senior russian and american officials are in talks over whether to lift some of president obama's sanctions against russia. russia is demanding the return of two of its diplomatic compounds in the us, which were seized over allegations that it had interfered in the 2016 elections. the russian foreign minister has accused washington of "daylight robbery". just two weeks after north korea's intercontinental ballistic missile test, seoul has proposed military talks with pyonyang. and this video is trending on bbc.com. saudi arabia is investigating the woman who posted this footage of herself wearing a miniskirt and crop—top in public, defying the country's strict dress code. it's sparked a heated debate with some saying she should be arrested while others are praising her bravery. that's all from me now. stay with bbc world news. now on bbc news it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk.

i'm stephen sackur. my guest today is a youthful artist who has spent his already strikingly successful creative life defying boundaries and stereotypes. mohammed fairouz is a composer, his work ranges from symphonies to opera, to unique fusions of music and poetry. he's an arab educated and resident in the west, an outspoken advocate for creative freedom who sometimes rails against western cultural imperialism. his aim is to foster cultural crossover rather than confrontation, but can this artist avoid taking sides? mohammed fairouz, welcome to hardtalk.

it is great to be here, stephen. i want to talk about your musical inheritance — arab parents, spent a lot of your schooling and residential life in the us and some of it in the uk. in terms of the tradition which is the bedrock for your own music, would you say it's western or it's arab? well, i...the truthful answer to that question is that it is much more of a mess than that, and it's always been. i mean, music has no respect for borders, sound has no respect for walls. i mean, you go tojerusalem and you hear the bells from the church of the holy sepulchre interweave with the shofar from the wailing wall, and the azan from the mosque, and they intermingle and they don't respect the boundaries that seem to cause so many people so much strife and anger. put it this way, some people talk about —

people who speak many languages — they talk about the language they dream in. do you have a sort of musical language that is your instinctive first language? yeah, i think that that is where music is particularly special, stephen. i think that's where it bypasses all of that, you know, because you can't have figurative... i can't paint a fork in music, it sort ofjust gets passed that and goes directly to the things that are truly universal about human beings — the rhythm, the beating of the heart, the pace, the human voice, all of these things. it is energy so you can't have a monopoly on energy or on sound. and they have mixed for thousands of years, so i think if i am to be honest and genuine in answering that question, because of what i know, i know how much of a mess it is. i love the idea of it being mess. it is a very frank answer but,

put it this way, you have been to some very formalised musical schools, you have done the conservatoire thing in the united states, you've also been to aleppo and worked with some of the most rigorous classical arab musicians. when you say to them, "you know what, i'm a bit of a fusion kid" "i'm a bit of a mess and i'm taking influences from all over," do they say, "you can't do that because you're not respecting the integrity of our tradition?" well, i think that actually when i went to the conservatory, what was really fascinating is walking into music history course, right, and you sort of start with the greeks and then you skip over, there is sort of a blind spot, and then you are in the middle ages with hildegard von bingen and so on, and you don't really touch on any non—western music, right. so you actually, literally have a book called the norton anthology of western music, right, but when you go to aleppo, what you discover is that a lot of this stuff, from hildegard, and mozart, and bach, and haydn, came from another civilisation and intermingled, 0k?

i mean, and vice—versa. so you actually find people saying more often, we wish you would respect this more. you find people saying, wow, we recognise that, we sang that or something like that. or that is one of our lullabies. that is one of the things we used to march people off to war, to serenade our loved ones. you have obviously written symphonies and they've been highly acclaimed. you've written operas, as well. both of those are words that we associate very much with the classical music tradition. when people introduce you as a classical composer, what's your response? i'm alive. i'm not a classical...mozart was a classical composer. this is a period sort of late 18th, early 19th century. i'm not that old. you said — and this is something that intrigued me —

you said, "i can get off a plane and here punjabi music, for example, one minute, and then go to a club and i'm going to hear beyonce or lady gaga, and then i might listen to a band in beirut, and if i still sounded like mozart after all of that, it would be kind of weird." so how far can you take this fusion approach? i think as far as it has always been taken. i really think that the never—the—twain—shall—meet approach is quite new. i think people have been exchanging ideas creatively for centuries, millennia, and every renaissance has been defined by the creative sharing of ideas, by the breaking down of boundaries and walls, and people coming together and discovering what they have in common and actually mitigating one another‘s weakness and amplifying each other‘s strengths. to give everybody a sense on how you do this and what the end result

looks like and sounds like, let's play a clip. this is a fascinating performance by an indian dancer, shakti mohan, using your music. so let's have a look at it. (music playing). it's beautiful to look at. ijust wonder how much collaboration there is, when you work with a beautiful dancer like that, or indeed you have worked with famous poets as well, how deep do you dig is that collaboration? well, i have to admit, that this was filmed, this collaboration with shakti was filmed well before we imagined that donald trump would ever be our president but it was proposed to me in a reality tv fashion that made me sort of very suspicious. what the bbc said when they wanted to do this was you have five days to make a new piece from scratch. don't prepare anything. you have five days, right. five days to create a new piece. i said, that is impossible.

