Michele Bachman renounces her Swiss citizenship "to make it perfectly clear: I was born in America and I am a proud American citizen."

"I am, and always have been, 100% committed to our United States constitution and the United States of America."

Roman Polanski, free at last.

Switzerland has rejected extradition.

The 76-year-old French-Polish film director Roman Polanski will not be extradited to the USA. The freedom-restricting measures against him have been revoked. This announcement was made by Mrs Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, head of the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police (FDJP), in Berne on Monday. The reason for the decision lies in the fact that it was not possible to exclude with the necessary certainty a fault in the US extradition request, although the issue was thoroughly examined. Moreover, also the principles of State action deriving from international public order were taken into account.

What fault in the extradition request? What "principles of State action deriving from international public order"?

UPDATE: NYT reports:

[Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf] said the American authorities had rejected a request by her ministry for records of a hearing by the prosecutor in the case, Roger Gunson, in January 2010 which should have established whether the judge who tried the case in 1977 had assured Mr. Polanski that time he spent in a psychiatric unit would constitute the whole of the period of imprisonment he would serve.

“If this were the case, Roman Polanski would actually have already served his sentence and therefore both the proceedings on which the U.S. extradition request is founded and the request itself would have no foundation,” the Swiss Justice Ministry said in a statement.

"Swiss turn down lawyers-for-pets plan."

Now, there's a teaser/headline that confused me. I thought: What? Do you turn in your lawyer and get a pet in exchange?

But I clicked through — over at BBC.com — and saw that it was just about a proposed national system of government-funded lawyers who would provide legal representation to animals.

ADDED: It was just pointed out to me that I was confused the wrong way.  I should have thought that it was about handing in your pet and getting a lawyer. The expression "cash for clunkers" was used in the explanation of why I was wrong about being wrong. And somehow those 2 wrongs did not make a right.

Death in Switzerland.

Whenever you want:

Assisted suicide is also legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well as in the American states of Oregon, Washington, and Montana. But in all those places, the practice is restricted to people with incurable diseases, involves extensive medical testing and consultation with physicians, and requires that applicants be permanent residents. By contrast, Switzerland’s penal code was designed such that, without fear of prosecution, you can hand someone a loaded pistol and watch as he blows his brains out in your living room. And there is no residency requirement. There are only two conditions: that you have no self-interest in the victim’s death, and that he be of sound mind when he pulls the trigger.

The proposal to ban new minarets in Switzerland.

BBC reports:

Partial results from the poll which closed at 1100 GMT indicated that the German-speaking canton of Lucerne accepted the ban, while French-speaking cantons Geneva and Vaud voted against....

What is it about minarets specifically?

There are unofficial Muslim prayer rooms, and planning applications for new minarets are almost always refused.

The BBC could be clearer here. Is a Muslim place of worship "unofficial" if it lacks a minaret? Regulation of buildings can be neutral toward religion, and one can imagine a government regulation that happens to exclude the construction of minarets. But this is a case of targeting religion. (A ban like this in the United States would violate both the Free Exercise and the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.)

Supporters of a ban claim that allowing minarets would represent the growth of an ideology and a legal system - Sharia law - which are incompatible with Swiss democracy.

So it is not only discrimination against religion, it is a restriction of the sort of speech that is most valued in a democracy — criticism of the government. This argument, an attempt to excuse discrimination against religion, makes the ban worse, not better.

But others say...

One hardly needs to hear from the other side. The supporters make the argument against themselves.

... the referendum campaign has incited hatred. On Thursday the Geneva mosque was vandalised for the third time during the campaign....

The president of Zurich's Association of Muslim Organisations, Tamir Hadjipolu, told the BBC that if the ban was implemented, Switzerland's Muslim community would live in fear.

"This will cause major problems because during this campaign in the last two weeks different mosques were attacked, which we never experienced in 40 years in Switzerland.

"So with the campaign... the Islamaphobia has increased very intensively."

Now, this is the situation without the ban, so it's not obvious whether actually having the ban would make things worse or better. If the campaign for the ban is the problem, then Hadjipolu too is critical of free speech. Ironically, both the supporters and the opponents of the ban are afraid of free speech.

ADDED: Swiss feminists lead the fight against minarets, which they portray as "'male power symbols' and reminders of Islam’s oppression of women."

AND: Final results:

In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.

The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution.

Roman Polanski is now in custody for having sex with a 45-year-old woman.

He did that that 32 years ago, when she was 13. You would think that by now it would be — if not forgotten or even forgiven — at least irrelevant. He's avoided capture for so long as he's lolled about in Europe, collecting kudos, and he's gotten so old — 76 — that it seems as though the reprehensible crime only exists in the sealed-away past.

