Angelina Jolie, UNHCR ambassador, meets with villagers hit by Pakistan floods, 7 September 2010 (photo: ©2010 UNHCR / J Tanner)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Celebrity actress Angelina Jolie is making a strong appeal to the public not to forget about Pakistan’s millions of flood victims as the waters recede.
She is touring the country, for the fourth time since 2001, in her role as a UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) goodwill ambassador.
“It’s clear this crisis is far from over,” says Jolie. “People have lost everything: their homes, their belongings, their crops and cattle, and their livelihoods. Long after the cameras have gone, people will be struggling to rebuild their lives.”
Angelina Jolie, UNHCR ambassador, visiting KandaroII Camp in Nowshera, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, 7 September 2010 (photo: ©2010 UNHCR / J Tanner)
Tuesday September 7 she met people who had been directly affected by the floods. She visited Mohib Banda, where some 70 per cent of the homes were destroyed or badly damaged by the swirling waters.”
“There was a small stream outside the broken homes. It was full of a mix of faeces, flies, old shoes and old clothes that had been recently washed into the water,” she noted.
International sports, tennis
Flushing Meadows, New York, USA (GenevaLunch) – Roger Federer has made it past his first hurdle in the US Open, defeating Brian Dabul from Argentina 6-1 6-4 6-2 in a night match. But it wasn’t his overall win that captured the crowd so much as his third set winning shot, between the legs. The Swiss player told reporters afterwards that “I’ve only hit a few in my life. To do it twice at the US Open centre court… it’s amazing to share this moment with you guys.”
Links to other sites: BBC, Guardian, US Open
Video
Get your game ready for the best of the best at a University level.
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Link out: http://www.wucc2010.ch/
Start date: 4 Sep 2010
End date: 12 Sep 2010
Lausanne triathlon 2009 (photo: ©2009, Lausanne Triathlon, V Cardoso)
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – Traffic in the Lausanne area will be rerouted in several places Sunday 22 August, due to the Triathlon, most of which takes place in the area around the lakefront. Traffic will be affected, but to a lesser extent Saturday.
The world championship sprint and team events will be joined by the Lausanne popular triathlon, with several thousand people expected.
A small detail provided by the organizers, with swimming as one part of the event: the lake temperature is 20C.
The Belgique and Ouchy quais have been closed to traffic from the Haldimand tower and the Place du Port since Wednesday morning; they will remain closed until the evening of 24 August for the events and dismantling afterwards.
During the two days of the event, access to the Mövenpick hotel and the Ouchy parking area will be via Avenue de la Harpe. Hotels at the Place du Port and the Beau-Rivage can be reached via the chemin de Beau-Rivage.
Areas where the races are run will have limited access:
Saturday, 07:00-13:00, sprint world championship
pl. Général Guisan, pl. du Port, pl. de la Navigation, av. de Rhodanie (to the bottom of av. des Bains), av. d’Ouchy (to the Croix d’Ouchy intersection), av. de l’Elysée, av. du Denantou, Tour Haldimand, quais d’Ouchy and Belgique.
13:00-19:00, popular triathlon
pl. Général Guisan, pl. du Port, av. d’Ouchy (Croix d’Ouchy), av. de l’Elysée, av. du Denantou, Tour Haldimand, quais d’Ouchy and Belgique.
From 13:00, drivers will be able to enter the Ouchy area normally except for the quais.
Sunday, 06:00-14:00, popular triathlon
pl. Général Guisan, pl. du Port, av. d’Ouchy (Croix-d’Ouchy), av. de Cour, av. de Milan, av. de la Dent d’Oche, Mont-d’Or roundabout, av. Marc Dufour, av. du Belvédère, av. de Provence, Vallée de la Jeunesse, av. Pierre de Coubertin, av. de Rhodanie, pl. de la Navigation, av. d’Ouchy (lower), av. de l’Elysée, av. du Denantou, Tour Haldimand, quais d’Ouchy and Belgique.
14:00-17:00, world championship, teams
pl. Général Guisan, pl. du Port, av. d’Ouchy (Croix d’Ouchy), av. de l’Elysée, av. du Denantou, Tour Haldimand, quais d’Ouchy and Belgique.
From 14:00, drivers will be able to enter the Ouchy area normally except for the quais.
