On September 26, Academy-award winning director Roman Polanski was arrested by Swiss authorities. A warrant had been pending against him since 1978, when he fled the United States after being charged with rape and pleading guilty to engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Now, film luminaries are leaping to his defense. Click through this TNR slideshow to see what they're saying.

Kabul, Afghanistan 

The spectacle of Afghanistan’s presidential elections seems to be finally entering its final act. Pulling out of the runoff race at the last minute, Abdullah Abdullah has cleared the way for Hamed Karzai to be the winner by default. 

Both men appear to have achieved many, if not all, of their original goals. Karzai, of course, has retained his seat for another five years. Abdullah, the underdog, has denied Karzai the much-needed legitimacy that a second round of voting was supposed to confer. Now the Afghan president will be serving under the cloud created by the massive fraud that characterized the first round of voting in August.

It was Halloween 2001, and Kennesaw State freshman Nick Ayers was sitting anxiously in an Atlanta airplane hangar. A friend had recommended him for a campaign position with Republican state senator Sonny Perdue, who was mounting a long-shot gubernatorial run against Democratic incumbent Roy Barnes. The portly, middle-aged politician disembarked his Bellanca Super Viking and, as Ayers recounts the story, walked down the stairs holding a lid-less cup of coffee. Eager to make a good first impression, the nervous blonde teenager extended his hand for a firm shake.

On July 25, Najibullah Zazi, a lanky man in his mid-twenties, walked into the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. The visit was captured on a store video camera. Wearing a baseball cap and pushing a shopping cart, Zazi appeared to be just another suburban guy.

Of course, not many suburban guys buy six bottles of Clairoxide hair bleach, as Zazi did on this shopping trip--or return a month later to buy a dozen bottles of "Ms. K Liquid," a peroxide-based product. Aware that these were hardly the typical purchases of a heavily bearded, dark-haired young man, Zazi--who was born in Afghanistan and spent part of his childhood in Pakistan before moving to the United States at the age of 14--kibitzed easily with the counter staff, joking that he had to buy such large quantities of hair products because he "had a lot of girlfriends."

I don't much like their Nation. And it, for that matter, doesn't like our nation. But, every so often, Calvin Trillin writes something that tells truth to his own.

What Whoopi Goldberg ('Not a Rape-Rape'), Harvey Weinstein ('So-Called Crime') et al. Are Saying in their Outrage Over the Arrest of Roman Polanski

On September 12, the United States government revoked the visas of de facto Honduran President Roberto Micheletti and 14 of the country’s Supreme Court justices. Days earlier, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S.-government body, voted to cut off $11 million in aid to the cash-strapped Central American country. The move came two months after the Honduran military, on the orders of its Congress, Supreme Court, and attorney general, removed Micheletti’s predecessor Manuel Zelaya from office following his repeated attempts to undermine the country’s constitutional provision limiting presidents to a single term. Explaining its decision to not recognize Honduras’s interim government, which it has repeatedly declared came to power via a "coup d’état," the Obama administration says that it is sending a "very strong message" to "anyone, be they civilian or military, who are thinking of deposing or removing from--illegally removing from office a duly elected president in any country."

Roman Polanski, the brilliant director of Chinatown, was arrested by Swiss authorities over the weekend; he might be extradited to the United States soon. Polanski fled America after concern that he would face serious prison time over the rape of a 13-year-old girl. Alas, one gets the nasty feeling that many of the people rushing to his defense are doing so simply because he is a great artist. This feeling is strengthened when his supporters...admit to as much!

In June, when four Uighur detainees at Guantánamo were released to Bermuda, the media’s portrayal of their story served as both distraction and palliative: Articles in many papers were written as though the United States had rescued members of an oppressed minority in China and delivered them to a tropical paradise. The New York Times wrote that the men “expressed wonder at their good fortune” and “basked in their new-found freedom,” while “smelling hibiscus flowers” and “marveling at the serene beauty.” Photographs accompanying the article showed the husky, bushy-bearded men strolling alongside azure waters, splashing in the waves, and licking double-scoop ice cream cones.

During his August 3 speech formally endorsing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned protesters that “by imitation of Ayatollah Khomeini, they cannot deceive people.” Khamenei was mocking the opposition’s claim to be to reviving “the values of Ayatollah Khomeini”--the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Khamenei’s predecessor as Supreme Leader. Ironically, Khamenei made this statement while seated below a large, framed picture of Khomeini.

The administration has not yet commented--and probably won't comment--on the news that the president of the Palestinian Authority, partner of the U.S. and Israel in peace processing, is today on a visit to Khartoum for talks with the president of Sudan. Omar al-Bashir has a warrant out for his head on charges of genocide. This indictment by the International Criminal Court has never bothered any other leaders of the Arab world. So why should it perturb Abbas? (But I want to be fair.

There is nothing glib to say, in any responsible sense, about Henry Louis Gates' arrest last week, which is this week's big race story. Its value is as an object lesson in why, with a black President, there remains a contingent convinced that America is still all about racism.

Gates' belligerence--"Why, because I'm a black man in America?"--may not have been pretty. However, tarring him as a professional racebaiter is inaccurate. One senses here a lazy analogy with his former Harvard Afro-American Studies department colleague Cornel West.

Earlier this spring, Nawaz Sharif threatened to topple Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari's government. Since taking power in September, Zardari had been promising to reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry, the chief justice of the supreme court, whom Pervez Musharraf had sacked on March 9, 2007. But Zardari, who feared that Chaudhry would try to either curb executive power or dredge up corruption cases, balked repeatedly. This annoyed Sharif--and many of his fellow countrymen--to no end.

Baghdad, Iraq In December 2007, the Alpha Company of the 4-64 Armor Battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division, arrived in the neighborhood of Saidiyah in southwest Baghdad. More than half of the onceupscale, religiously mixed neighborhood's 60,000 residents had fled to Jordan, Syria, or other parts of Iraq. Those who stayed rarely ventured out of their homes. Up until a few months earlier, human corpses had littered the street, where stray dogs feasted on them. The police were responsible for collecting the bodies and delivering them to the morgue, but they tended to shirk this duty because warring militias often booby-trapped the bodies.