Vancouver, Canada (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland’s Christoph Kunz won the gold medal Friday 19 March for the Men’s downhill at the 2010 Winter Paralympics in Vancouver, to add to the silver medal the 27-year-old from Bern won earlier in the week for the super-G event. Second place also went to the Swiss, thanks to Michael Brugger, 27, from Fribourg.
Links to other sites: TSR (Fre), Yahoo France
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – English Premier League football club Arsenal and Spanish Barcelona will face each other in the quarter-finals of the European Champions League. The draw was held at UEFA, the European Football head office in Nyon. French striker Thierry Henry, who is Arsenal’s highest-ever goalscorer, played for Arsenal when the two last met but he now plays for Barcelona.
The other games will feature Bayern Munich against Manchester United, an all French affair as Lyon play Bordeaux, while Inter Milan face a trip to play CSKA Moscow. The two favourites, Barcelona and Man United, cannot meet before the final in Madrid 22 May.
Swiss take cheese world championship first and second place, 2010 (photo: World Cheese Championship)
Madison, Wisconsin, USA (GenevaLunch) – Say “cheese” this week and the Swiss dairy industry will smile. Awards at the World Champion Cheese Contest in Wisconsin 18 March might provide a clue as to why the Swiss hold the world record for eating cheese. First and second place awards went to Swiss cheesemakers. Cheeses and butters from 20 countries participated in the bi-annual event, with 2,313 competitors’ products judged by an international team of 30 judges.
First place went to Cedric Fragniere, Emmi Kase AG in Kirchberg, Switzerland for his gruyère, with an overall score of 98.79.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss government will decide next Wednesday how to best withdraw its support for Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF), according to Le Temps newspaper, which says the decision has already been taken. The Wednesday meeting will review whether to pay CHF1 million in debts incurred by the forum or whether to let it sort out its own affairs, says journalist Stéphane Bussard in an article Friday 19 March. Bussard does not cite a source.
Walter Fust, who heads the non-profit foundation created in 2007, told Le Temps Thursday that he was not aware any such decision had been made.
Charges against Tribune de Geneve journalist dismissed by judge
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The legal case opened Thursday 18 March between Hannibal Qadaffi, son of Libya’s leader, and canton Geneva plus the Tribune de Genève newspaper. The judge quickly dismissed charges against a journalist working for the Tribune who had approved but not selected the article and photograph, the newspaper reports. But swissinfo reports that Hannibal Qadaffi, who has asked for damages of CHF100,000, said Thursday evening he is no longer interested in the money: he wants an international tribunal to acquit him. Qadaffi was interviewed by news agency AFP.
Head for the hills: Extreme World Championship in Verbier, balmy weather in the Alps, decent snow in Jura and an affordable new hut in Zermatt
This weekend we won't see fresh snow, but more green
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Temperatures are warming up nicely on the plain, but it remains cold enough in the mountains for skiers to find good snow. It’s not yet clear what conditions will be like for the Easter school holidays that start in a week, but for this weekend, the skiing is good if you stay above 2,000 metres.
If you’re still on the mountainside at 17:32 Saturday 20 March you can celebrate the first day of Spring there.
Snowpacks are weakening thanks to daytime sun radiation, says the Swiss national avalanche centre in its Friday 19 March bulletin, but avalanche danger is low to moderate.
Weather forecast, snow depth
The snow is disappearing in many areas, which the MeteoSwiss snow depth maps show.
Cern operations group leader Mike Lamont (foreground) and LHC engineer in charge Alick Macpherson in the Cern control centre 19 March
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Two 3.5 TeV proton beams successfully circulated in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at Cern for the first time Friday morning 19 March, shortly after 05:20, a key step in ramping up the LHC for 7 TeV collisions, whose data will be fed to a series of physics research projects around the world.
Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) says this is the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator.
Hillary Clinton, Geneva, March 2009
Update 16:12 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State and Sergey Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, have said after meeting in Moscow that the two countries are very close to an agreement on the Start talks. Clinton was in Moscow for a meeting of the Middle East Quartet.
