By Geoffrey Cowley NEWSWEEK

    May 5 issue —  SARS may have dominated the headlines last week, but it wasn’t the only weird disease on the World Health Organization’s radar screen. In central Africa, an outbreak of the dreaded Ebola fever had stretched into its fifth month. In Belgium and the Netherlands, a virulent new strain of avian flu was wiping out entire chicken farms. Dutch farmers recently slaughtered 18 million birds in hopes of stopping the outbreak. Yet the bird flu has spread to several provinces and jumped from poultry to pigs and even people, causing 83 human cases. Most of the infected people have suffered only eye inflammation, but some have developed respiratory illness. One of them, a 57-year-old veterinary surgeon, recently died of pneumonia. “Bird flu virus was... found in the lungs,” according to an April 19 statement from the Dutch Agriculture Ministry, “and no other cause of death could be detected.” Sound familiar?     Has the SARS epidemic caused you to change your lifestyle at all? Yes, I've changed my travel plans to avoid SARS-stricken cities Not much, but I bought a protective face mask--just in case Not at all

Vote to see results Has the SARS epidemic caused you to change your lifestyle at all?* 19703 responses Yes, I've changed my travel plans to avoid SARS-stricken cities 21% Not much, but I bought a protective face mask--just in case 5% Not at all 74% Survey results tallied every 60 seconds. Live Votes reflect respondents' views and are not scientifically valid surveys.

	        SARS. Ebola. Avian flu. The parade of frightening new maladies continues, each one confirming that our species, for all its cleverness, still lives at the mercy of the microbe. It didn’t seem that way 30 years ago—not with smallpox largely defeated, AIDS still undreamed of and medical science evolving at an unprecedented clip. But even as optimists proclaimed victory over the germ, our megacities, factory farms, jet planes and blood banks were opening broad new avenues for infection. The dark side of progress is now unmistakable; many of the advances that have made our lives more comfortable have also made them more dangerous. Some 30 new diseases have cropped up since the mid-1970s—causing tens of millions of deaths—and forgotten scourges have resurfaced with alarming regularity. “Infectious diseases will continue to emerge,” the Institute of Medicine declares in a new report, warning that complacency and inaction could lead to a “catastrophic storm” of contagion. So what’s to be done? As the SARS outbreak has shown, surveillance is critical. By spotting new infections wherever they occur, and working globally to contain them, we can greatly reduce their impact. But is preparedness our ultimate weapon? Do we know enough about the genesis of new diseases to prevent them? Could we avert the next SARS? The next AIDS? What would a reasonable strategy look like?

        We don’t hold all the cards in this game. Most new diseases begin when a person catches something from an animal—a transaction shaped by chance or even the weather. When healthy young adults started dying of a SARS-like syndrome in New Mexico 10 years ago, it took health experts several weeks of intensive lab work to identify the culprit. To the scientists’ amazement, it wasn’t a human pathogen at all. It was a novel member of the hantavirus family, a group of rodent viruses that sometimes spread through the air after rats or mice shed them in their urine. The previous outbreaks had occurred in Asia. So why were people dying in New Mexico? Scientists now believe the American mice had harbored the virus all along but had never been populous enough to scatter infectious doses in people’s toolsheds and basements. What changed the equation that year was El Niño. The ocean disturbance caused an unusually warm winter in the Southwest. The mouse population exploded as a result—and the hantavirus got a free ride.

       Until someone harnesses the jet stream, such accidents are sure to happen. But quirky weather isn’t the greatest threat we face. As ecologists study the causes of disease emergence, they’re finding that human enterprise is a far more significant force. Almost any activity that disrupts a natural environment can enhance the mobility of disease-causing microbes. Consider what happened in the 1980s, when farmers in Venezuela’s Portuguesa state cleared millions of acres of forest to create cropland. The farms drew as many rats and mice as people, and the rodents introduced a deadly new virus into the region. The so-called Guanarito virus causes fever, shock and hemorrhaging. It infected more than 100 people, leaving a third of them dead.

