Saudi King sharp-minded as ever,Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz became king of Saudi Arabia in 2005
Saudi king interview,Interviewing the leader of a country for TV is rarely easy.
Some try to get you to tell them the questions in advance. Others insist that you must leave your equipment with them for 24 hours beforehand, or search you rigorously.

When you saw Saddam Hussein you had to wash your hands in a special solution first, in case you might infect him.

But when I went to interview King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in Jeddah, a couple of days before his state visit to Britain, we did not even have to put our gear through an X-ray machine nor go through a metal detector.

I thought it was going to be easy.

King Abdullah's palace is tasteful, modern and charming. The white marble is cool and pleasant after the heat outside. The offices are wood-panelled, and there are some attractive paintings.

Off-limits

I was just running through my questions in my head when the difficult part began.

A few minutes before we thought the interview was going to begin, someone came to speak to us.


I have not spoken about some subjects because I did not want either to be dishonest or evasive with you
King Abdullah
The king would not, it seemed, be prepared to talk about Iraq, or the possibility that the Americans might bomb Iran.

Nor would he speak about the BAE arms contract between the UK and Saudi Arabia, with its attendant allegations of corrupt payments.

The Saudis knew I wanted to talk about these subjects because although I had refused to hand over the questions in advance, I thought it was not unreasonable to tell them the general areas I wanted to cover.

I have never been told so close to an interview that some of the main questions are off limits.

And so I heard myself saying that, unfortunately, it looked as though we would not be having an interview after all.

Negotiations

But I did not quite walk out. That would have been rude, and the Saudis had treated us with kindness and courtesy.


The minister said he would call the Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, and ask him to give us an interview about the subjects the king did not want to speak about
Instead, we had a polite but firm argument. There were two ministers and an ambassador on the Saudi side, and I called in our producer, Oggy Boytchev, to back me up.

Cups of tea came in, and little sweets, and glasses of water. Two hours passed.

Then the minister who had been leading the discussion spoke to the other minister, and made a new suggestion.

He would, he said, call the Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, and ask him to give us an interview about the subjects the king did not want to speak about.

I have interviewed Prince Saud before. In fact, he gave me one of the best exclusives I have had, shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq, when he showed how bitterly opposed the Saudis were to it.

In his quiet way, Prince Saud can be ferocious.

Frank

Something else had become clear to me by now. The king was not refusing to talk about Iran and Iraq because he was not interested in them.

On the contrary, I now realised he felt so strongly about what the US had done in Iraq, and the thought that they might soon bomb Iran, that he felt he might upset his relations with Washington if he spoke openly to me.


So I agreed.

Within five minutes of agreeing to the deal, I was sitting opposite the king. He was shrewd and pleasant and surprisingly frank, and at 82 still as sharp-minded as ever.

He said enough things to me about terrorism and the failure of other countries, including the UK, to act against terrorist activities, to get headlines around the world.

At the end, he said he wanted to say something personally to me.

"I have not spoken about some subjects," he said, "Because I did not want either to be dishonest or evasive with you."

Maybe he wanted to demonstrate how independent-minded Saudi Arabia has become during his rule.

But it was certainly one of the most complicated and interesting interviews I have ever done.

Rice tells Canada U.S. did not handle Arar case well, pledges to 'do better',- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted Wednesday the case of Canadian Maher Arar wasn't handled well by the United States.

"We do not think this case was handled as it should have been," she told the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee. "Our communication with the Canadian government about this was by no means perfect. In fact, it was quite imperfect."

Rice was fielding questions from legislators about Arar, a Canadian citizen who was detained by U.S. authorities during a stopover in New York and sent to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured on wrong intelligence that he was a terror suspect.

A commission of inquiry in Canada has cleared Arar of any links to terrorism, but he is still barred from travelling to the United States.

Rice did not apologize during testimony at the House committee, but she did say U.S. authorities failed to handle the case as well as they ought to have.

"We and the Canadians do not have the same understanding of what is possible in the future for Mr. Arar in terms of travel," Rice said.

"But we have told the Canadian government that we did not think this was handled particularly well in terms of our own relationship and we will try to do better in the future."

Asked about Arar's torture and the Canadian inquiry that cleared the Ottawa telecommunications engineer, Rice said: "I am aware of claims he was tortured."

"I am aware of the inquiry, and we do not think this case was handled as it should have been. We do absolutely not wish to transfer anyone to any place that they might actually be tortured."