And now that another woman — a 61-year-old woman, who, when she was 21 (not as young as 13), murdered his long-ago wife and his never-born child — has died, that other world seems impossibly distant and deceased. His victimizer Susan Atkins is dead, and the woman he victimized, Samantha Geimer, has settled with him. It might be part of the secret settlement, but Geimer does not want the old criminal charges pursued.

Nonetheless, the Swiss police arrested Roman Polanski when he touched down in Zurich to pick up another prize. Why did that happen?

"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."

Oh! There is memory, and there is law, and you cannot rise above it, not by extreme suffering or extreme old age, not by great fame or great accomplishment, and not by profuse reconciliation with the victim.

Roman Polanski has been called to account at long last.

Suddenly, the Swiss are inundated with nudist hikers, many from Germany.

It's called "FKK" — "free body culture."

Can you imagine a bunch of Germans arriving in America, thinking it would be okay to traipse about in the nude?

IN THE COMMENTS: bill says:

They're not wearing shorts, so they should get Althouse points for that.

"People who use heroin, they have the image of losers. They have the image of... junkies."

It's not fashionable anymore to be a heroin addict, so why not dispense it, legally, at a clinic?

"One can cook really delicious things with [breast milk]. However, it always needs to be mixed with a bit of whipped cream..."

It's on the menu in Switzerland, thanks to a loophole in the law.

The food control authority in Switzerland was initially confused by the apparent loophole in local legislation regulating the use of human milk and it was not clear whether Mr Locher could actually be banned from serving his specialities.

"Humans as producers of milk are simply not envisaged in the legislation.

"They are not on the list of approved species such as cows and sheep, but they are also not on the list of the banned species such as apes and primates," Rolf Etter of the Zurich food control laboratory said.

As I say in the sidebar: I'm a law professor, and sometimes I write about law. To that I add: Sometimes I blog about breasts. And sometimes I blog about breasts and the law.

***

You know, Justice Scalia was just bitching about law school courses like "'Law and Poverty,' or other made-up stuff." I'd just like to point out that one could do a course called "Law and Breasts." There's this topic of whether a restaurant can serve breast milk, but there are all sorts of other things. I can easily find many things in my old blog posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

***

If you think the subject of food made with breast milk is funny -- or if you have any sense of humor at all -- you should buy Season 5 of "The Ricky Gervais Show" (the podcast). There's a bit where Ricky is thoroughly disgusted by a hippie woman who brings a housewarming gift of rice pudding and informs the recipient that she's made it with her breast milk.

"Still, my goal is to ski over to Switzerland today and I am told that this morning, Switzerland is closed."

Nina's weekend in Cervinia continues.

Protesting minarets.

In Switzerland.

After that embarrassing phone-in approach, Kerry leaves Switzerland...

... to come back to the Senate to continue his futile filibuster-fomenting.

"Judge Alito's confirmation would be an ideological coup on the Supreme Court."

So says Senator John Kerry, and I get the feeling -- because of the use of the word "on" -- that he means "coup" in the sense of "coup d'état" rather than simply a brilliantly executed strategem. Kerry, as reported at that first link, is lobbying Democrats to filibuster.

Sources close to Kerry, who lost to Bush in the 2004 race, told CNN that the senator was calling colleagues from Switzerland, where he was attending the World Economic Forum.....

The White House believes Alito's supporters have the 60 votes they need to block any filibuster, spokesman Steve Schmidt said, and suggested that Kerry's move was designed to buttress a possible 2008 presidential run.

It seems unlikely that there will be a filibuster, of course, as 3 Democrats have already said they'd vote for Alito and one has said she will oppose a filibuster. Only one more Democratic vote is needed to add to the 55 Republican votes to reach the 60 votes needed to close debate.

But isn't it nice to get a chance to think about Kerry again? I love the image of him phoning from Switzerland.

UPDATE: The NYT is saying Kerry is getting a "cool response." It must be quite cold, I'm thinking, given that the Times was hotly promoting the filibuster only yesterday. The hapless Kerry stepped up to that challenge and today must read:

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts could not attend the Senate debate on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Thursday. He was in Davos, Switzerland, mingling with international business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum.

But late Thursday afternoon, Mr. Kerry began calling fellow Democratic senators in a quixotic, last-minute effort for a filibuster to stop the nomination.

Democrats cringed and Republicans jeered at the awkwardness of his gesture, which almost no one in the Senate expects to succeed.

Ouch. Oh, but that's our Kerry: awkward. What? You don't find it endearing anymore?

IN THE COMMENTS: Dave points out that "coup" is a French word, and the French use "sur" with "coup," making "on" a natural choice for a French-speaking person like Kerry. I respond:

I thought "on" was a weird choice of preposition, but if the French use "sur," maybe that's why he said it. To me, as an English-speaker, it sounded awkward. And with the use of the passive voice, I'm left thinking WHO is delivering a blow to the Supreme Court? What I think he meant is that once Alito is there, an "ideological coup" will take place. That is, the institution of the Court will be illicitly taken over by a group of ideologues.

