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ZURICH – Director Roman Polanski was arrested by Swiss police as he flew in for the Zurich Film Festival and faces possible extradition to the United States for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl, authorities said Sunday.
Polanski was scheduled to receive an honorary award at the festival when he was apprehended Saturday at the airport, the Swiss Justice Ministry said in a statement. It said U.S. authorities have sought the arrest of the 76-year-old director around the world since 2005.
“There was a valid arrest request and we knew when he was coming,” ministry spokesman Guido Balmer told The Associated Press. “That’s why he was taken into custody.”
Polanski, the director of such classic films as “Chinatown,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” fled the U.S. in 1978, a year after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with the underage girl.
Polanski has asked a U.S. appeals court in California to overturn a judges’ refusal to throw out his case. He claims misconduct by the now-deceased judge who had arranged a plea bargain and then reneged on it.
His victim, Samantha Geimer, who long ago identified herself publicly, has joined in Polanski’s bid for dismissal, saying she wants the case to be over. She sued Polanski and reached an undisclosed settlement. Polanski’s French lawyer, Georges Kiejman, told France-Inter radio that it was “too early to know” if Polanski would be extradited.
“The proceedings must take their course,” he said Sunday. “For now we are trying to have the arrest warrant lifted in Zurich.”
Tesco has been accused of religious discrimination after the company ordered the founder of a Jedi religion to remove his hood or leave a branch of the supermarket in north Wales.
Daniel Jones, founder of the religion inspired by the Star Wars films, says he was humiliated and victimised for his beliefs following the incident at a Tesco store in Bangor.
The 23-year-old, who founded the International Church of Jediism, which has 500,000 followers worldwide, was told the hood flouted store rules.
But the grocery empire struck back, claiming that the three best known Jedi Knights in the Star Wars movies – Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker – all appeared in public without their hoods. Jones, from Holyhead, who is known by the Jedi name Morda Hehol, said his religion dictated that he should wear the hood in public places and is considering legal action against the chain.
The quote of the day:
“If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they’ll miss lots of special offers.”
May the Force and the Power of Cheese be with you!
This is Rep. Alan Grayson asking Federal Reserve General Counsel Scott Alvarez about the Fed’s independence.
Having posted another of his withering questioning sessions before, Grayson seems to be someone to watch. It’s quite refreshing to see government officials squirm under his questioning. Remember the days when the Main Stream Media had the balls to do that?
While this is in one state, you can bet lawyers for homeowners in every state will pounce on this immediately. Read the whole article to understand the depth of this decision. Then read Matt Taibbi’s take on it where he calls much of the mortgage industry a criminal enterprise.
A landmark ruling in a recent Kansas Supreme Court case may have given millions of distressed homeowners the legal wedge they need to avoid foreclosure. In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler, 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose – on 60 million mortgages. That is the number of American mortgages currently reported to be held by MERS. Over half of all new U.S. residential mortgage loans are registered with MERS and recorded in its name. Holdings of the Kansas Supreme Court are not binding on the rest of the country, but they are dicta of which other courts take note; and the reasoning behind the decision is sound.
[I]n December 2007 attorney Sean Olender suggested in an article in The San Francisco Chronicle that the real reason for the bailout schemes being proposed by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was not to keep strapped borrowers in their homes so much as to stave off a spate of lawsuits against the banks. Olender wrote:
“The sole goal of the [bailout schemes] is to prevent owners of mortgage-backed securities, many of them foreigners, from suing U.S. banks and forcing them to buy back worthless mortgage securities at face value – right now almost 10 times their market worth. The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.
A prison which installed alcoholic hand gel dispensers to combat swine flu had to withdraw them within hours after a drunken fight between inmates.Some men apparently drank the stuff neat, while others mixed it with sugar and fruit to make hooch. Warders noticed that three or four prisoners were the worse for wear, while one was said to have started a fist fight with another. The governor of The Verne, a Category C jail on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, had no alternative but to ban the detergent.
Peter McParlin, south west representative of the Prison Officers’ Association, said members had warned the jail’s management not to introduce the gel, which is 70 per cent alcohol. ‘Hooch, in the experience of staff, is just as bad if not worse than drugs.