i have never met the woman. she has never been to new york. she was flown in form india to new york. and not only was there this bollywood dance tradition that had thousands of years of baggage and history that i sort of did not know much about, there was also david krakauer, the clarinettist, who was bringing ajewish klezmer tradition... you can hear it... you can hear it, you can hear it in that clip and what's fascinating about that is that when you go to those eastern european villages where those people are no longer there — the holocaust or whatever, they left the country or they're dead, or they were killed — the ideas were not killed. you still hear those sound in those villages. it is impossible to kill that energy, it's impossible to kill an idea even though you can kill people. there was that and then there was this very rigorous classical stodgy thing of the string quartet,

so there were so many elements coming together and what was magical about this is that it worked. it worked. it is like we could have not spoken the same language and yet the fluidity of the human body, the universality of what she was doing, she understood the rhythm. there were things that were...there were things that were just beyond the need to translate and it worked — we did it in five days and i think that is sort of a controlled experiment, it's proof. it is really interesting. let's switch focus a little bit because you talk with such passion about how you can find common ground with an artist like her, whom you've never met before. really, really pure collaboration in artistic terms but a lot of your work, it seems to me, a lot of the recent work, has had a much more sort of real world political edge to it as well.

to what extent these days do you as an arab american feel that you need to use your art to explore politics? well, i think an interest in statecraft and diplomacy and politics has been something that has defined my work for many, many years. i think that when a politician comes on this show, they are basically coming to sell something and they are asking people to give them something — power. and an artist is doing something that is very different from that. they are offering ideas and insight into the internal human condition, and societies are human beings multiplied, magnified... offering ideas or actually delivering polemics and various specific critiques. just looking at recent things you've done, like the dictator‘s wife, that you put on a washington, dc, just before the trump inauguration — it seemed to be a very direct message about authoritarian corruption that might be taken as a your feeling, worry, about donald trump coming to the white house. well, of course, but i do think

that the thing about this is, you know, kennedy had a great way of putting this, i mean, if donald trump was in the white house during the cuban missile crisis i probably would never have been born. the temperance, the idea of sort of understanding that power has its limitations, that wielding power has its limitations and indeed kennedy did say, "where power leads man to corruption, poetry reminds us of our limitations, where power corrupts, poetry clea nses". and there is a very special accountability that artists can hold people in power to. do you think your consciousness is very much affected by being an arab american in an era where, as we know,

donald trump in particular, with his travel ban on certain muslim countries, in particular, appears to associate muslims — this is my words not his — but he appears to associate muslims from particular countries with terrorism. as an american citizen, how does that make you feel? i should say, i really would like to emphasise that i do not really think... i think donald trump represents something that is an outgrowth of at least 165 years of decline in one of our political parties in the united states, that it's just refused to participate in the democratic process, the republican party, and i think that as far as his views on muslims are concerned, i think this cuts to the heart of what we would call a clash of civilisations. this is the reason why i don't think a clash of civilisations is happening. it is not happening.

sadiq khan, the mayor of london, was marching in pride, and he probably shares a lot of views with angela merkel, on treating people with dignity and basically being inclusive, and these are global cities. you don't want to set billions of people against, insist that, you know, "i am your enemy" — i insist that i am your enemy — that is a destructive and incedianry outlook... i'm going to stop you because, again, i think it is so helpful to have a representation both in sound and vision of the work you've been doing recently. you, in the netherlands recently, put on a show, an opera, the new prince, which clearly played with images of us politics, including a character appearing to be based on donald trump. let's have a quick look at that now. (music playing).

you have tried preventing us from living. chains and irons. pounding of locks. keys and bars. so many arresting images that

i almost don't know where to begin. one thing strikes me. you have put on different forms of music, particularly operas, which clearly carry a critique of power, especially western exercise of that power. but one thing you have in your career is anything that really, clearly takes on, confronts, and criticises, the arab world, you don't talk about that. why is that? i criticise political power around the world. i wrote several articles criticising several arab governments. i have been vocal in my critique. what i do think is that the west and the arab world can help each other if they approach each other

in a more genuine way. i think there is this sense that we are going to criticise imperialism coming from the west and the west is going to take ao—year—old critiques of the arab world rather than other things we can solve together. there are universal values we have together. you are a publicly out gay man and an artist and frankly, you would find life in many parts of the arabian gulf, saudi arabia, the emirates, where your parents are from, you would find life there in possible, not least

because being gay, being actively gay, is a criminal offence that is severely punishable in saudi arabia, potentially by death itself. but you don't speak out about that at all. i have spoken out about sexual repression in middle eastern countries and western countries. if i may enter up, you have criticised human rights watch, amnesty international, for what you regard as culturally inappropriate analysis. you say they are using a completely western and non—nuanced understanding of homosexuality in the arab world, but i don't understand that. they are approaching it with a noninclusive point of view that does not take into consideration... i mean, you define me as a gay man which i don't identify with in that way... what do you mean by that? there are really no arabic words for "gay" or "straight." and i axley find the idea of being "straight" kind of strange. there is a tradition and it is quite different. we are coming to a point, i think, in the western world, where we are talking about non— binary definitions of sexuality. 0k?

