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CANNES, France—Roman Polanski says the birth control pill has had a "masculinizing" effect on women and that the leveling of the sexes is "idiotic" The director made the comments Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, where he came to premiere "Venus in Fur," a film adapted from the David Ives play which stars Polanski's wife and toys with the subject of gender.

Polanski said the pill has "changed the place of women in our times" while talking to reporters. He further lamented that "offering flowers to a lady" has become "indecent."

The 79-year-old Polanski was famously convicted of having sex with a minor in a 1977 case. He was initially indicted on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs, child molesting and sodomy, but pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful sexual intercourse.

Polanski, whose past films include "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby," fled the United States after a Los Angeles judge threatened further sanctions.

He's restricted by an Interpol warrant in effect in 188 countries, but he moves freely between Switzerland and France. He was freed from Swiss house arrest in 2010 after the government refused to deport him to the United States.

Polanski's new film stars his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Mathieu Amalric as an actress and theater director rehearsing an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novella, "Venus in Furs." The film features Seigner as a strong, feminine actress who comes to dominate her director.

"Venus in Fur" is in competition for the Palme d'Or, Cannes' top honor, which is to be announced Sunday.

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A cyclist was stopped by police for not wearing "the right road bike clothing".

Tim Burton, 25, said he was pulled over in Keynsham on Wednesday for "not wearing Lycra".

He tweeted: "The PC said I wasn't dressed in appropriate gear to be riding my bike so had I stolen it?"

PC Keith James, from Avon and Somerset Police, said he stopped Mr Burton because it was "unusual to see an expensive bike being ridden by someone in non-cycling clothes."

Police said bike thefts were a priority in the area following a number of garage and shed robberies.

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E.W. Jackson, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Virginia, said it's important to note that his incendiary remarks on abortion were made before he entered the political arena.

After securing the GOP nomination last weekend, Jackson has drawn intense scrutiny for previous comments, like the time he said that "Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was."

But Jackson told The Daily Caller in a story published Friday that those comments must be taken in context and, moreover, they were made when he was holding an entirely different job. Those remarks were made, Jackson said in an email to The DC, in his "role as a minister, not as a candidate.”

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New driver quoted £33,000 for first insurance policy | AOL Cars UK
A newly qualified driver from Harehills, Leeds faced a setback on her road to freedom after being faced with a quote for £30,000 to insure her £400, 800cc Daewoo Matiz.

Kaljeet Bansal, 18, passed her driving test on the first attempt but met a brick wall when the cheapest car insurance quote came in at almost £20,000.

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The Ohio Liberty Council was initiated by members of local Tea Party groups, 912 groups, the Ohio Freedom Alliance, and the Campaign for Liberty in June 09. It was conceived as a way to get all liberty minded groups and individuals in Ohio connected and communicating on issues and activities. But more importantly we seek to create concerted action among all of these groups in Ohio. By working together we can be more successful and achieve real results to protect and promote liberty in Ohio.

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Three of the largest federal agencies will close to the public on Friday, the first time since the government shutdowns of the 1990s that large corners of the government have ceased operations on a weekday.

The mass furlough of 115,000 employees at the Internal Revenue Service, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Housing and Urban Development and the small Office of Management and Budget — 5 percent of the federal workforce — is happening because of the budget cuts known as sequestration.

Even in a government shutdown, thousands of essential employees are still called to work. In this case, the only ones in the office will be a small number of Senate-confirmed presidential appointees who are exempt from furloughs and emergency responders.

The closures, the first of several around summer holiday weekends and other days this fiscal year, were conceived as a way for furloughs to do the least damage to employees and the public. The Friday before Memorial Day is a vacation day for many, and the volume of calls for tax help, housing assistance or to report an environmental problem is relatively low, officials said.

“From a public service perspective, it means there will be no service,” said Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents some EPA workers as well as employees at the embattled IRS. (The agency is the focus of congressional hearings for its targeting of conservative groups seeking tax exempt status.)

Service at the agencies will be limited Friday.

Some Web-based tools and phone-based automated services will continue to function for taxpayers. At the housing agency, hotlines at the Federal Housing Administration and at a program for low-income families called HOPE will be open because they are run by contractors. HUD officials cautioned, though, that those staffs will have limited authority to answer questions and resolve problems.

But homeowners looking for housing counseling and developers and local governments with technical issues or questions about pending projects will have to wait until next week, officials said.

The EPA will still respond to environmental emergencies but will be “unable to perform core functions” like site inspections and some criminal investigations, spokeswoman Alisha Johnson said in a statement.

And close to 400 taxpayer assistance centers across the country will be closed, as will the IRS’s toll-free hotlines and Taxpayer Advocate Service. No tax returns will be processed, and there will be no enforcement. But tax-payment deadlines will not be pushed back.

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Dear colleagues,

The recent news about the FBI’s seizure of the phone and email records of Fox News employees, including James Rosen, calls into question whether the federal government is meeting its constitutional obligation to preserve and protect a free press in the United States. We reject the government's efforts to criminalize the pursuit of investigative journalism and falsely characterize a Fox News reporter to a Federal judge as a "co-conspirator" in a crime. I know how concerned you are because so many of you have asked me: why should the government make me afraid to use a work phone or email account to gather news or even call a friend or family member? Well, they shouldn’t have done it. The administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News and its employees will not succeed and their excuses will stand neither the test of law, the test of decency, nor the test of time. We will not allow a climate of press intimidation, unseen since the McCarthy era, to frighten any of us away from the truth.

I am proud of your tireless effort to report the news over the last 17 years. I stand with you, I support you and I thank you for your reporting with courageous optimism. Too many Americans fought and died to protect our unique American right of press freedom. We can’t and we won’t forget that. To be an American journalist is not only a great responsibility, but also a great honor. To be a Fox journalist is a high honor, not a high crime. Even this memo of support will cause some to demonize us and try to find irrelevant things to cause us to waver. We will not waver.

As Fox News employees, we sometimes are forced to stand alone, but even then when we know we are reporting what is true and what is right, we stand proud and fearless. Thank you for your hard work and all your efforts.

Sincerely,

Roger Ailes

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WASHINGTON — Lois Lerner, the head of the Internal Revenue Service’s division on tax-exempt organizations, was put on administrative leave Thursday, a day after she invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to testify before a House committee investigating her division’s targeting of conservative groups.

Lawmakers from both parties said Thursday that senior I.R.S. officials had requested Ms. Lerner’s resignation but that she refused, forcing them to put her on leave instead. Whether her suspension will lead to dismissal was unclear, given Civil Service rules that govern federal employment.

“The I.R.S. owes it to taxpayers to resolve her situation quickly,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. “She shouldn’t be in limbo indefinitely on the taxpayers’ dime.”

The move to put Ms. Lerner on leave came minutes after Senators Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, released a letter to the new acting I.R.S. commissioner, Daniel I. Werfel, demanding her immediate suspension for what they said was her failure to disclose information to their Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

“Given the serious failure by Ms. Lerner to disclose to this subcommittee key information on topics that the subcommittee was investigating, we have lost confidence in her ability to fulfill her duties as director of exempt organizations at the I.R.S.,” wrote Mr. Levin and Mr. McCain.

If Ms. Lerner is dismissed, she will be the third senior I.R.S. official to lose his or her job in the scandal. The acting commissioner, Steven T. Miller, was dismissed, and Ms. Lerner’s supervisor, Joseph H. Grant, director of the tax-exempt and government entities division, is retiring.

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