‘Prisoners with drinks which have extreme alcoholic content become extremely violent with consequences on health and security. ‘We understand there was an alternative to the hand gel which was a foaming soap which did not contain alcohol but served the same purpose. But that was considered and disregarded as it was more expensive. The prisoners took the gel from the dispensers on the wing and put it in a kettle.
‘They steamed it and strained it to leave pure alcohol and mixed that with sugared water and fruit. They turned it around very quickly.
I’ll have mine with a twist please. In other news the nanny state has outlawed the use of antibacterial hand gel in all of the UK… just kidding, maybe.
Do these idiot cities think it is a good idea to host these G20 events in this environment?
 
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I know this will come as a shock to our younger readers, but there was a time when men and women lived in separate dorms. A guy entering a women’s dorm to pick up a gal to take her to the malt shop was carefully controlled and watched. No sex was allowed AT ALL! Astonishing, but true!
There are lots of things roommates fight over
The Office of Residential Life and Learning (ResLife) has added a new stipulation to its guest policy that prohibits any sex act in a dorm room while one’s roommate is present. The stipulation further states that any sexual activity in the room should not interfere with a roommate’s privacy, study habits or sleep.
ResLife’s Assistant Director for Community and Judicial Affairs Carrie Ales-Rich explained that the change comes as a result of an annual review of residential policies that examines the previous year’s trends.
[…]
“We want to make perfectly clear that we do not want to hinder someone from engaging in any personal or private activity,” she said. “But when it becomes uncomfortable for the roommate, we want to have something in place that empowers the residents to have a good conversation with the roommate.”
With the revelation at the G20 summit about the processing site, what do you think we should do about it?
The US, Britain and France united in condemnation of Iran on Friday after Tehran’s admission that it has been constructing a secret uranium enrichment facility that Washington fears could help produce a nuclear bomb.
As the world’s major powers prepare to meet Iran next week for critical talks on its nuclear programme, US President Barack Obama disclosed the existence of the plant, 160km south of Tehran.
On Saturday, Iranian media reported that the Revolutionary Guards will stage missile defence exercises starting on Sunday. The war games announcement is expected to futher heighten the nuclear dispute.
Iran has been enriching uranium at the plant in Natanz under inspection but it had never before admitted the existence of the second site to the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Oh, my gosh, this is such a delightful idea from Microsoft’s brilliant marketing folks. I just can’t stand it! What party animals! This will be so ever much more fun than that drunken orgy we had just a few weeks ago when Snow Leopard came out. I can hardly wait!
Can’t get enough of these wonderfully helpful videos? Then you want to go here.
WIRED.com – September 25, 2009
The “copyleft” and the “copyright” are both applauding the presidential appointment Friday of Victoria A. Espinel to become the nation’s first copyright czar.
Congress created the new czar position last year as part of intellectual property reform legislation.
Espinel, who requires Senate confirmation, has a past in teaching and government. Most recently, she was a visiting scholar at the George Mason University School of Law, where she taught intellectual property and international trade. The White House said she was an intellectual property adviser to the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Finance Committee, House Judiciary Committee and House Ways and Means Committee. Espinel, in 2005, served as the nation’s top trade negotiator for intellectual property at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
C-NetNews.com – September 25, 2009 1:18 PM PDT
It’s all over the news. A major analysis published this week of more than a dozen studies in North America, Italy, Scotland, and Ireland designed to determine the effect of smoking bans on heart attack rates shows a 17 percent reduction in heart attacks in places where bans were in effect for one year. That rate more than doubles to 36 percent in places where bans have been in effect for three years.
The impact of smoking bans is “bigger than expected,” the BBC reports. The bans are “potent weapons in the battle to prevent heart attacks,” claims The Wall Street Journal. Communities that ban smoking get a “big payoff,” according to CNN. In the days since the report first came out, scores of articles have added to the chorus that smoking bans significantly reduce heart attacks.
Maybe… maybe not, RTFA. A lot of people are now switching to electronic cigarettes… all of the nicotine but none of the other toxins.
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