Saudi King Fahd Hospitalized

[Tuckerfan]

Said to be doing well.

Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, ruler of the world’s top oil exporter and a close ally of the United States, was taken to hospital on Friday but officials said he was doing well.

Fears about the king’s health had heightened earlier after a royal statement urged the monarch’s subjects to pray for his recovery. Medical sources said he had pneumonia and high fever.

But the official SPA news agency quoted an official as saying: “King Fahd is well, thank God, and the medical tests he is undergoing are proceeding in a normal way.”

In a separate statement, SPA said that the kingdom’s Crown Prince Abdullah had reassured Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in a telephone call that “the king’s health is good.”

The royal statement gave no details on the condition of Fahd, who is in his early 80s.

“We ask God to keep and care for the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and grant him health and well-being,” it said.

Security sources in Saudi Arabia said royal princes had begun arriving in the capital, suggesting the condition of the monarch was serious and worrying.

[Paul_in_Qatar]

Seventeen big points on my Death Pool list! Woo! Woo!

(And by 'Woo! Woo! I mean, may God protect him and keep him safe. God save the King!)

[jayjay]

Oh, my…from everything I’ve read about the Royal Family, any and all events surrounding Fahd’s death are going to be the biggest goddamn reality soap opera that ever happened. And it may very well be the pivot that the fate of the Western world as we know it turns on. There are some REALLY wacked-out factions in the Saudi royal family and, as far as I know, no terribly clear line of succession (aren’t there something like 6000 royals?) It’s likely that Prince Sultan (who is moderately pro-USA and somewhat suspicious of the other Arab nations) will be the next in line, but Prince Abdullah (who spent YEARS in the desert with the bedouin and is very much in line with the more hardline Islamicists) has a hand in pretty much everything behind the scenes right now and I don’t really see him stepping back if the family chooses Sultan as the next king (Sultan is, btw, the father of Prince Bandar, aka “Bandar Bush”, the Saudi ambassador to the US).

[Mehitabel]

I like Bandar himself, but the rest of that family…

Excellent article from early 2004 that appeared in the New Yorker by Lawrence Wright called “Kingdom of Silence” that helped me understand Saudi society a bit more. I’ll be interested in **Paul in Saudi’s ** take on the pending crisis from the country’s media–I feel safe in saying they’ll ignore it until suddenly there’s a lavish, male-only funeral on everybody’s TV. Remember how we joked in the early 80s about if a Soviet Gen Sec got “a cold”, he’d be dead in a week?

The ABCs of dead Russian Leaders, the ABCs of dead Russian leaders! When you hear the letter A, Andropov is the name to say! B is for Brezhnev and C for Chernenko! - old Dr. Demento show song