we are talking about fluidity in sexuality. the arab world, go back, thousands of years of tradition in this form. there are a lot of people in the arab world who would like to identify with the tradition that they belong to and enjoy equal rights with their fellow citizens. i believe that all arab nations must guarantee equal protections for all citizens. would your work, could it be put

on in your country of heritage, the united arab emirates, or saudi, kuwait, bahrain, is there any ability for you to do this in the arab world itself? my song cycle, called songs from ibn khafaja, based on his same—sex love poetry. they have been done in the united arab emirates. i have another song with baritones and male singers in the west who have identified and seen this. and it has been done over there. and they are not only done, they are taught and memorised by people over there. i will ask you before we end

about something very current and relevant for you being in the uk. you put on a performance at a big manchester arts festival, a musical performance. you are doing it only weeks after a man of libyan origin, a young man, a militant, appearing to be loyal in his own way to so—called islamic state, he put a bomb inside an ariana grande concert, killing women and children. do you believe your music and your message about the bridge building and the cultural cross—fertilisation that can happen through music, do you think about, right now, can make a difference to the thinking of people in a city like manchester? not why itself.

i mean, it has been said you must love one another or die. he meant it. we have two options. we have a serious issue with violence erupting throughout the world. some of it is linked to extremist thought and to radicalisation. i would urge an uncoupling of what is, as a matter of fact, a small number of people from the second—largest civilisation in human history. that gives them legitimacy that they crave. it gives them association they do not need to have... but they are muslims and they are coming out of a very small number of mosques inspired by a very small number of militant imams and other leaders, and... absolutely.

you cannot deny the muslim origin of this problem. absolutely not. but what you can say and understand are once again fact. you know, we have had zero suicide attacks in most countries. the netherlands, uae, we havejust had under 3000 people die of suicide attacks between 1982 and 2015 in the united states. we have had, in the united states, at least 30,000 people die as a result of gun violence every year since 1982 at least. i see the crosses, the kkk, i see they have them and burn them. i do not associate them with such a mainstream movement as christianity, because the majority of people, christians, have nothing to do with that. what you need is people who believe in civilisation, believing perversity, who believe in inclusion,

people from all backgrounds, sadiq khan, angela merkel, from the uae, to come together and oppose people who incite hate. they need to do that in the us, especially against people like donald trump. your music is a part of that? it is forced to be a part of it because i am living in this age. mohammed fairouz, we have the end it there. but thank you so much for being on hardtalk thank you. thank you. hello there.

good morning. yesterday, we saw 27 degrees in the london area with increasing amounts of medium and upper level cloud. but the skies stayed pretty much clear in northern scotland. through the day today, temperatures creeping up. 29 degrees somewhere in england and wales. then midweek, big changes on the way. some thunderstorms heading our way. by the end of the week, more cool. 27 degrees. as the cloud goes to the southern half of the uk, clearer skies further north to end the day on monday. with those clearer skies, 11—12 degrees in main cities and rural areas could be single figures. further south, not so, a warm night here. today, a south—easterly breeze striking in some humid air from the near continent. that will be noticeable in the south—east in particular. a decent day for many places. some sunshine for much of scotland.

maybe a shower or two developing in the afternoon. a lot of sunshine. warm as well. 22 in glasgow and inverness. northern ireland should have a decent afternoon. similar in northern england. fresh on the north sea coast. 25 in the manchester area. southern england and wales getting to 28—29. to the south—west, starting to see thunderstorms developing. they will be in the channel islands early on and go ever northwards. hit and miss, but if you get one, you will know about it. the thunderstorms going north through the small hours wednesday. hail and gusty wind to go with that. wednesday itself, thunderstorms going north. dry in large parts of england and wales. more rain coming in from the west. some could be heavy.

temperatures coming down a bit in the west. norwich, 29 degrees. generally, temperatures beginning to come back down on wednesday. and that process continues on into thursday as the weather front goes from west to east that be bringing some rain with it and also some fresher air. for those playing golf, quite strong winds making a challenging. early rain and then sunshine and showers into the afternoon to the temperatures in the upper teens. rain west to east. it will be an unsettled end to the week with rain over a large area. kudla i'm rico hizon in singapore, the headlines. russia demands the us returns to

diplomatic compounds, as talks to try and normalise relations hit trouble. two weeks after the listed missile tests, north korea says it is time for military talks withjohn yang —— south korea. —— pyongyang. i'm babita sharma in london. also in the programme. australia vows to make tech giants like apple and facebook hand over encrypted messages to help it fight crime and terrorism. and why making a film about women led to a six—month battle with the censors.