1 / 5 SARS: common questions NBC’s Robert Bazell explains the basics about SARS.2 / 5 China says it will set up health network to combat SARSChina says it will spend $500 million to set up a nationwide health network to combat SARS. NBC’s Ned Colt reports from Beijing.3 / 5 SARS: fear in NYIt is an unwelcome effect in Asian neighborhoods, including New York City’s sizeable Chinatown. NBC’s Brian Williams reports.4 / 5 Asia tries to coordinate SARS planChina is ground zero for SARS, especially the capital of Beijing. NBC’s Ned Colt reports from there.5 / 5 Toronto and SARSThe SARS outbreak has devastated business in Toronto, where restaurants are empty and hotel occupancy rates were already down almost 25 percent. NBC’s Don Lemon reports.

        Malaysian pig farmers had a similar experience in 1999, after they started pushing back the forest to expand their operations. As barns replaced forestland, displaced fruit bats started living in the rafters, bombarding the pigs’ drinking water with a pathogen now known as the Nipah virus. “The pigs developed an explosive cough that became known as the one-mile cough because you could hear it from so far away,” says Mary Pearl, president of the Wildlife Trust in Palisades, N.Y. The virus soon spread from the pigs to their keepers, causing extreme brain inflammation and killing 40 percent of the affected people. The outbreak ended when Malaysian authorities closed eight farms and slaughtered a million pigs.         The point is not that rain forests are dangerous. It’s that blindly rearranging ecosystems can be hazardous to our health—whether we’re in the Amazon Basin or the woods of Connecticut. That’s where Lyme disease emerged, and it, too, is a product of the way we user our land. Borrelia burg-dorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme, lives in the bodies of deer and white-footed mice, passing between those animals in the heads of biting ticks. People have crossed paths with all these critters for generations, yet the first known case of Lyme disease dates back only to 1975. Why did we suddenly become vulnerable? Richard Ostfeld, an animal ecologist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., has tied the event to suburban development. In open woodlands, foxes and bobcats keep a lid on the Lyme agent by hunting the mice that carry it. But the predators vanish when developers chop woodlands into subdivisions, and the mice and their ticks proliferate unnaturally. In a recent survey of woodlots in New York, Ostfeld found that infected ticks were some seven times as prevalent on —one- and two-acre lots as they were on lots of 10 to 15 acres. His bottom line: “You’re more likely to get Lyme disease in Scarsdale than the Catskills.” May 5, 2003 Issue Cover: SARS--What You Need to Know •  The Mystery of SARS •  How Progress Makes Us Sick •  Economies on Empty        Fortunately, you’re not likely to spread it in either place. Even when a microbe succeeds at leaping from one species to another, the new host is often a dead end. Neither Nipah nor Guanarito can spread from person to person. The hantaviruses have the same problem. And a tick could suck on a Lyme-disease patient all day without getting enough bacteria to infect its next host. The infections we get from primates and pigs are a whole different story. When the Ebola virus jumps from an ape into a person, it often races through a family or a hospital before burning itself out. And HIV is still spreading steadily after three decades of person-to-person transmission. It has infected some 60 million people since crossing over from chimpanzees, and its emergence was no fluke of the weather. We placed ourselves in the path of the virus, we moved it around the world, and we’re well poised to do it again.

 fact file  SARS virus cases

Number of people affected by the flu-like virus Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) worldwide. As of May 1, 2003 | 1 | 2 | 3 Country Cases* Deaths Recovered China 3,638 170 1,351 Hong Kong 1,600 162 834 Singapore 201 25 143 Canada 147 20 87 Taiwan 89 3 25 Vietnam 63 5 56 USA 54   23 Italy 9   4 Thailand 7 2 5 Germany 7   7 Malaysia 6 2 3| 1 | 2 | 3 Country Cases* Deaths Recovered Britain 6   6 Mongolia 6   3 France 5   1 Philippines 4 2 1 Australia 4   4 Sweden 3   2 Brazil 2   2 Indonesia 2   1 Japan 2     Bulgaria 1     India 1   1| 1 | 2 | 3 Country Cases* Deaths Recovered Ireland 1   1 Kuwait 1   1 Macao 1     Poland 1     Romania 1   1 South Africa 1     South Korea 1     Spain 1   1 Switzerland 1   1