The announcement by the pair comes just after the publication of a lengthy interview of Clinton by New Times, a Russian magazine, where she says the US and Russia are “close” to an agreement on reducing their arsenals of nuclear weapons. “I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to complete this agreement soon.”
Clinton and Lavrov agreed in Geneva in March 2009 to seek a new Start treaty by the end of 2009, and while both sides said in December that good progress had been made, the year-end goal was not achieved. Few details of the talks have escaped the total news blackout which both sides have respected.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The Swiss and Belorussian governments Thursday signed a bilateral agreement covering vacations offered to children who have grown up in the region affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. There have been a small number of cases in other countries where teenagers have refused to return home.
Bluefin tuna (photo, ©2010 WWF/Canon Manu San Felix)
[WWF video] Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Atlantic bluefin tuna’s last reasonable chance for survival as a species has taken a beating: its defenders have been defeated in a critical vote at a Cites meeting in Doha, Qatar. A clear majority of nations of the Cites pact of countries, which regulates trade in endangered species, voted 18 March against a ban on bluefin tuna fishing.
The Cites head office is based in Geneva.
Gland, Switzerland-based World Wildlife Fund for Nature, which has campaigned for a ban to allow stocks to recover from over-fishing, says 72 countries in Cites voted against the ban, while 43 voted for it and 14 abstained.
Opening ceremony at BaselWorld (image, BaselWorld 2010)
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The world’s largest watch and jewelry fair opened Thursday 18 March in Basel. BaselWorld began on an upbeat note, with export figures released by the Swiss federal government the previous day showing watch exports in February alone rising 9 percent. The fair is fully booked, according to its managing director, Sylvie Ritter, with 1,915 exhibiting companies and nearly 100,000 international buyers.
And while BaselWorld to many equals watches, the jewelry business is in fact nearly as large, with watches taking up 62 percent of the exhibit space, jewelry 24 percent and related products the rest. The fair has 759 jewelry exhibitors and 592 watch exhibitors, from 45 countries.
BaselWorld runs to 25 March.
- Opening times: 09:00-18:00 (Thursday 25 March to 16:00).
- Tickets: CHF60 for the day
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A Nigerian man who was being sent back to Nigeria on a special repatriation flight died at Zurich Airport Wednesday night 17 March, under circumstances that the police and federal authorities have not made clear. An investigation into his death has been opened and Bern announced Thursday that all such special flights are cancelled until further notice.
Details about whether the man was an asylum-seeker or not have not been released, but asylum-seekers whose requests are turned down are returned on “special” flights, as are people without papers who are arrested for serious crimes.
Swiss news agency ATS reports that the man, 29, was arrested for drug trafficking and that he had been on a hunger strike.
Producing Swiss Emmental cheese (image, Swiss Cheese Marketing)
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss are the world leaders in eating cheese and for 2009 the country set a new record for per person consumption, 21.4 kg. New 2009 figures from the Swissmilk show that in economically tight times the Swiss ate more, not less cheese, with consumption rising by 240g per person. The preference is for fresh, medium-hard cheeses.
Swiss cheese consumption 2009 (table, Swissmilk - click on image to view larger)
Those numbers are not as reassuring as the Swissmilk, the national milk farmers’ federation would like because foreign cheeses accounted for the increase, with Switzerland consuming 310g more of imported cheese, per person, and 70g less of Swiss cheese.
Appenzeller was the big loser, with consumption falling 10.5 percent, and Emmental was the big winner, up 7.5 percent. Switzerland Cheese Marketing will lead a country-wide publicity campaign to push the quality of Swiss cheese to consumers, starting in May 2010.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss exports were up 3.3 percent in nominal terms (-0.6 in real terms) in February, to CHF13.9 billion, and for the first time since 2008 they rose for most business sectors. Imports slipped and trade for the first two months of 2010 shows opposite trends, with exports up 1.3 percent but imports down by 2.4 percent. The balance of trade at the end of February was positive, at CHF1.3 billion.
