LOS ANGELES TIMES:Roman Polanski’s decision to attend Zurich’s film festival this weekend was a major win for a minor event, but it turned into a bigger coup for Los Angeles County authorities who seized the opportunity to arrange the arrest — three decades in the making — of a Hollywood fugitive. When the 76-year-old Academy Award-winning director of films such as “Chinatown,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Pianist” arrived at the Zurich, Switzerland, airport Saturday night for a well-publicized appearance, Swiss officials armed with a U.S. arrest warrant took him into custody. The arrest touches off extradition proceedings that could return the filmmaker to the United States to face the child sex case he fled in 1978. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Polanski 32 years ago for the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl and has battled the director in the last year over his attempts to have the controversial case dismissed, initiated the arrest last week when it learned of his travel plans to Zurich. “It wasn’t any secret. It was on the Internet. They were selling tickets to it,” said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. She said prosecutors prepared a provisional warrant and sent it to U.S. Justice Department officials, who presented it to Swiss authorities. MORE

RELATED: Roman Polanski’s attorneys helped provoke his arrest by complaining to an appellate court this summer that Los Angeles County prosecutors had made no real effort to capture the filmmaker in his three decades as a fugitive, two law enforcement sources familiar with the case told The Times. The accusation that the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office was not serious about extraditing Polanski to facing sentencing in a child sex case he fled in 1978 was a minor point in two lengthy July court filings by the director’s attorneys. But the charge caught the attention of prosecutors, who had made several attempts to apprehend Polanski over the years. MORE

WASHINGTON POST: William Safire, 79, conservative political columnist and word maven, died today at a hospice in Rockville, Md., reportedly of pancreatic cancer. Mr. Safire, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1978, wrote a semi-weekly political column in the Times from 1973 to 2005, penning an erudite and opinionated series of articles, ultimately creating a body of work that he described as libertarian conservative. he said he “was hired to be a sore thumb” at the famously liberal newspaper. “It’s time to leave when you’re still hitting the long ball and have something else you want to do,” he told the Washington Post at the time, one of many baseball-related metaphors that popped up in his work. He was equally known for his On Language column, which he began writing in 1979, a delightful look at the origins of words and phrases and their proper usage that engaged readers from all over the U.S. He wrote it until two weeks ago. MORE

CP: Kari Ferrell lies. She has lied about having cancer. She has lied about booking for Golden Voice. It’s been reported that she called the Philadelphia Police Department to turn herself in. I don’t know where that story originated, but that’s a lie, too. How do I know? I’ve been setting her up for the last few weeks. I had her arrested. Here’s how…MORE

DEENEY: My name is Jeff Deeney, I’m also occasionally a contributor to the CP. I think the tone of this article is smug and self-congratulatory. I think this is a completely sensational story printed solely to attract page views, both with the newspaper’s hope of getting linked by more heavily trafficked media sites in NYC and for Sam to draw attention to his band. I think this piece is braindead, the lowest possible sort of article that seeks to capitalize both on the suffering this girl created and the suffering she will experience in prison. The clear expectation on the paper’s part that I as a reader would want to mindlessly join in the mobs cheering this girl’s frog march into incarceration is unfortunate, and I think is at odds with the paper’s historical stance on the prison system as a cruel and inhumane institution that is unfit for nonviolent offenders. I won’t even get into the clear gender bias involved, where all spurned boys everywhere are invited to high five over the cute chick who took advantage getting her just desserts. This is a seriously sad moment in Philly’s alternative press…MORE

PHILLY GRRL: With all due respect, sir, I fail to understand what is wrong with highlighting an original, dramatic story. It’s a Philly story. Why not correct the obvious inaccuracies in K.’s “confession”? Set the record straight. If Phawker or any other Philly mag/webzine/weekly/daily would’ve gotten hold of it, they would’ve done the same exact thing. [She’s right. — The Ed.] She didn’t turn herself in. (She’s certainly not helping matters what with her compulsive lying and all.) Sam did. That’s news. Sam’s a hero. He’s not a journalist. He’s not a professional writer…. but he did something commendable. Maybe he’s not proud of it, but I think honest citizens everywhere should be. I know I am. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: To be honest, we couldn’t give a shit about haven’t had the time to keep up with the the wacky exploits of the The Hipster Grifter, whose obligatory 15 minutes of Internet infamy came to an end Sunday with her arrest here in Philadelphia. But judging by your cards and letters, we can tell this is just the kind of meaningless story that brings meaning to your lives. And so we give you the arrest docket. May it serve you well.

TANGENTIALLY RELATED: Joey Sweeney Is The Dwight Shrute Of Philly Media

Today the PW mothership rolled out a cover story I wrote about Big City Philadelphia, a rapper now living in Northeast Philly who recently made a name for himself by taking down so-called “hipster rappers” in a song/video called “How To Rob an Industry Hipster.” Predictably, this prompted Joey “Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians” Sweeney to write a self-serving take down of the story on his increasingly-irrelevant, sinking ship, Philebrity. MORE

THE GRIFTERS: The Oranges

Yeah, this grifter stuff is all shits and giggles until somebody gets The Oranges. Brutal.