• Includes number of deaths, recoveries and current cases Source: World Health Organization Printable version        The human AIDS viruses are descended from simian pathogens known as SIVs. HIV-1 is essentially a chimpanzee virus, while HIV-2 (a rarer and milder bug) comes from the sooty mangabey (a monkey). How did the chimp virus make its way into humans? The best guess is that African hunters contracted it while butchering animals, and then passed it on through sexual contact. Until a few decades ago, that hunting accident would have been a local misfortune, a curse played out in a few rural villages. What turned it into a holocaust was not just a new infectious agent but a proliferation of roads, cities and airports, a breakdown of social traditions, and the advent of blood banking and needle sharing. Those conditions virtually sealed HIV’s success, and they continue to rocket obscure bugs into every corner of the world. “The volume and speed of travel are unprecedented,” says Dr. Mary Wilson of Harvard. “We are interconnected in ways that weren’t true a century ago.”

• Learn more about the disease       SARS is only the latest reminder of how powerful those connections can be. The novel coronavirus that causes the syndrome emerged from Guangdong, the same Chinese province that delivers new flu viruses to the world most years. Pigs, ducks, chickens and people live cheek-by-jowl on the district’s primitive farms, exchanging flu and cold germs so rapidly that a single pig can easily incubate human and avian viruses simultaneously. The dual infections can generate hybrids that escape antibodies aimed at the originals, setting off a whole new chain of human infection. The clincher is that these farms sit just a few miles from Guangzhou, a teeming city that mixes people, animals and microbes from the countryside with travelers from around the world. You could hardly design a better system for turning small outbreaks into big ones.         For all the fear it has caused, SARS clearly isn’t the big one, at least not in its current incarnation. The coronavirus that causes it is as nasty as any flu virus, but it doesn’t get around very easily. And as University of Louisville evolutionist Paul Ewald points out, an epidemic can’t sustain itself unless each patient infects more than one other person. “If each SARS case were generating even two others,” he says, “we would have seen hundreds of thousands by now.” A doomsday flu virus would approach the virulence of the SARS agent, but it would infect people by the roomful.

Such pandemic flu viruses have emerged in the past, and many experts believe it’s only a matter of time until it happens again. How can we lessen the danger? A long-term strategy would have to include modernizing the world’s farms, improving basic health care and stockpiling vaccines and antiviral drugs. As science illuminates the ecology of infectious disease, it may also inspire wiser, safer approaches to land use and wilderness preservation. Until then, surveillance will be doubly important. The good news is that the forces making microbes so mobile are also making them easier to track. Ten years ago, quick communication was still a problem for many health departments, says Stephen Morse, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “A colleague in Russia had a fax but no fax paper. A colleague in Ghana had telex but no fax. In other places they had a telephone but no telex.” Today even the most remote surveillance stations are tied into the Web-based Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases. The world’s largest health agencies have created similar systems for sharing scientific research. Such systems are only as good as the openness and good will of their users. If anything good has come of the SARS scare, it is a renewed commitment to those ideals. How far they’ll take us is still anyone’s guess.

[ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 4/27/03 ] By MICHAEL E. KANELL

The war with Iraq is over, but the uncertainty is not. And one of the biggest unknowns is how much impact the return of Iraqi oil to the market will have on the wobbly U.S. economy -- and how soon.

A lot is riding on the answer. Optimists say Iraqi oil holds the promise of keeping global energy prices down, limiting the influence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and offering relief to beleaguered American consumers and companies.