Christophe Kunz, front right, first member of the Swiss Paralympics team to win a 2010 Vancouver medal (image: Swiss Paralympics, Facebook)
Vancouver, Canada (GenevaLunch) - Swiss skier Christoph Kunz, 27, has won Switzerland’s first medal at the 2010 Vancouver Paralympic Games, taking silver in the Men’s giant slalom sitting event. The race was run in rain with heavy fog and Kunz finished with a time of 2:40.35, behind Germany’s Martin Braxenthaler, who won in 2:37.40.
Kunz is a seven-time Swiss champion and, according to swissinfo, he is a favourite for the upcoming downhill and super-G events.
Kunz, who is from Bern and who works in banking, participates in all five Men’s Alpine skiing events, using a mono-ski with sled seat. He lost the use of both legs in a motorcycle accident seven years ago.
Switzerland won 11 medals at the Beijing 2008 Summer Paralympic Games.
Links to other sites: Swiss Paralympic Committee, Swiss Paralympics Facebook page
Image March 2010 ©Rando, Bern Bear Park
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Bern Zoo’s first baby bears in nearly 20 years have been spotted outdoors in recent days.
The bears, Urs and Berna, are putting on 70 gr a day, reports the zoo, while the world speculates on whether they are male or female.
The zoo’s webcams normally allow a relatively good view of the bears’ activities, but mother Bjoerk’s den has a dirty window, making the images unclear
The zoo says it isn’t yet possible to go in and clean the window. Webcam viewers will have to be patient. Meanwhile the video on Berner Zeitung’s site, showing mother bear trying to line up her cubs to face the photographers, is a good substitute.
Image March 2010 ©Rando, Bern Bear Park
Image March 2010 ©Rando, Bern Bear Park
Background, GenevaLunch
Links to other sites: Bern tourism office, Bear Park
Video, 7 min: Berner Zeitung newspaper, with mother Bjoerk and cubs by Christian Lierchti.
Click on images to view larger
EPFL joins the fight against tuberculosis
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Testing new therapies in the fight to eradicate tuberculosis is high on the list of work that will be done at a new laboratory in Lausanne that specializes in air-borne pathogens. EPFL, the Swiss federal polytechnic institute in Lausanne, inaugurated the laboratory Wednesday 17 March. It is financed by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and the Swiss government and is open to researchers from EPFL and nearby universities.
The laboratory will study in vivo strains of Bacillus anthracis, the air-borne pathogen that causes tuberculosis, a disease that has thousands of new victims a year, including 500 new cases annually in Switzerland alone. The teams will be led by EPFL professors Stewart Cole, who is head of the EPFL Global Health Institute, and John McKinney.
Cole points out that the problem is not, as people often believe, limited to developing countries. “In Département 93 in France and in certain neighbourhoods in London the rate of tuberculosis disease is as high as in sub-Saharan Africa.And it is in Eastern Europe where the most virulent and antibiotic-resistant strains are found. Seventy percent of the patients do not survive if they don’t receive effective treatment, he says.
The researchers will work on strains used around the world, which are less aggressive than those found in nature, or even in hospitals, according to Cole.
US President Barack Obama at his inauguration
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – US Democrats Abroad are launching a Get Out the Vote campaign worldwide to encourage Americans to register to vote early enough to participate in the November 2010 congressional elections. The group manages a web site, www.votefromabroad.org, where voters can order absentee ballots, and which offers them voter information.
Democrats Abroad is the official overseas branch of the US Democratic Party and has members in more than 160 countries. It is keen to get Americans abroad voting in the hope of holding onto a strong Democratic majority. There are 435 House elections and 36 Senate elections in November.
”Just over a year ago, we saw history being made before our eyes,” says Christine Schon Marques, the Geneva-based president of Democrats Abroad.
