Word: gulf
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Change is stealing into all the desert kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, but nowhere else has it proved as beneficial--though fraught with palace intrigue--as in tiny, thumb-shaped Qatar (pop. 500,000). Eighteen months ago, Hamad, trained at Britain's Sandhurst Military Academy, was merely an heir apparent. Then he staged a bloodless coup that ended the 23-year reign of his father Sheik Khalifa bin Hamad al-Thani, 64, who had developed an unseemly fondness for liquor and opulent palaces. Since then, Qataris have witnessed one of the bitterest Arabian family spats in memory, involving cash...
...trouble in Qatar and the other oil sheikdoms, of course, goes far deeper. Quite apart from perennial fears about Iraq and Iran, the region faces a potentially fatal combination of declining economic growth, rising democratic opposition and mounting Islamic extremism. The gulf is the West's economic lifeline, and a serious threat to the flow of oil would jeopardize millions of jobs in industrialized countries. While Hamad's cautious reforms, like his cool handling of his family feud, have proved generally popular at home, they are eyed with nervousness and suspicion in the tradition-bound region, which includes Saudi Arabia...
From the capital of Doha, a glass-and-steel city whose residents once survived on pearl fishing, Hamad has scheduled municipal elections and loosened restrictions on the press, near revolutionary moves in the ultrapatriarchal gulf. He has angered neighbors by receiving a minister from Iraq and a minister plus a battleship from Iran--every other sheik's two worst enemies. He has also tried to outdo them in pleasing the U.S., offering the Pentagon a base on his soil and, until Benjamin Netanyahu came to power, moving faster to normalize relations with Israel...
...battled President Clinton's social policy, advocating cuts in the National Endowment for the Arts and led the 1994 campaign to remove Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders from office. But for all his social conservatism, he was one of the first in Congress to push for the recognition of Gulf War syndrome and has been a strong Medicare advocate, both issues having almost universal appeal in this popular retirement area...
CONVICTED. JUAN GARCIA ABREGO, 52, reputed head of Mexico's Gulf cartel; on federal drug-trafficking charges; in Houston. He could get a life sentence...