GENEVA – Roman Polanski is finishing the edit of his latest movie "Ghost" from his house arrest in Switzerland, surrounded by family and bombarded by telephone calls of support, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy said in an interview Sunday.
Levy, a friend of the 76-year-old director, told the Lausanne-based weekly Le Matin Dimanche that he visited Polanski in his chalet in the luxury Swiss resort of Gstaad about 10 days ago and found him like "a rock," working and confident even though his family is worried about the U.S. extradition request hanging over him.
"It's in fact very impressive. He is in the process of finishing at a distance the editing of his next film, which I understand will be in the official selection at the next Berlin Festival," Levy said.
He said he was able to have a friendly dinner with Polanski in the chalet. Being able to entertain at home was one of the privileges the director received after his Dec. 4 transfer to house arrest from a Swiss jail after more than 60 days of detention.
Polanski has to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet around his ankle to guard against his leaving the grounds of the chalet, but he is able to receive guests inside or outside the house, work on his films, make telephone calls and send e-mails as much as he likes.
"The telephone doesn't stop ringing, the messages of support are pouring in, especially from his Swiss friends," Levy said.
He said Polanski told him Swiss officials were only doing their job in arresting him Sept. 26 and holding him in detention, but that all of them had treated him with kindness and appeared "extraordinarily embarrassed" by what he was going through.
Swiss authorities have said they will decide early next year whether to extradite Polanski the United States where he is wanted in Los Angeles for sentencing for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl.
If Polanski breaks the conditions for his house arrest, the Swiss government would confiscate the $4.5 million bail he deposited. That substantial amount was a key element in granting the house arrest — a first in Switzerland for a detainee in an extradition case.
Polanski's two children — Elvis, 9, and Morgane, 16 — and his wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, have been staying in the chalet with him.
The Oscar-winning director of "Rosemary's Baby," "Chinatown" and "The Pianist" was arrested as he arrived in Zurich to receive a lifetime achievement award at a film festival.
Polanski was initially accused of raping the girl after plying her with champagne and a Quaalude pill during a 1977 modeling shoot. He was indicted on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs, child molestation and sodomy, but he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse.
In exchange, the judge agreed to drop the remaining charges and sent him to prison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation. The evaluator released Polanski after 42 days, but the judge said he was going to send him back to serve out the 90 days.
The filmmaker fled the U.S. on Feb. 1, 1978, the day he was to be formally sentenced. He has lived since then in France, which does not extradite its citizens.
Polanski has been getting help from his victim in the California case in a bid to have sex misconduct charges against him dismissed. The attorney for Samantha Geimer, who long ago publicly identified herself, argued earlier this month for an end to the case, saying she has repeatedly said she wants it dropped.
The California Second District Court of Appeal is being asked to decide if it should order a lower court to consider dismissing the case without Polanski's attendance in court.
Polanski claims that the U.S. judge and prosecutors acted improperly in his case.

Ideally, a sales tax is fair, has a high compliance rate, is difficult to avoid, is charged exactly once on any one item, and is simple to calculate and simple to collect. A conventional or retail sales tax attempts to achieve this by charging the tax only on the final end user, unlike a gross receipts tax levied on the intermediate business who purchases materials for production or ordinary operating expenses prior to delivering a service or product to the marketplace.

Most countries in the world have sales taxes or value-added taxes at all or several of the national, state, county or city government levels. Countries in western Europe, especially in Scandinavia have some of the world's highest valued-added taxes. Norway, Denmark and Sweden have the highest VATs at 25%, although reduced rates are used in some cases, as for groceries and newspaper.

