Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia, appearing Thursday for the first time before a United Nations women's rights panel, faced tough questions over restrictions on "virtually every aspect of a woman's life" in the kingdom. The U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women monitors adherence to a 1979 international bill of rights for women. Saudi Arabia ratified that pact in 2000, with the proviso that Islamic Sharia law would prevail if there were any contradiction with its provisions.

Re "Bush visits Saudis; U.S. offers 'smart' weapons technology," Jan. 15 President Bush, on his current peace mission to the Middle East, promised to sell $120 million worth of weapons technology to Saudi Arabia and an estimated $20 billion in weapons to six Persian Gulf nations. How can this be a peace mission? Are we to believe that these weapons will aid the feeling of security and guarantee peace, and that they will simply gather dust and never be used? There is also the sad possibility that these weapons could eventually be used against Americans who have no business being there in the first place.

Even as smiling members of the Saudi royal family feted President Bush and his entourage this week, presenting the lame-duck leader with an ornamental sword, Saudi Arabia's most prominent English-language daily stabbed him with a pen over his aggressive Iran policy. "Whatever threat Iran may constitute, now or in the future, must be addressed peaceably and through negotiations," said an unsigned editorial in Tuesday's Arab News.

The U.S. primaries are an enticing, confusing political drama for a Middle East looking for an American president who can offer security and repair years of Bush administration policies widely seen as disastrous. The next U.S. president will inherit the Iraq war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a rising Iran and competition from the growing economies of India and China for oil in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations.

A bus plunged over a cliff in Saudi Arabia, killing at least 25 people on board, the state-run news agency reported. The official Saudi Press Agency said 25 people died and eight were injured, citing police Col. Abdulla Qurni in the southern district of Asir, where the crash took place. Okaz newspaper, which is deemed close to the government, reported that 26 people died and seven were injured. The bus drifted to the side of a road, crashed through a guardrail and landed in a valley near the city of Abha, Okaz reported.

If Cal Poly San Luis Obispo had wanted to start an engineering program for a university in someplace like Norway, the proposal probably would have sailed through without much comment either on campus or off. But the school's plan to start an engineering department in Saudi Arabia is a different story.

Saudi King Abdullah has made an impassioned plea for dialogue among Muslims, Christians and Jews, the first such proposal from a nation with no diplomatic ties to Israel and a ban on non-Muslim religious services and symbols. The message, welcomed by Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders, came at a time of stalled peace initiatives and escalating tensions in the region. "The idea is to ask representatives of all monotheistic religions to sit together with their brothers in faith . . . as we all believe in the same God," the king said Monday night.

More than 100 Arab rights groups and intellectuals in the Middle East condemned a Saudi religious edict calling for the death of two writers for apostasy, saying "clerics of darkness" were practicing intellectual terrorism. Sheik Abdul-Rahman Barrak, one of Saudi Arabia's most revered clerics, said in a rare religious ruling last month that two newspaper columnists should be put to death if they did not renounce their "heretical articles" in public. The two had questioned the Sunni Muslim view in Saudi Arabia that Christians and Jews should be considered unbelievers, which Barrak said implied Muslims were free to follow other religions.

Saudi Arabia remains the world's leading source of money for Al Qaeda and other extremist networks and has failed to take key steps requested by U.S. officials to stem the flow, the Bush administration's top financial counter-terrorism official said Tuesday. Stuart A.