Rice said she could not immediately recall the details when asked whether the U.S. administration relied on Syrian assurances that Arar would not be tortured.

"I will get you a full accounting of this because my memory of some of the details has faded," she said.

Last week, both Republican and Democrat legislators offered apologies to Arar for his ordeal during a hearing at which Arar testified via videoconference from Ottawa.

Arar still has a lawsuit pending against American officials. Arguments are scheduled for Nov. 9 in New York.

Fast food salt levels 'shocking'
A meal at a fast food restaurant could expose children to "staggeringly" high levels of salt, a survey has suggested.
Lobby group, Consensus Action on Salt and Health (Cash), found one meal from Pizza Hut contained four times the daily limit of salt for a six-year old.

KFC also did poorly in the analysis of hundreds of food items, which also included McDonalds and Burger King.

All the restaurant chains said they had reduced salt levels considerably in their products in recent years.

The government recommends a maximum of 6g of salt per day for adults, 5g a day for children aged 7-10 and 3g for children aged 4-6.


How can these companies justify selling food that contains more than the maximum daily limit for adults and children in a single meal
Professor Graham MacGregor
According to the Cash survey, a family of four sharing a Pizza Hut meal deal - consisting of one Cheesy Bites Meat Feast, one medium Super Supreme, a portion of garlic bread, a portion of potato wedges, chicken wings, and a cheesecake dessert - could eat 12.3g of salt each.

The amount of salt consumed in one meal is more than twice the daily limit for an adult and four times the daily limit of a six year old.

A family meal from KFC - consisting of eight mini breast fillets, two regular popcorn chicken portions, four regular fries, a large portion of BBQ beans, a large coleslaw and a 1.5 litre Pepsi shared equally between four - could contain 5.2g of salt per person.

Of meal combinations aimed specifically at children, the salt content varied from 4.3g of salt in a Pizza Hut chicken wrap and a soft drink to 0.6g in a McDonald's Happy Meal of chicken nuggets and a fruit bag.

Informed choice

CASH said all the restaurants had information on the salt content of their food on the company websites, but Pizza Hut and KFC had no information at the point of sale.


The saltiest individual meals
Pizza Hut Meat Feast Italian Pizza Plus (meat feast pizza, potato wedges, cheesecake) 9.7g
KFC Variety Meal (three chicken pieces, two hot wings, Colonel's Crispy Strip, regular fries, regular diet coke) 6.3g
Burger King Chicken BLT Baguette Meal (chicken BLT baguette, regular fries, regular coca cola) 4.8g
McDonalds Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal (quarter pounder burger with cheese, medium fries, medium coca cola) 3.2g
They called for all restaurants to carry nutrition information so people could make informed choices.

"It is over four years since the maximum daily limits for salt were established for adults and children," said Professor Graham MacGregor, chairman of Cash.

"And yet this survey shows that the salt levels in some of these meals are staggeringly high.

"How can these companies justify selling food that contains more than the maximum daily limit for adults and children in a single meal?"

He added that high levels of salt in childhood contributed to increased blood pressure and risk of heart attack in later life.

A spokesperson for Pizza Hut said the pizzas highlighted in the survey are not part of a family meal deal and that they had been working since 2004 to cut the salt in their foods.


Lower salt options
McDonalds Chicken McNuggets Meal (six chicken nuggets, medium fries, medium coca cola) 1.5g
KFC Colonel's Meal (two chicken pieces, regular fries, regular diet coke) 2.5g
Burger King Hamburger Meal Deal (hamburger, regular fries, regular coca cola) 2.96g
Pizza Hut Seafood Lovers Pan Pizza Plus (seafood pizza, garlic bread, chocolate fudge cake) 4.7g
"Every sensible parent knows that Pizza Hut is an enjoyable treat and we have significantly reduced the salt levels in our products over the past few years."

A spokesperson for KFC said they had reduced salt by up to 30%.

"We were the first - and remain the only - fast food chain to have removed salt from our fries, leaving customers to choose whether they want to add salt or not."

McDonalds said they had worked hard to make significant reductions in salt levels and would continue to do so.

Burger King said their burgers had no added salt.

CIA torture film hopes to shine light on "rendition"
Director Gavin Hood hopes his film "Rendition" about the U.S. practice of deporting suspected terrorists to foreign jails will raise public awareness and help stop abuse of human rights in the name of national security.

