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Breaking News PM: New Law To Reform Bankers Bonuses
Roman Polanski has been taken into Swiss custody on a 1978 US arrest warrant
In a statement the Zurich Film Festival said the Oscar-winning director was held on his arrival in Switzerland.
A spokesman for the city's police confirmed Polanski had been detained, but gave no further details.
The Swiss Justice Ministry was reported as saying he would be extradited to the US. Polanski fled America more than 30 years ago after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl. The 76-year-old has been unable to travel to the US since the warrant was issued. Polanski, who is a French citizen, has been trying to have the case thrown out on grounds of misconduct. The director claims the now-deceased judge who arranged a plea bargain later went back on it. In May, a Californian judge dismissed Polanski's bid because he failed to appear in court. Victim Samantha Geimer, now 45-years-old, has also called for the case to be dismissed and the saga put to an end.
She has already sued Polanski, reaching an undisclosed settlement. The director had been due to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival, organisers said.
Polanski early films include Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown. More recently, he was awarded the 2002 best director Oscar for The Pianist and released a remake of the Charles Dickens' classic Oliver Twist in 2005. In 1969 Polanski's pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered along with four other people by followers of Charles Manson. Cult member Susan Atkins, convicted in 1971 for her part in the killings, died in prison last week.
Merkel bullish as Germans head to the polls
Germans voted in a national election Sunday with Angela Merkel favourite to win a new mandate to drag Europe's top economy out of recession and as the country agonises over its role in Afghanistan.Skip related content
Final polls indicated the conservative Merkel was near certain to secure four more years as chancellor, but her hopes of forming a new centre-right coalition with a business-friendly party hung by a thread. Heightened security after warnings from Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and other Islamic militants over Germany's increasingly bloody mission in Afghanistan also cast a shadow over voting. Merkel wants to dump the Social Democrats (SPD), her current "grand coalition" partners, for an alliance with the Free Democrats (FDP) that she says is needed to pull Germany out of its worst downturn in 60 years. But her Christian Democrat party's lead has fallen in the final weeks of the campaign. A Forsa survey on Friday put her preferred coalition on 47 percent of the vote, which experts say may not be enough to form a government. The most likely alternative would be another grand coalition. Nevertheless, Merkel, Forbes magazine's most powerful woman on the planet for the past four years, said she was confident of putting together the alliance she wants.
"I am always optimistic," she told the mass-circulation Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
"Voters will decide tomorrow how quickly we get out of this crisis," Merkel told a final rally on Saturday. "We are fighting for the German jobs of the future." Her SPD challenger, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was also upbeat as he cast his ballot. "I am very confident we will have a strong SPD. A strong SPD that will be able to lead the government from the top this time," said a beaming Steinmeier in Berlin. Sporting a red jacket, Merkel also cast her ballot in Berlin around 1100 GMT but did not speak to reporters assembled at the polling station. Awaiting the winner of this pivotal election is a bulging in-tray of problems. Unemployment is forecast to shoot higher, and everything from health care to education to Germany's bloated social security system are in dire need of reform. German public finances are in tatters and its population ageing fast.
Abroad, the main challenge is Afghanistan, where Germany has around 4,200 troops in the NATO force ensnared in the eighth year of an ever bloodier struggle with insurgents. The mission, opposed by most German voters, may become a major domestic headache for Merkel if violence worsens in the north of the war-ravaged country where Germany's soldiers are based.
Security across Germany has been tight in the run-up to election day following a series of threats from Islamic militants over the country's presence in Afghanistan. Germany has never suffered an attack by Islamist extremists but authorities fear it is only a matter of time, with several suspected plots uncovered and Internet warnings a regular occurrence, including from German-born Muslims. With all of the main parties in the Bundestag lower house supporting the deployment, with the exception of the far-left Die Linke, the Afghan mission has failed to register as much of an issue in a largely uninspiring campaign.
But the war may become a battleground in the next parliament, particularly if the SPD finds itself in opposition. If there is not sufficient effort to build up the Afghan army and police, "the US will have a second Vietnam, and Germany its first," the Berliner Zeitung daily said in an editorial last week. Troops in Afghanistan have already registered their votes by postal ballot before home polling stations opened Sunday. The first exit poll results were due at around 1600 GMT. However, due to Germany's complex electoral arithmetic, the initial outcome could prove unclear. Experts estimate that Merkel and the FDP may need as much as 48 percent of votes to form a coalition, possibly turning election night into a cliffhanger.
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Pope seeks to restore Catholic hold in Czech Republic
More than 120,000 people packed a field in the Czech city of Brno on Sunday to hear Pope Benedict XVI call for a spiritual renewal in the former communist nation.
The pope is one a three day visit to the Czech Republic, which is about to mark the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution that ended communist rule and which he has used to hail the end of what he called "oppressive regimes". People from across Eastern Europe came for the giant mass where Benedict again attacked the communist past, saying: "History has demonstrated the absurdities to which man descends when he excludes God from the horizon of his choices and actions. "Here, as elsewhere, many people suffered in past centuries for remaining faithful to the Gospel, and they did not lose hope," he added. Religious belief was suppressed by the Communist regime, which labelled the Church the people's enemy, put priests under secret police surveillance and banned the Catholic press and Catholic associations. Benedict told the huge crowd gathered autum sun in a field near Brno-Turany airport that the technical and social change of the modern world could also be a threat to faith. "Your country, like other nations, is experiencing cultural conditions that often present a radical challenge to faith and therefore also to hope," he told the mass. Faith and hope "have been relegated to the private and other-worldly sphere, while in day-to-day public life confidence in scientific and economic progress has been affirmed," he noted. The 82-year-old pontiff warned: "We all know that this progress is ambiguous: it opens up possibilities for good as well as evil." "Technical developments and the improvement of social structures are important and certainly necessary, but they are not enough to guarantee the moral welfare of society." One of the goals on the pope's trip is to restore faith in the largely secular country. In his prayer, Benedict called on those present "to remain faithful to your Christian vocation and to the Gospel, so as to build together a future of solidarity and peace." But the fall of communism has failed to bring a religious revival in the Czech Republic: less than a third of the country's 10.38 million people are Catholic, according to the Vatican. Some pilgrims spent the night in tents at the field to get a good spot for the mass.
Youngsters in traditional costumes mingled with robed priests and families with prams, warming their hands on mugs of tea or nibbling on cake and biscuits in the morning chill. The arrival of Benedict in his distinctive white Popemobile drew cries from the crowd, who waved small white-and-gold Vatican flags and large Czech, Slovak, Austrian and Polish banners.
Out of the 120,000 people present, some 10,000 had come from abroad. One bishop came from Bangladesh, according to the Brno diocese organisers. Former Slovak president Michal Kovac who attended the mass, told AFP: "Meeting the Pope is always a big thing for me... the world today must, now more than ever, honour Christian values." Benedict's first visit to the Czech Republic began on Saturday in Prague, where he visited the Our Lady of Victory Church and met former president Vaclav Havel, hero of the 1989 coup who became president after spending years in Communist prisons. The Pope hailed the fall of communism in eastern Europe 20 years ago, giving thanks for the region's "liberation from those oppressive regimes." After the two-hour mass in Brno on Sunday, Benedict was to return to Prague to attend an ecumenical meeting and meet scientists. His visit will symbolically end with a mass for an estimated 35,000 people in Stara Boleslav near Prague on Monday, which is the feast of St Wenceslas, the Czech martyr and patron saint who was murdered in the town on September 28, 935.
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