Note that special parking rules and areas will be in effect during the weekend.
Particle tracks fly out from the heart of Cern's Alice experiment from one the first LHC collisions at a total energy of 7 TeV
Update 27 July Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – Cern’s LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is starring at ICHEP, the world’s largest international conference on particle physics, which opens in Paris Monday 26 July. More than 1,00o scientists are attending.
Four spokespersons for the LHC’s four main experiments, Alice, Atlas, CMS and LHCb, are presenting data at the conference today.
The data is measurements from the first three months of successful LHC operation at 3.5 TeV per beam, an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.
The measurements to date are for “the particles that lie at the heart of the Standard Model, the package that contains current understanding of the particles of matter and the forces that act between them,” Cern notes in a press release.
“This is an essential step before moving on to make discoveries. Among the billions of collisions already recorded are some that contain ‘candidates’ for the top quark, for the first time at a European laboratory.”
Final score: Spain 1, The Netherlands 0
International sports, World Cup football
Johannesburg, South Africa (GenevaLunch) - The game is over, except in the hearts of fans, who will continue to turn over every move and every decision by the referee, for days to come.
The big one has been decided: Spain beat The Netherlands 1-0 with a goal in the final minute to take the 2010 World Cup football title. It was a game between two evenly matched teams, but where yellow cards and bad tempers ruled the day. The match remained scoreless until 117 minutes into the game.
Nelson Mandela was another real winner: the former South African president rode around the stadium in a small vehicle for the closing ceremony, winning the hearts of the crowd.
In Geneva, Festifoot, organizers of the city’s official World Cup festival, announced Sunday that 250,000 football fans took advantage of the outdoor screen – at the Esplanade des Vernets – during the past four weeks.
Read GenevaLunch’s recap of the 2010 World Cup.
Links to other sites: BBC, El Pais (Spa), Guardian, Le Matin (Fre), TSR (Fre), Xinhua
Usain Bolt in Lausanne, at IMD
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – The crowd is packing out the Pontaise stadium in Lausanne on a warm and sunny Thursday evening, 8 July, with the temperature just over 30C. The athletes are warming up for the third Diamond League athletics event of the 2010 season. There are plenty of big name athletes here, but one of them, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt, dwarfs the rest, just as the man himself is a physical giant in most crowds.
Bolt stands out for another reason in the hours and minutes before the race begins: the charismatic Olympic champion prefers to warm up by relaxing, joking, “messin’ around.” His success has encouraged other athletes to believe it makes sense to relax more and to take time to talk to each other. His agent, Norman Pearts, says that eight years ago, the athletes were all in their corners, wound tightly, with no one speaking. Today, he says in amazement, you sometimes see small groups of them doing relaxation moves to shake out the nerves. Thank you, Mr Bolt, for helping that come about.
Bolt charmed a crowd of nearly 400 business and sports fans Tuesday evening , when he fielded questions from a professor at IMD business school, a sports psychologist and after 45 minutes, from the crowd. The theme was how to sustain success, a topic some might say the athlete, who turns 24 in September, isn’t yet old enough to know much about. But he won the crowd over with his clear views on running, winning, and life in general. It’s clear that two world records and an Olympics title don’t unnerve him or worry him.
Sports psychologist Mattia Piffaretti asked Bolt why, when other athletes try to isolate themselves before a race as part of their relaxation strategy, he does the opposite.
“If you think, I got to get this right or that right, you start over-thinking,” says Bolt. In the call room during the 20 minutes or so before a race, a space where even coaches and agents are not allowed to go and the tension is palpable, he prefers to joke and sing songs.
“Eleven months of training just goes if you’re not mentally fit,” he says. “One of my strengths is that I’m always focused. When I go out there I just try to relax and I don’t worry too much. I already know in my mind what I got to do.” It’s like a test at school, “where you already learned it.”
Taking a relaxed approach and relying on his training to come through at the right time lets him enjoy the crowd, and Bolt says that’s one of the reasons he races. “I like the energy of the crowd. For me, I look at it as a performance, not just a competition.” He loves the tracks in Lausanne and Zurich, he says, with their gentler corners that are easier on his long back. But he also loves the Swiss cities’ crowds.