"I think the war changed things in a big way," said economist Ujjayant Chakravorty of Emory University.

Few oil wells were torched by Iraqi troops. No missiles hit Saudi oil fields. No suicide bombers blocked oil ports. As those fears evaporated, the price for oil came down dramatically.

From a prewar flirtation with $40 a barrel, oil prices fell into the mid-$20s.

For a struggling U.S. economy that stumbled again in recent months, the higher prices had threatened a renewed recession, said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the economic forecasting center at Georgia State University

"We definitely dodged the oil bullet," he said.

Still, the ripple from the halt of Iraqi oil production when the war started has yet to even reach U.S. shores.

Oil from Iraq, which had been the fifth-largest supplier to the United States, stopped flowing shortly after the bombs started falling on March 19. Since it takes more than a month for oil to wend its way from the Middle East to the United States, it is too early to assess the effects of the shutdown, said Matt Simmons, chairman and chief executive of Simmons & Company International, a Houston-based energy investment bank.

Oil production in Nigeria has also been disrupted, by political violence.

If the cutbacks in those countries are going to mean higher prices, we should start to see them in the coming days, he said.

Most analysts expect a slow return of Iraqi production and relatively stable oil prices for a few months. And as the flow of Iraqi oil swells, that added supply should nudge prices down.

But there are other possibilities. Many analysts expect the Bush administration to dismantle Iraq's state-run economy in favor of a free market.

Privatization would be a tremendous shock and might delay full production, said Lewis Snider, professor of political science at Claremont University in California, who has lived in the Middle East.

"The politics of this could get really nasty," he said.

The issue is important because timing matters. America's need for gasoline peaks in midsummer.

With most of the world's producers pumping near capacity and the stream from Iraq slowly resuming, gas this year will be available at surprisingly reasonable prices, Snider predicted.

"I don't see too much reason to be anxious about the tightness of supply this summer," he said.

Still, inventories are at historically low levels. With so much oil coming from unreliable places, and with OPEC planning to cut production about 7 percent, an increase in energy needs will leave precious little room between supply and demand, said Jay Hakes, former administrator of the Energy Information Administration.

"I still think we are in the tightest market since the Persian Gulf War. Saudi Arabia helped, but it hasn't offset the oil lost from Iraq."

And other losses are possible.

Balance shifts

Crunch time is from Memorial Day to Labor Day. If all goes right, which includes Iraq starting to export oil and Venezuela and Nigeria staying placid, then there will be enough modestly priced gas for Americans.

Unfortunately, that means depending on a lot of coins to come up heads, Simmons said. "The odds are really low that we will have an easy time."

"This market is very vulnerable to any little disruption," Hakes said. "I think OPEC may be misreading the world market. There is not a good supply of oil out there. That could make for fireworks in the next few months. If gas goes to $2 a gallon, that has an impact on the economy."

Short-term questions aside, the war has shifted the balance of oil power.

Iraq's oil reserves are second only to those in Saudi Arabia. While Iraq's decaying industry struggled in recent months to pump 2 million barrels a day, its capacity could be three times that.

As some war-backers argued, a U.S.-friendly Iraq would erode Saudi Arabia's power to shape prices.

The 2001 Cheney Report on energy argued that America must diversify sources for oil and make sure those sources are dependable. "The policy-makers want to move away from the Middle East -- to the Caspian Sea, to West Africa and Latin America," said Daphne Wyshan, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

A pro-U.S. Iraq would provide one more dependable source. But significant production needs to be resumed first.

Vice President Dick Cheney recently predicted that Iraq will be pumping 2.5 million to 3 million barrels of crude a day by year's end -- better than its production has been for years.

The experts are split on that projection.

First is the problem of legality: Will the United States win United Nations approval to sell Iraqi oil? Would the United States go ahead without an OK?