"It's easy to talk about arbitrary detentions and enhanced interrogation techniques and all these fancy words in the abstract and then we realize that in fact it's about people," Hood told reporters after a screening at the Rome Film Festival.

"(It's) not just the people to whom it happens but the people who are involved in having to do this and they don't quite know what the rules are ... We don't have the answers but I think we ask people to ask the questions and I hope the film contributes to the debate."

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon, "Rendition" tells the fictional story of an Egyptian-American engineer abducted by U.S. customs at Washington airport, deported to a North African jail and tortured under the eyes of a CIA agent.

Witherspoon plays the man's pregnant wife desperately trying to track him down, while Gyllenhaal is the reluctant CIA agent asked to supervise his brutal interrogation.

The film, which screened at the festival on Sunday and has just been released in the United States, is the latest in a string of Hollywood productions tackling the political and military fallout from the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The theme has made U.S. cinema popular at European festivals this year, even though box office returns have been mixed.

Unlike other directors who have accused the media of not telling the full story about the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, Hood said the press had played a crucial role in bringing the practice of rendition to light.

"One of the ways that this controversy has come to the attention of the public is through the efforts of journalists and through the efforts of lawyers publicizing these things," said the South African director, whose previous film "Tsotsi" won an Oscar for best foreign movie last year.

The United States acknowledges it has conducted secret international transfers of terrorist suspects and held them at secret prisons, but denies torturing them or handing them over to countries that torture prisoners.

The U.S. has sought to dismiss legal cases brought by victims on the grounds that they would violate state secrets.

Striving for balance, the film poses the question of whether potentially saving the lives of thousands makes it worth sacrificing one person's rights.

Hood said people should put themselves in the position of CIA officials, like the one played in the film by Meryl Streep, whose job is "to make sure that another 9/11 does not happen."

"We need clear rules not just to protect people like (the man) who is kidnapped but also to give guidance to the people whose job it is to protect the American people," he said.

"If there are no rules then why will they stop pushing the envelope in order to try and protect?"

The roadblocks to another Mideast summit, US Secretary of State Rice spent four days in the region trying to iron out differences between Israeli and Palestinian leaders ahead of November peace talks.,Jerusalem and Cairo - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spent four days in the Middle East this week to drum up support for an international summit that the US hopes will push the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward.

While there were positive signs from her shuttle diplomacy throughout the visit – Israeli and Palestinian officials described the conference, expected for late November or early December, as an important opportunity, and Egypt and Jordan lent some support to the idea – obstacles to getting all sides to the table remain, as has long been the case with the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

But the Bush administration has not yet exhausted all efforts to lay the groundwork ahead of the Annapolis, Md., gathering. It is banking on this conference to kick off formal talks to create a Palestinian state, and to help salvage a Middle East policy battered by the Iraq war and muddled by the Iran nuclear dilemma.

Ms. Rice is expected to return to the region for more premeeting talks at the end of this month or in early November. President Bush is also sending security adviser Stephen Hadley to meet with Israeli and Palestinian counterparts next week.

"There's a clear change; the administration is now more willing to devote intensive amounts of diplomacy and capital and address the core issues," says Scott Lasensky, a senior analyst at the US Institute of Peace. "Right now failure is not an option. Condoleezza Rice is fully invested in this."

But Rice's seventh visit to the region this year yielded plenty of evidence of the odds against this high-profile gambit into Middle East peacemaking. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he still wants Israel to agree to negotiations on specific issues such as final borders of a Palestinian state. Israel is seeking to keep the agenda vague.

US allies Egypt and Jordan did throw their weight behind the idea, but cautioned that meetings that fail to yield specific timetables on the three core issues – ownership of Jerusalem, permanent Palestinian borders, and the return of Palestinian refugees – could discredit the process.

Almost 15 years after the US-sponsored Oslo accords that are now generally viewed as a failure by both Israelis and Palestinians and after seven years of almost daily violence between the two sides, little goodwill exists.

Arabs and Israelis generally subscribe to precisely opposite reasons for the failure of Oslo – the "other" side didn't keep its word – but their beliefs have left everyone in the same place with less trust and less patience.

Israeli skeptics, who include Defense Minister Ehud Barak, worry that any concessions Israel makes will simply become the new preconditions for later negotiations, essentially getting nothing for something. That's in part because while Mr. Abbas wants to move forward quickly, politically he remains weak. His rivals in the militant Islamist Hamas movement, who control the Gaza Strip, aren't necessarily eager to see Palestinians rushing to the table.