Oh! The pain! I'm having a flashback to the last election campaign, when I spent a bizarre amount of time parsing Kerry statements. The meaning would seem almost to be there, but as I reached out to try to grasp it, it would slip away in one direction or another, and we'd be down here in the comments debating what they hell he actually meant.

20 countries have offered Katrina aid.

It's reported here that offers of aid have come from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Russia, Japan, France, Germany, Britain, China, Jamaica, Honduras, Greece, Venezuela, the Organisation of American States, NATO, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, South Korea, Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

This, despite President Bush's statement:

"I'm not expecting much from foreign nations because we hadn't asked for it. I do expect a lot of sympathy and perhaps some will send cash dollars. But this country's going to rise up and take care of it."

Did you notice Venezuela on that list?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a vocal critic of the United States, offered to send cheap fuel, humanitarian aid and relief workers to the disaster area.

The State Department did not comment on Venezuela's offer but several officials smiled at the gesture from Mr Chavez, who yesterday called Mr Bush a "cowboy" who failed to manage the disaster.

Cuban President Fidel Castro, a close Chavez ally, led a minute of silence in remembrance of the victims of Katrina in parliament on today. The parliament then returned to normal business with a resolution attacking Mr Bush over the Iraq war.

"It's precisely because I respect all life that I did this."

The Boston Globe reports:

A Chinese artist who grafted the head of a human fetus onto the body of a bird has defended his work as art after a Swiss museum withdrew the piece from an exhibit.

"It's precisely because I respect all life that I did this," artist Xiao Yu said Tuesday. He said the bird and fetus "died because there was something wrong with them. ... I thought putting them together like this was a way for them to have another life."

Swiss museum visitor Adrien de Riedmatten, 29, filed a complaint on Monday with the district attorney of Bern, Switzerland, calling for an investigation into the piece, which was on display at the Bern Art Museum....

The work was removed, curator Bernhard Fibicher said Tuesday, because museum directors didn't want the controversy surrounding it to overshadow the rest of the "Mahjong" exhibit, which features avant-garde Chinese works from the last 25 years. The museum is planning an Aug. 22 symposium with artists, philosophers and ethics experts before deciding whether to re-exhibit the piece.

Xiao said he bought the head in 1999 for a few dollars from a man who was cleaning out a scientific exhibition hall. The glass bottle in which it came had a handwritten sticker identifying it as a female specimen from the 1960s. According to Xiao, it had no name or cause of death....

The name of the piece, "Ruan," is a word Xiao invented that combines the Chinese characters for different kinds of animals. Xiao said he added the eyes of a rabbit to the head.

Xiao is known for shocking material. He once paid an assistant $1,200 to sew pairs of living lab mice together at the hip and displayed them in glass bowls.

Well, I hope the the artists, philosophers and ethics experts can figure this one out. I wonder which of the three -- artists, philosophers or ethics experts -- will have the strongest objection and which will be most supportive of Xiao. And while you've got those artists, philosophers and ethics experts assembled, please ask them about the sewn-together mice.

Don't you understand art?

UPDATE: Creative taxidermy is more widespread than you may realize.

I can't believe this artist.

BBC reports:

An art work purportedly made from excess fat from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sold for $18,000 (£9,862).

Switzerland-based artist Gianni Motti claims to have bought the fat from a clinic where the leader had a liposuction operation performed....

"I came up with the idea of because soap is made of pig fat, and I thought how much more appropriate it would be if people washed their hands using a piece of Berlusconi," Motti told Welwoche magazine.

We're asked to think the artist thought this up entirely independently of the widely known film/book "Fight Club." What do you think that bar of soap in Brad's hand is?

Whoever bought the thing is a fool for buying conceptual art where the concept is already extremely well known from a previously existing art work.

Those poor celebrities.

The NYT has an amusing article today about celebrities attempting to manage their interaction with the world of politics. Some of them are just tired from too many parties, and some need help figuring what the right parties are.

"If you're going to the Oscars and trying to go to parties, you know what all the good ones are ... But here it's brand-new territory."

And some celebrities saved up the treasure of their endorsement for such a touchingly long time that we ought to really, really care when they finally bestow it on anti-Bush:

Bruce Springsteen is probably the biggest name to be recruited by the left this campaign season, having announced his participation in a series of anti-Bush fund-raising concerts. A fellow performer said that Mr. Springsteen told him recently that he had long felt like the "Switzerland of political endorsements.''



Mr. Traub said that getting Mr. Springsteen to attend an anti-Bush event in New York would be "like getting J. D. Salinger to come to a literary conference."

But we don't care, do we? Or does the near-unanimity of celebrity endorsement for anti-Bush create a deep-seated feeling that all the cool people are on the left?