* Saudi Largess: King Fahd of Saudi...

* Saudi Largess: King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who contributed $1 million to Nancy Reagan’s war on drugs, also donated $1 million to Barbara Bush’s campaign against illiteracy, financial records show. Fahd made his gift to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy Sept. 29, 1989, Saudi officials in Washington acknowledged Monday. About the same time earlier this month that Fahd was helping fund Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign, he was secretly providing $2 million a month to help fund the Nicaraguan Contras at the request of President Ronald Reagan. Barbara Bush’s press office declined comment.

* Book Awards: Five writers have been nominated in Washington for the PEN-Faulkner Award for the best fiction of 1989. They are novelists Russell Banks (“Affliction”), E.L. Doctorow (“Billy Bathgate”), Molly Gloss (“The Jump-Off Creek”), Lynne Sharon Schwartz (“Leaving Brooklyn”) and short story writer Josephine Jacobsen (“On the Island”). The winner will be announced in April.

* Common Ground: Miss America Debbye Turner, 24, met with a group of troubled girls and discovered that “our dreams and expectations are not all that different.” Turner talked Sunday with seven girls ages 14 to 18 at a community center in Egg Harbor City, N.J. Turner said each girl agreed to write to the others so they could chart each other’s progress.

* Same Song: Social activism in the ‘90s still centers around human rights, says folk singer and longtime activist Mary Travers, one-third of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. “The issues today are a question of ecology, education and a new virulent racism,” she said in Nashville Sunday. People are not as giving as 30 years ago, Travers said. “In the 1960s, the economic infrastructure was healthy and people could afford to be generous.”