Saudi

Steve Thorne, 54, watched approvingly as his girlfriend tried on a pair of boots at the Jimmy Choo boutique on Rodeo Drive last week. "I can't complain," he said when I asked how the economy's been treating him. With sales of new cars down, Thorne said, his 600-employee replacement-parts business in Philadelphia has had a record year, and he's doing better than ever. "Things are good," he said. "Absolutely." Gas and grocery prices may be more than many working-class families can bear, home foreclosures may be soaring, but life is just fine at the loftiest heights of the economy.

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.

COLLEEN WILLIAMS, who co-anchors the KNBC Channel 4 news at 5 p.m., has purchased a home in Pasadena with her husband of five months, Air Force Maj. Jon Dudley, whom she met last fall when she went to Saudi Arabia to cover the Persian Gulf War. "I arranged a trip there to be with some of the troops and at the last minute he was substituted as my escort officer," she said. "It was the first time he had been an escort officer, because he is a pilot.

TOM SELLECK and his wife, dancer JILLIE MACK, had just finished renovating and expanding the home on their Thousand Oaks-area ranch at a cost of $2 million when the Green Meadow blaze threatened to destroy it. The October firestorm, which claimed more than 60 residences from Thousand Oaks to Malibu, burned 50 of the 60 acres on the Sellecks' ranch and came to within 20 feet of a newly built complex housing their movie theater, guest suite and gym.

Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist? To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical, especially in the context of the U.S. media's supine acceptance of administration claims relating to national security.

They reshuffled the deck Friday in the athletic department at Chapman College and when they were done, the Panthers had three new coaches and a new sports information director. Dr. Walt Bowman, Chapman's athletic director, introduced his four new appointments at a press conference on campus. The new appointments are: --Paul Kahn, head coach of the women's basketball team. Kahn comes from Costa Mesa High School, where he had been the girls' coach for the last six years.

FRESNO -- At 6 o'clock on a sweltering June morning in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, Sarah Saga dressed in the traditional veil and full-length covering that many Muslim women wear and roused her two children from a deep sleep. The house was silent as other relatives slept. Saga, the 24-year-old daughter of an American mother and Saudi father, hurried with daughter and son to a nearby market, where they hailed a cab for the U.S. Consulate.

The INS has begun deportation proceedings against Joeri DeBeer, the Dana Point youth convicted of killing his legal guardian, who had sexually abused him. DeBeer was arrested earlier this month because he had committed a crime of "moral turpitude," said Harold W. Ezell, western regional commissioner for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Because DeBeer was convicted of manslaughter, he is in violation of his non-immigrant student status, Ezell said Saturday.

WASHINGTON - The CIA has stepped up secret contingency planning to protect the United States and its allies as the turmoil expands in Syria, including collecting intelligence on Islamic extremists for the first time for possible lethal drone strikes, according to current and former U.S. officials. President Obama has not authorized drone missile strikes in Syria, however, and none are under consideration. The Counterterrorism Center, which runs the CIA's covert drone killing program in Pakistan and Yemen, recently shifted several targeting officers to improve intelligence collection on militants in Syria who could pose a terrorist threat, the officials said.

WASHINGTON - Cyber-attacks and cyber-espionage pose a greater potential danger to U.S. national security than Al Qaeda and other militants that have dominated America's global focus since Sept. 11, 2001, the nation's top intelligence officials said Tuesday. For the first time, the growing risk of computer-launched foreign assaults on U.S. infrastructure, including the power grid, transportation hubs and financial networks, was ranked higher in the U.S. intelligence community's annual review of worldwide threats than worries about terrorism, transnational organized crime and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.