought it was some fairy-tale punishment, having to marry a sheet, having to do all the [house] work," Ferraris said. "When I did get married, she said, 'I told you so.'

He keeps his tools in a torn sack -- a hammer, three chisels, a sponge. He works in the shade, bent, blowing away dust, writing names of the dead in marble. He's carved 1,000 of them, probably more; he stopped counting long ago. This was not his aspiration, but a dream changes along the way, and a man who starts out as a mechanic can end up carving gravestones. It happens. You find your craft, you take your pay.

Facing a global economic slowdown and plummeting oil prices, the government of Saudi Arabia is taking a page from President-elect Barack Obama's book and pouring additional billions of dollars into public works, even as the country expects its first budget deficit in six years. But unlike the United States, Saudi Arabia will be drawing from its substantial savings, rather than issuing new debt.