Niceties of international law aside, dilapidated equipment and transportation bottlenecks could throttle a return to full production, Simmons said. "But it's like a patient who needs an MRI and CAT scan. We just don't know yet."

Even the much-touted estimates of Iraqi reserves are unreliable, he said. "How much oil is there? Nobody has any idea."

Politics plays a role

Iraqi oil's impact may depend more on politics than engineering, said Ken Miller, vice president of Purvin & Gertz, an international energy consulting company in Houston.

With the world's large economies weak, Miller said the supply will overwhelm demand and prices will come down.

For American drivers, the idea of cheaper gasoline sounds delightful. But that could spell political disaster.

Middle East oil producers have built economies around oil dollars. When the price plunges, it can savage the standard of living and undermine the compact between people and rulers.

Some analysts scoff at worries about revolution. Still, the danger is obvious from the numbers, Simmons argued. Saudi Arabia has a burgeoning population and a large royal family that has its own kind of welfare. The nation's income has fallen from about $26,000 per person to $6,500 in less than two decades.

"Do the numbers -- unless they are willing to produce another cash crop, they need an average of 10 million barrels a day at $50 a barrel," Simmons said.

Oil prices didn't get to $50 a barrel last year. But during the winter, higher energy costs were seen as a drain on the finances of consumer and company alike.

Price increases are not as costly to the economy as three decades ago, but America cannot run without oil. When the price goes up, we pay. Only if it stays high for a long time do consumers shift their habits and purchases.

That makes the short-run effect of oil prices potentially painful. So, if OPEC's cut forces oil prices up rapidly, that could put a nasty hole in hopes for a recovery.

The price equation

High oil prices have been a factor in -- or the cause of -- most of the U.S. recessions since World War II. On the other side of the coin, low prices have added fuel to several booms.

While the fall from prewar levels is welcome, oil prices are still far higher than in late 2001 and early 2002. Back then, gas prices in metro Atlanta were below $1 a gallon. Still, if prices don't climb again, that is a very modest kind of good news.

With the U.S. economy struggling -- job losses up and business orders down -- oil prices are not helping, said John Silvia, chief economist of Wachovia Securities. "But it won't hold us back -- we're already stuck in the mud."

Hopes for renewed growth have been pegged to a resurgence in business spending. But companies have been unsure about the future and hesitant to spend, just like consumers. Higher-than-average oil prices only add to uncertainty, said Dwight Allen, a partner at Deloitte Research.

"At least we know we are not in for a dire, acute situation," Allen said. "But the future is as cloudy as it was before."

Allen is telling his corporate clients to come up with several backup plans, to consider various scenarios and to hedge their bets. This is not a time for gambling, big spending or padding payrolls.

"For the next 12 months, you make only a limited commitment," Allen said.

<a href=www.orlandosentinel.com>OrlandoSentinel.com By Pamela J. Johnson | Sentinel Staff Writer Posted April 27, 2003

Armored-catfish study For the first time, the state is conducting a "life-history study" on the species of armored catfish called brown hoplo and its possible effects on other fish in the St. Johns River. The study, which tracks what they eat and how they reproduce, is expected to be completed by year's end.

CHRISTMAS -- Each morning, they arrive for a full day of fishing. On weekends, a long line forms at the boat ramp.

The dedicated fishermen aren't fishing the upper St. Johns River for bass, bluegill or black crappies.

At sunset, they will pack their coolers with armored catfish -- "trash fish" to most locals.

"I wouldn't feed it to my cat," said a disgusted Frank Peacock, an airboat operator from Christmas. "They taste nasty."

But armored catfish is considered a delicacy for fishermen originally from Guyana, who travel from as far as New York to cast their nets in search of them.

That is angering longtime anglers, who say the newcomers have taken over the Highway 50 Boat Ramp in east Orange County and illegally stripped the upper river of game fish with their nets.

Nearly 1,000 people have signed a petition urging state officials to "Stop the Rape and Death of our River by Cast Netters."