His agent, Norman Peart, says we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking this means Bolt isn’t competitive, far from it. “He’s just naturally really competitive. Any game we play, he just has to win. He can’t be a spectator.” Bolt laughs and agrees. “I watch my friends racing and I think, I want to be out there. I want to be running.”
He’s been forced to be a spectator in recent weeks, taking time off due to an Achilles tendon injury. The Lausanne race is his first time back on the track.
He comes back to the importance of training, saying that “It’s really hard, but if you want to be the best, you have to do it. Maybe you’re watching TV, it’s late, and you don’t want to do 50 pushups! But you do it.”
He doesn’t believe he’s unbeatable, but he says training helps him to know he’s good, and then he reminds himself that he can be beaten, so the fear of losing doesn’t cripple him.
John Weeks, professor at IMD who was part of the team asking questions, noted after the event that Bolt offers all of us an important lesson on “identifying your strengths and building them, not your weaknesses.”
“I want to be a legend,” Bolt says matter-of-factly.
What comes across is not so much ego as a sense that the world needs legends, that kids and adults alike need someone to inspire them to do their best. Little kids are always telling him they want to be like him, “and I say hey, you don’t have to be like me!” Be you, he encourages them, but your best possible you.
“You always have to listen to everybody, even little kids, because maybe there’s something you can learn from them. You got to tell yourself you can be beaten.”
And when it’s time to run, “Then you just do it.”
Life off the track
Bolt also talked about the importance of his family, saying he learned discipline and respect from his parents, and the importance of always giving back. He answered questions about his diet with a hearty laugh, saying he eats what he wants. His coach tried to get him to follow a diet but that lasted about three weeks and now, if he wants a Burger King, he gets one. Religion? It’s there, a little more so after a car crash in 2009 made him reflect on why he was lucky enough to escape unscathed.
Usain Bolt’s charity run in Nyon
Sponsor Hublot donated $100,000 to Usain Bolt’s recently created foundation to help educate children, when 10 children each outran Bolt during a mini-race at the Hublot head office in Nyon Tuesday 6 July.
Links to other sites:
Athletissima, IMD video interview with Usain Bolt (YouTube), IAAF on Bolt’s Lausanne race
The IMF (International Monetary Fund), in a regularly scheduled report on the state of the global economy, warned Thursday 8 July that there is a growing risk of the global recovery slowing down due to turmoil in financial markets. The warning came as the IMF nevertheless raised its forecast for growth in 2010 from 4.2 to 4.26 percent.
Links to other sites: Bloomberg, Financial Times, IMF World Economic Outlook reports
Swiss wages up
Neuchatel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – Collective labour agreements for companies with 1,500 employees or more will see an increase in real wages of 0.7 percent for 2010, a lower hike than in the past five years.
Of the total, 0.3 percent is to be awarded collectively and 0.4 percent individually.
Minimum wages for the companies will also rise by 0.7 percent. The negotiations involved nearly one million workers.
Switzerland's favourite brand in 2010
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Migros has just moved up three places to take the top slot as Switzerland’s number one brand for the first time, according to Young & Rubicam’s “BrandAsset Valuator” 2010. The consulting agency, an arm of the advertising agency of the same name, surveyed 1,100 Swiss people who gave the Migros brand points for repesenting “Swissness” and traditional values. The supermarket chain which has a series of linked brands, such as Migrol for petrol sales, says its M-Budget label performed particularly well in the survey.
The BAV’s top 20 list includes names known well outside Switzerland, such as Coca-Cola and Google.
Americans wondering what their tax returns should look like can take heart from the model return for 2010 filed by their president, Barack Obama, and his wif Michelle.
Few will be able to declare a $1,600 dog as a gift, the case for the Obama’s Bo, from Senator Ted Kennedy shortly before his death. And none will be able to claim something comparable to the $1 million he received for the Nobel Peace Prize, then gave away to charity. But many will be relieved to see how generous is the spread allowed when declaring other assets: a gift of bank shares from the estate of his grandmother sold for between $250-500,000. He made a loss on those.
The couple’s safe investments such as Treasury bonds, were valued at somewhere between $2.2 and 7.5m.
The most interesting thing for your average US taxpayer might be that the Obamas paid $1.4 million in taxes, on a salary for the president of $400,000, showing that the American dream of earning more than your boss pays you is still worth pursuing.