Use Tax

NEW DELHI – Indian children are increasingly caught in the middle of fighting between the government and communist rebels in impoverished rural areas, with at least 42 schools attacked in the past year, a human rights group said Wednesday.
The rebels, who say they are inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, have been fighting for more than four decades in several states in central India, demanding land and jobs for agricultural laborers and the poor. But a spate of recent attacks has raised concern they are lashing out ahead of a planned government offensive aimed at routing them from their forest strongholds.
While the rebels frequently target police and government workers, schools are also often destroyed by rebels or occupied by police, jeopardizing the education of tens of thousands of India's most disadvantaged and marginalized children, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report.
"The Maoists say they are fighting for India's poor, but their attacks on schools deprive these children of the education they desperately need," said Bede Sheppard, author of the report. "At the same time, long-term police occupation of schools puts these children right in the midst of danger and trauma, keeps them from their classrooms, and frightens them away."
At least 30 schools have been attacked in the remote state of Jharkhand and 12 in Bihar since November 2008, although students do not appear to be targeted directly, the report found, focusing on two of the hardest-hit areas.
It said many of the attacks occurred over the past month — 14 in Jharkhand and two in Bihar.
The rebels have defended the attacks, which usually involve homemade bombs, saying they are only targeting schools being used by security forces, but the report found that unoccupied schools were attacked as well.
The reason for the rebel attacks appears to be that schools are often the only government buildings in areas where the movement is concentrated, according to the report.
"Moreover, undefended schools are a high-visibility, soft target — attacking them garners media attention and increases fear and intimidation among local communities," it said, calling the attacks a violation of international humanitarian law and Indian criminal law.
The Indian government declined to comment.
"The Home Ministry never comments on the reports of rights groups," ministry spokesman Onkar Kedia said.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently said left-wing extremism was perhaps the gravest internal security threat India faces.
More than 2,000 Indian security forces and civilians have been killed in communist rebel violence since 2005, according to the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.
Human Rights Watch also criticized police and paramilitary troops for using school buildings as part of their counterinsurgency efforts, saying the occupation often extends for longer terms than warranted. It cited two cases in which police remained in part of a school years after their own station was destroyed by rebels.
Reliable government figures for the number of occupied schools were not available.
The Indian government has announced plans to deploy more than 70,000 paramilitary and police forces in a spring offensive in the so-called "Red Corridor" that runs through the dense, mineral-rich forest belt from the Nepal border to the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
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Sharma reported from New Delhi and Gamel from Islamabad.

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On the Net:

Human Rights Watch report: http://www.hrw.org/en/node/86827

YANGON (Reuters) –
Myanmar's detained opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been insincere and dishonest in her offer to meet the country's military ruler and push for the lifting of Western sanctions, state media said on Wednesday.

Suu Kyi, who is held under house arrest, had tried to harm the government's image and her behavior had been "highly questionable", said a commentary carried in three state-run newspapers, which serve as mouthpieces for the reclusive regime.

The 64-year-old Nobel peace laureate asked to meet junta leader Senior General Than Shwe in a letter dated November 11, saying she wanted to work with his government in the interests of the country.

In a similar letter on September 25 she stated her desire to work with Western countries and the junta to bring about the lifting of sanctions, which critics say have been largely ineffective because of the regime's trade with China and India.

"Her letters suggest her dishonesty, and are designed to tarnish the image of the ruling government, putting all the blame on the government," said a commentary in the New Light of Myanmar.

This was the first response by the regime to Suu Kyi's requests and appeared to criticize the National League for Democracy (NLD) party leader for leaking one of the letters to the media.

"The two letters reflect her dishonesty. She should have approached the government in an honest way in order to work out the stalemate," it said.

Myanmar's military, which has ruled the country for almost 50 years and is shunned by the West because of its rights record, plans to hold multi-party elections in 2010 [ID:nBKK532864]).

In the last letter, Suu Kyi expressed thanks to the regime for allowing her to meet U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat to visit Myanmar in 14 years, in November.

Despite the criticism, on Wednesday Suu Kyi was allowed to meet a government minister assigned as a go-between for the regime, suggesting lines of communication were still open.

A Home Ministry official said she held talks for 50 minutes at a state guesthouse in Yangon with Labour Minister Aung Kyi, whom she has met twice since late September.

It is unlikely Suu Kyi will get to meet Than Shwe. The 76-year-old strongman has been head of the junta for 17 years and plans to retire after the elections, but only, analysts say, after he has installed a favorable replacement.

Suu Kyi, the daughter of late independence hero Aung San, is seen as the biggest threat to the junta's grip on power and has been under detention of some form for 14 of the past 20 years.

She is appealing against a conviction for breaching an internal security law by allowing an American intruder to stay for two nights at her lakeside home.

The verdict was widely seen as an attempt to keep her sidelined in the run-up to the former Burma's first election in two decades. The NLD scored a landslide victory in the 1990 election that the military refused to recognize. (Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Alan Raybould)