The armored-catfish fishermen say they have the proper permits to be there and that the upper St. Johns River is one of the few areas in Florida where the fish can be found.

Fishermen from Guyana at the upper St. Johns River said that armored catfish is in high demand in South American communities in the United States and can be sold for about $10 a pound.

But they said they catch the armored catfish -- covered with tiny dark brown platelets that make them appear dressed for battle -- only to feed their extended families. The fish, also widely found in Trinidad, Martinique, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Paraguay, is boiled and the scaly outer skin is removed. It's soaked in lemon juice, stewed in curry and served with rice.

"It's better than ahi tuna," Radesh Arjoon, 32, a truck driver who immigrated from Guyana and lives in DeLand, said recently at the boat ramp. He learned that the upper St. Johns River was a hot spot for armored catfish a year ago, when he lived in New York City.

Arjoon said he has had one run-in with a fisherman who accused him of taking game fish -- which legally can only be caught with a fishing rod.

"They don't like us, and I don't know why," said Arjoon, pouring a few bucketsful of the fish into a cooler after an eight-hour day.

He said his weekly catches feed his wife and three children and sometimes his friends. "With a little curry," he added, "it's really, really good."

Peacock has no use for the fish. He said he routinely went bass fishing in the upper river until the armored catfish and cast netters came along, wiping out the game fish. "No one bothers to bass fish here anymore," he said.

Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission officials say the tropical fish was most likely introduced to the area two years ago by illegal aquarium dumping.

"I wish the cold weather we had would've killed them all," Peacock said of the armored catfish.

In a petition that he sent to state officials, Jon Sharp, a retired technical writer from Christmas, said that a severe drought had left water levels extremely low on the St. Johns River when the armored catfish and the cast netters appeared. Because the water was so low, he said, the nets caught not only catfish, but loads of game fish such as bass and bluegill. But the cast netters didn't throw back the game fish, as legally required, he said.

"The cast netters say they are after armored catfish," Sharp said. "Maybe so, but what happened to all the other fish?"

State officials say there is no evidence that the number of game fish has decreased in the upper river.

"We've done the studies, and there is no smoking gun," said Bob Eisenhauer, a state fisheries biologist based in Melbourne. A year ago, the state analyzed the amounts of different fish species at the upper river and determined that there was no significant decline in game fish, he said.

As a result of the complaints, state law enforcement officers stepped up patrol in the area. In several months, officers issued a handful of citations to cast netters taking game fish or fishing without the proper license.

"We extended a lot of time and effort in responding to the complaints," said Andy Love, a regional commander for the state Fish & Wildlife law-enforcement division. "And we shot down their accusations."

Officer Brian Baine, who works with Love, remembered hiding in bushes and watching the cast netters unload their catch. "I checked them and checked them," Baine said. "And I never could make an arrest."

Baine and others think that the conflict between Florida fishermen and those from other countries is a result of a culture clash.

"Here are these strangers coming in throwing their nets, some of them speaking little English," Baine said. "They just don't like them."

"That's the biggest bunch of baloney I've ever heard," said John Long, an airboat operator from Christmas. "We just don't like what they're doing. I've been fishing here for 40 years, and now you can't even catch supper."

Pamela J. Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5171.

April 25, 2003, 6:34PM By SEAN EVERS and TOM CAHILL Houston Chronicle-Bloomberg Business News

VIENNA, Austria -- Saudi Arabian oil minister Ali al-Naimi, clad in a black Nike jogging suit and New Balance sneakers, set out Thursday morning for his regular loop of Vienna's ring road before an OPEC meeting.

The 67-year-old, who covers a little over three miles in half an hour, was pursued by three Lycra-clad bodyguards and some 10 reporters straining to catch words that rattle the $2 billion-a-day world oil market. Thursday, he told reporters OPEC is determined to keep prices at $25 a barrel by cutting production, foreshadowing the outcome of an emergency meeting.