Links to other sites: AP, BusinessInsider, the White House tax report
Tourism up strongly, unemployment down slightly, retail sales slip
Geneva continues to have highest jobless rate
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Swiss economic indicators this week are showing a mixed picture, with several federal statistics published Friday. Overnight stays rose by 5 percent overall and by 6 percent for foreign visitors in March, compared to March 2009, an increase of 153,000 stays for the month.
The good news continues with unemployment, which fell from 4.2 percent in March to 4.0 percent in April, representing 7,462 fewer people on the unemployment office books, but the figure is still 16 percent higher than a year earlier. Geneva and Vaud both saw an improvement, with Neuchatel showing one of the greatest drops, from 7 percent to 6.5, but all three continue to have higher rates than the rest of the country. Geneva’s rate, at 7.2 percent, remains the highest cantonal unemployment rate in Switzerland.
Less positive were figures for retail sales, down 0.9 percent for the month of March compared to February.
Adecco net profits more than doubled
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Better job conditions worldwide have helped Swiss staffing giant Adecco to net $73.5 million, (€57 million), in the first quarter of 2010. The net is more than double the €23m the company earned during the same period in 2009.
Job market growth in France and the United States, cost-cutting, restructuring efforts, and acquisitions in the US and the UK helped the increase.
The Miles Davis Hall programme now complete for MJF
Montreux, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Alternative rock, dark melodies and hard riffs are on the agenda for 3 July 2010 when The Dead Weather play at the Miles Davis Hall, completing its programme as part of the Montreux Jazz Festival.
Jack White (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs) and Alison Mosshart (The Kills) are joined by bassist Jack Lawrence (The Raconteurs) and guitarist Dean Fertita (Queens Of The Stone Age). The four will release an album in May.
Tickets for the concert go on sale Thursday 6 May at the FNAC, Ticket Counter and online at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
Latest fair to feel fallout from economic crisis but Geneva private jet fair numbers likely to be up
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Salon du Livre, Geneva’s annual bookfair at Palexpo, closed Sunday with numbers down from 2009: 98,000 while a year earlier the figure was 105,000. The fair is the latest to see lower numbers this year, as the economy gently recovers from the economic crisis. The Visions du Réel film festival in Nyon in mid-April also saw its numbers drop. TSR reports that booksellers were happy, however, with lower numbers overall but more people spending money while at the fair.
Consumers are still willing to spend their time dreaming and planning about vehicles, however: the Geneva Motor Show numbers held steady in March and Europe’s largest private jet fair, that runs from 4-6 May in Geneva, is expecting higher attendance than in 2009, some 12,000 people. Lake Geneva region hotels are heavily booked for the event.
Links to other sites (Fre): Tribune de Geneve, TSR and history of private jet fairs in Geneva
©2010 Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
2-17 July: complete programme now online and ticket sales start online 29 April at 10:00
Montreux, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Montreux Jazz Festival kicks off 1 July 2010, a day before the official opening of the 16-day concert series, with a special show by Vaud resident Phil Collins. Collins will take the audience back to the 1960s with his interpretations of memorable Motown hits.
Montreux then moves to Africa, in keeping with the South African mood set by the summer World Cup Football championship: a concert in tribute to Miriam Makeba, Angélique Kidjo with African stars will celebrate “Mama Africa” and Youssou N’Dour will end the evening with the Dakar-Kingston.
Big band and jazz lineup
The Auditorium Stravinski will host big bands of Pepe Lienhard and Roger Cicero 12 July. Herbie Hancock will play John Lennon’s biggest hits 16 July and Quincy Jones will present his Global Gumbo All-Stars, a group composed of young artists he discovered in Montreux.
Jazz is a Montreux must and this year features Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Brad Mehldau and Chick Corea’s Freedom Band.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - It’s the 40th anniversary of the entry into force of the World Intellectual Property Convention, as well as the 10th birthday of World Intellectual Property Day, and Wipo, the United Nations organization that oversees the convention, is celebrating with a new logo. The seven lines stand for the main areas covered by the convention:
literary, artistic and scientific works,
performances of performing artists, phonograms, and broadcasts,
inventions in all fields of human endeavor,
scientific discoveries,
industrial designs,
trademarks, service marks, and commercial names and designations,
protection against unfair competition, and all other rights resulting from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary or artistic fields.