Swiss newspaper says canton condemning it without justice taking its course
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – Canton Geneva late Wednesday at a press conference confirmed through its lawyer that it is ready to pay a fair sum to Hannibal Qadaffi, compensating him for moral damage because a state employee appears to have been involved in leaking a police mug shot of him to the Tribune de Genève. The state noted that the action was “deplorable” and completely unacceptable, and that it will also sanction the employee, if the investigation into the leak makes it possible to determine who supplied the photo.
The state, in filing its “Memorandum” with the court hearing Qadaffi’s civil suit, filed against the canton and the newspaper in December 2009, asks the court to determine how much of the sum should be borne by Geneva and how much by the newspaper. But Tribune editor-in-chief Pierre Ruetschi Wednesday noon wrote a scathing comment on the papers the canton filed with the court.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland has been named Europe’s most innovative country by the European Union’s Commission for Enterprise, in its latest European Innovation Scoreboard, published 17 March. Switzerland was bumped up from second place, which it achieved in the 2007 rankings, with good growth in the several areas that are measured by the scoreboard. A key factor in its 1.5 percent growth rate was the rapid growth in 2009 of venture capital.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss media and Muslim leaders have been mixed in their reaction to the announcement over the weekend by one Muslim cleric that he wants to see Switzerland have a federal solution to burials that requires every canton to have its own Muslim cemetery.
Farhad Afshar, president of the Coordination of Islamic Organisations in Switzerland, told newspaper Sonntag that he is planning a legal case to protect freedom of religion, that would ensure each canton has a Muslim cemetery.
The issue is not new: in 1998 Switzerland had no Muslim cemeteries and 2.2 percent of the population was Muslim, but negotiations began in several cities and towns after the issue was raised in the early 1990s. The Muslim population has grown to about 5 percent of the total Swiss population (estimated at 400,000 out of 7.7 million), and Switzerland now has nine communes with Muslim cemeteries. Geneva created one in 2007. (Ed. note: unofficial figures)
Wine and beer now allowed on radio, TV
More ads, different spots - and a drop of wine on Swiss TV, radio
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Ofcom, the Swiss federal communications supervisor, will issue directives during the summer of 2010 for more advertising space and time on radio and television. The new regulations will bring Switzerland into line with European neighbours, who have more advertising time, in order not to create a disadvantage, in particular for Swiss public TV and radio.
Indian Wells, California, USA (GenevaLunch) – Roger Federer won’t be starring at Indian Wells this year, after a defeat, 5-7 7-5 7-6 (7/4), at the hands of Marcos Baghdatis of Cyprus in the third round of the Indian Wells Masters 1000 tournament.
Scot Andy Murray beat US player Michael Russell 6-3, 7-5 to move on in the tournament.
Links to other sites: AFP/Sydney Morning Herald, Lawn Tennis Association
Update 12:35 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) has criticized the impact on wildlife of construction projects for the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. The cumulative impact, in particular, of several projects around the Black Sea resort are not being addressed, says Unep in a new report that was requested by the Russian government. The report follows a late January visit to the site by a Unep team.
It is not too late for the Games to serve as an environmental showcase, however, says Unep, which praises the Russian Railway, Ministry of Natural Resources and the 2014 Sochi Games organizers for being open to discussions.
Coffee at the Hotel Richmond, Geneva
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Uganda is starting a planting programme for wilt-free coffee strains. Wilt, a fungus, has killed half of the country’s robusta variety coffee plants in 20 years. Uganda is Africa’s second largest coffee producer, after Ethiopia, but the largest producer of robusta, which accounts for 85 percent of its coffee exports. The new disease-free strain was developed by Uganda’s Coffee Research Institute and gardens will be planted with the new strain this year, Uganda-based Emma Joynson-Hicks of Cafe Africa told Bloomberg.
Cafe Africa was started in Nyon in 2006 by John Schluter, a retired Ugandan coffee grower, to reduce poverty in Africa by helping the continent restore its coffee industry to 1975 levels, when it was a major player in the world coffee business.
Robusta is often mixed with Arabica, particularly in France and Italy, to add strength to coffee.