Because of term limits in the Saudi kingdom, al-Naimi's run last week may have been one of his last in the Austrian capital. In eight years as the most influential voice in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, al-Naimi has convinced members from Iran to Venezuela that stable oil prices are better than the swings between $40 and $10 seen in the 1980s and 1990s. During the past four years, oil prices averaged $24.57, almost in the center of OPEC's target range of $22 to $28 a barrel.

"Before his arrival, OPEC was defined by its public squabbling," said Bruce Evers, an oil analyst with Investec Henderson Crosthwaite in London. "Now they are businesslike, professional and do what they say they will do. Al-Naimi has to take a lot of the credit for that."

Al-Naimi, who shuns questions from reporters in the lobbies of Vienna's Intercontinental and Grand hotels, during his morning jog past Vienna's Hofburg palace and opera house not only discusses oil but opens up about everything from his seven grandchildren to hunting quail and pheasant. The minister also shoots turkey, which he said can be as tricky to predict as the price of crude.

"You have to have fun," the minister told the reporters, who in the past have rented bicycles to keep up with a man at least 30 years their senior. "Even maintaining the price of oil is fun. They say if I can keep it here for 10 years, they will give me a medal."

At 7:45 a.m. Thursday, Viennese commuters overlooked the 5-foot-2-inch man sharing their streets, the man who largely sets the price they pay at the gas pump by deciding how much oil to sell.

"He speaks softly and carries a very, very big stick," said Fadel Gheit, an oil industry analyst at Fahnestock & Co. in New York, who calls al-Naimi the Alan Greenspan of oil. "With Saudi Arabia's supply, he can single-handedly change the course of OPEC by adding or taking away product."

Al-Naimi has been involved in Saudi Arabia's oil industry since he was 12, working as an office messenger for state oil company Saudi Aramco, at that time controlled by four U.S. oil companies.

He benefited from the company's commitment to train and educate young Saudis. Eventually he received a bachelor's degree in geology from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., and a master's in geology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

"I started as an office boy, doing the same thing as I did when president, shuffling papers from in-trays to out-trays," al-Naimi said as he jogged.

He rose to chief executive officer of Aramco, which was nationalized in the 1970s and now pumps more than twice as much crude as Exxon Mobil Corp., the largest oil company that is not state-owned. He was picked for the kingdom's top energy post in August 1995.

The nation influences prices by deciding how much to pump from its 10.5 million barrels of daily oil capacity, almost as much as that of its next four closest OPEC colleagues.

OPEC has "been acting prudently, and acting so as to ensure security of supply," said Claude Mandil, executive director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, which was founded to represent the interests of 26 oil-consuming nations after the 1973 Arab oil embargo. "I'm confident they will make no decision that could be harmful to consuming countries."

Keeping oil prices around $25 a barrel has been al-Naimi's goal. He spent his first four years in office lobbying OPEC's second- and third-largest producers, Iran and Venezuela, to see the benefits of compliance with output quotas. The second four years fed off that cooperation.

Prices averaged about $17.50 during his first term and above $25 a barrel since 1999, a boon for states that depend on oil sales for as much as 80 percent of government revenues. Al-Naimi keeps it there by managing the market's expectations.

That's a far cry from November 1985, when oil prices started a plunge from $31.75 to $10 within months as the Saudis opened their taps to stop cheating by OPEC producers. By July 1986, some Persian Gulf crudes traded as low as $7 a barrel.

While OPEC has two regularly scheduled meetings a year, the group has had four in the past four months, and one is planned for June as members seek to anticipate moves in oil prices, rather than react.

The war in Iraq also raised concern of shortages and disruptions to Middle East supplies.

By Saudi Arabian law, oil ministers are limited to two four-year terms, with extensions at the discretion of the king. Al-Naimi said he really doesn't know if he will be out of a job.

"No matter what happens, I will come here personally to bring the press out on a run," he said with a chuckle and stepped up the pace. "Nobody lives forever. OPEC is healthy. It's going to do very well."

Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page A20

When the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, flew to Saudi Arabia in October, his hosts denied that the visit had anything to do with the looming war in Iraq. Use of Saudi territory to facilitate a U.S. attack on Iraq was out of the question, senior Saudi officials told reporters.

In retrospect, the Myers trip marked the start of five months of intensive military cooperation between Washington and Riyadh that played a crucial role in the U.S. victory over Saddam Hussein. According to sources close to the negotiations, Saudi Arabia ended up agreeing to virtually every request made by the Bush administration for military or logistical assistance.

In addition to allowing the United States to run the air war against Iraq out of a Saudi air base, the Saudi government provided U.S. Special Operations forces secret staging grounds into western Iraq and granted overflight rights to U.S. planes and missiles, officials said. Saudi Arabia also tapped into its vast oil reserves to help restore stability to the oil market at a time when prices had hit their highest levels in more than a decade, oil industry sources said.

Taking place against a background of enormous public unease in both countries over U.S.-Saudi relations, the cooperation over Iraq suggests that the controversial alliance between Washington and the Saudi royal family is stronger than often portrayed, and will survive the aftermath of the U.S. military ouster of the Iraqi government. While some adjustments are inevitable -- including a scaling-back of the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia -- the basic oil-for-security bargain struck between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdul Aziz in February 1945 remains intact.

On the public level, U.S.-Saudi relations have been seriously troubled since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and on the Pentagon. According to recent opinion polls, 97 percent of Saudis now view the United States in a negative light. Americans have been alarmed by the Saudi funding of extremist religious groups and the fact that 15 out of the 19 hijackers who took part in the 2001 attacks were Saudi citizens.

The evidence of the past few months, as well as conversations with U.S. and Saudi officials, suggests that both governments seek to cast the relationship in a light that fits their domestic needs and foreign policy goals. At the very time Saudi leaders were denouncing U.S. policies toward Iraq, for example, they made a strategic decision to facilitate a U.S. invasion. While U.S. officials talk about the virtues of democracy in the Middle East, they have shown little interest in free elections in Saudi Arabia, which would almost certainly be won by Islamic groups opposed to the United States.

The relationship could come crashing down if, as some commentators predict, Saudi Arabia is swept by political and economic turmoil. For the time being, however, official Washington is continuing to bet on the autocratic House of Saud as the best means of ensuring continued U.S. access to a quarter of the world's proven oil reserves.

With such exceptions as the governments of Britain and possibly Israel, few foreign governments enjoy the degree of diplomatic and personal access to the heart of the Bush administration as Saudi Arabia's.

During the run-up to the war, contacts between the two sides deepened, officials said. The generally smooth cooperation between Washington and Riyadh contrasted with the much more turbulent, and ultimately unsuccessful, negotiations with Turkey over the opening of a northern front against Iraq. The administration has pointed to Turkey as a democratic model for the rest of the Muslim world. In practice, however, the administration found it much easier to negotiate with an authoritarian government free of the constraints of public opinion.

Now that the war is over, both the U.S. and Saudi governments have signaled that they will soon begin talks about the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, and particularly the 4,500 U.S. Air Force personnel stationed at the Prince Sultan air base south of Riyadh. The aviators' principal mission -- enforcing the southern "no-fly" zone in Iraq -- ended with the toppling of the Hussein government.

The presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil has been one of the major grievances exploited by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in his diatribes against Washington. But even if the Air Force role is sharply reduced, officials say that other U.S. troops will remain.

The Saudi decision to cooperate with the United States over Iraq reflected a political calculation that the administration was determined to go ahead with the ouster of Hussein, no matter how much opposition it encountered.

The Saudis "bent over backwards not to get in the way of the U.S. military plans, while reassuring their own population that they weren't doing anything extra," said Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "From the point of view of political acrobatics, it was quite a skillful show."

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