Arvinis welcomes American wines for the wine fair’s 15th year
Wine fair offers easy way to discover Swiss wines
Napa Valley, California vineyards, October 2009 (click to view larger)
Morges, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Morges is offering a fine pair of anniversary bouquets starting Wednesday 14 April. The first tulips are opening at the lakeside park which is home to the annual Tulip Festival, and the popular wine fair Arvinis opens its doors. This is the 40th anniversary of the Tulip Festival, which runs from 2 April to 16 May, and the 15th anniversary of Arvinis, which is the largest wine fair in the Lake Geneva region. It offers visitors some 2,500 wines to sample during its six-day run.
Arvinis serves as a harbinger of spring, with wine villages throughout the country holding their open houses in the weeks that follow. The guest of honour for 2010 is the California Wine Institute.
Record profits at UBS
Update 13:30 Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss banking giant UBS has announced that pre-tax profits for the first quarter of 2010 will reach CHF2.5 billion. The statement was made ahead of its annual general meeting, which takes place takes place 14 April. Swiss media reports Monday indicate that the meeting Wednesday is likely to be a heated one.
This is its highest pre-tax profit since 2007.
Net client withdrawals from its wealth management units were down more than CHF15 billion from Q4 in 2009.
Institutional investors’ rep Ethos opposes remuneration and discharge agenda items
Two agenda items have prompted a group of investors led by Ethos to put up a fight at the annual general meeting Wednesday: the discharge of the board and executive committee members for 2007, 2008 and 2009 and the bank’s remuneration policy. Ethos is a UBS shareholder that represents a number of large Swiss institutional investors, notably several pension funds.
UBS announced its decision, in December, to clear the board and committee members from 2007-2009 of criminal wrongdoing, after internal and Finma (Swiss banking supervisory body) investigations into the bank’s losses and problems with the US tax office, the IRS.
Cambridge, the winners . . . (BBC TV coverage)
. . . and Oxford, the losers (BBC TV coverage)
The Thames, London (Geneva Lunch) - The 156th Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge ended in a surprise victory for the light blues of Cambridge. Cambridge have now won 80 to 75 for Oxford. Oxford won the previous two races and looked like they would make it three as they led by almost a boat length but the Cambridge boat clawed back and took the lead going into the last mile.
The teams are multi-national, including four Canadians, but the celebrity stars are two twins from Harvard, now rowing for Oxford.
The Winklevoss brothers, Cameron and Tyler, recently gained an estimated $65 million settlement from Facebook after they alleged that Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, had used their idea. The twins also represented the United States at the Beijing Olympics. They were not able to earn a victory for the dark blues in one of the oldest sporting contests in the world.
Links to other sites: BBC, which provided live coverage, The Times,Telegraph
Inside EPFL's Rolex Learning Center (photo©2010 Peter Brodbeck)
Architects Sejima and Nishizawa (photo 2010, Sanaa)
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The architects who designed the Rolex Learning Center at EPFL in Lausanne will be awarded the Pritzker Prize, widely considered the top prize in architecture, in May at Ellis Island in New York.
The news was announced Monday 29 March by the Hyatt Foundation in Los Angeles, California. The two will be awarded $100,000 in prize money.
Last year’s winner was Peter Zumthor of Switzerland.
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, partners in the architectural firm, Sanaa, were named by the jury “For architecture that is simultaneously delicate and powerful, precise and fluid, ingenious but not overly or overtly clever; for the creation of buildings that successfully interact with their contexts and the activities they contain, creating a sense of fullness and experiential richness; for a singular architectural language that springs from a collaborative process that is both unique and inspirational; for their notable completed buildings and the promise of new projects together.”
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.
Car-gazing, sailing on Lake Geneva or skiing this weekend: you choose
We’ll start with some photos, to help the choice
click on images to view larger
Iced-up boat in Versoix near Geneva, 10 March 2010 (photo Peter Brodbeck)
Geneva Motor Show 2010 (image: Mr Kio)
Jura near Geneva, 10 March 2010 (photo: Shirley Curran)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The sun is shining, slopes are gleaming, the ice around the edge of Lake Geneva is melting and the wind has finally died down after a week’s drubbing. Skiing beckons, all the more so with Swiss skier Carlo Janka putting in a spectacular performance in Germany Friday morning, winning the World Cup’s Crystal Globe for the most points all season.
Weather forecast
Pull out your skis, but keep the warm clothes, including that rarity in the Swiss Alps, thermal underwear, handy. Friday and Saturday mostly sunny with highs of 5C on the plain and 7C in canton Valais, -8C at 2,000 metres. Sunday sunny to partly cloudy, temperatures the same.
Good news once you’re off the slopes: it should warm up to 10C Tuesday and 15C Wednesday. Welcome March spring weather!
Alpine resorts
It’s the winding down season, but the slopes are in good shape with recent snow and cold weather keeping it powdery.
Events in Alpine resorts this weekend: Read more…
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - World media have been celebrating International Women’s Day for much of the week, with stories about the progress made by women in the past 100 years, particularly in politics and economically. But women are conspicuously small in numbers on Forbes latest list of the world’s rich. You have to move beyond the first 10 to find a woman, and most of those in the top 20 are from the same US family, the Waltons of Walmart fame. Birgit Rausing, whose money comes from Tetra Laval, is described by Forbes as “living quietly in Switzerland”. She is part of a very small group of wealthy women whose money has almost always been inherited, the magazine notes, while men who have made their fortunes do so in family businesses to a much smaller extent.
Vancouver, Canada (GenevaLunch) - The Swiss hockey team ended their Olympic adventure with another narrow defeat to the USA. They were one goal down going into the final few minutes but then conceded a second after taking off their goaltender while searching for an equalizer. The US team now enter the semi-finals.
Links to other sites: TSR (Fre), Vancouver 2010
Vancouver, BC, Canada (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland held its own against Canada in ice hockey 18 February in the Winter Games, giving Canada a 3-2 victory, but in a penalty shootout. The Canadians were widely expected to win easily: they have a strong young team, are skating on home territory and they were still bruised from their 2006 Winter Games loss to underdog Switzerland in Torino.
Background, Washington Post
Lindsey Vonn puts on fine show
Dominique Gisin's crash affected other skiers (photo: Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images)
Gold winner Lindsey Vonn (sstock photo: ©2009 US ski team)
Vancouver, BC, Canada (GenevaLunch) – American Lindsey Vonn took gold in the Women’s Downhill at Whistler mountain, in a race marked by her excellent performance, four crashes on the undulating course and wide gaps between skiers’ times. Vonn, with a time of 1:44.19, finished an impressive .056 ahead of fellow American Julia Mancuso, who won silver. The bronze medal went to Austrian Elisabeth Goergl, a full 1.46 behind Vonn. The best performance by a Swiss skier was Fabienne Suter’s. She came in nearly two seconds behind the winner, for fifth place, a remarkable performance considering that she came close to crashing and managed to right herself dramatically.
Racers appeared affected by the series of crashes that started with Swiss skier Dominique Gisin. Her spectacular wipeout left the crowd silent while they waited, then cheered when she sat up: she walked away from the course, in tears, but on her own.
BMW Oracle team walking out to the boat Sunday 14 February before the race they won, taking the 33rd America's Cup sailing title (photo: ©2010 Guilain Grenier/BMW Oracle)
Valencia, Spain (GenevaLunch) - BMW Oracle has taken the America’s Cup sailing title, winning the second race Sunday 14 February almost as clearly as it won the first race two days earlier. The American boat finished 5.26 minutes ahead of Alinghi: Oracle’s technology, with its massive rigid sail, was the real winner. The race was close during the first leg but BMW Oracle pulled ahead and the winner was never in doubt.
Links to other sites: Alinghi, America’s Cup, BMW Oracle
Swiss train on a winter Sunday evening: always busy
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland’s CFF rail company will raise prices by 6.4 percent overall 10 December 2010. The recently voted increase in value added tax (TVA) of 0.4 percent is included. The Public Transport Union announced the hikes Thursday 14 January. The amounts of some of the changes come as a surprise, but higher than normal increases have been predicted widely because a year ago the government insisted that increases for 2010 be put off because consumers were hurt by the weak economy.
The half-price CFF card, the most popular discount, will be increased from CHF150 a year to CHF165. It is the first increase for the card since 1993.
