GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Malaria cases worldwide fell by 25 percent in the past decade and by 33 percent worldwide thanks to better prevention but threatened shortfalls in funding from governments could slow the fight against the disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports. Its World malaria report 2011, published 13 December, shows malaria rates falling in all parts of the world, but the disease is far from eradicated.
“In 2010, there were an estimated 216 million cases of malaria in 106 endemic countries and territories in the world. An estimated 81 percent percent of these cases and 91 percent of deaths occurred in the WHO African Region. Globally, 86 percent of the victims were children under 5 years of age.”
The disease is entirely preventable and treatable, notes the WHO, which makes the number of deaths from it, 655,000 in 2010, “disconcertingly high” even though it was 38,000 fewer than the year before.
AUSTRALIA – Child asylum-seekers in Australia may be victims of “child abuse,” said the Australian Medical Association, AMA, to a joint select committee looking into Australia’s detention network.
The AMA said it has “grave concerns for the mental welfare of child asylum-seekers and believes mandatory detention is akin to child abuse.”
According to the Association, asylum-seekers as young as nine, have attempted suicide while in Australian immigration lock-ups.
Currently there are 795 children in the detention network, including those in community placements, says The Australian newspaper. “Of these, 282 are unaccompanied, 688 are housed in mainland facilities and 107 are on Christmas Island,” the article says.
Links to: The Australian
Hiking near the Jungfraujoch (baby gets a backpack ride), August 2011
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – WWF, the environmental organization, and Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain, Migros, are joining forces to help children learn more about and appreciate the Swiss Alps. Mountainmania is a seven-week online quiz programme that kicks off 13 September, designed to teach children more about the Alps.
The two organizations are ready to hand out 50,000 diplomas to “mountain champions” who correctly complete the quiz.
“We need to take care of our Alps,” says WWF chief executive Hans-Peter Fricker. “We’ll only be able to do this if we instill a love for the mountains in children, starting as early as possible.”
Migros will be featuring its bio brands during this period, aiming to increase their sales by 10 percent during the seven weeks. The mountainmania albums that are sold will contribute CHF1 per album to WWF Alpine projects that include restoring areas of the Rhone and Rhine rivers to natural habitats for trout and beavers, and helping encourage the natural return of large carnivores to their Alpine habitats.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Vaud police say the 48-year-old man whose body was found in Begnins, not far from Nyon, Friday morning committed suicide, but the cause of death of his 39-year-old wife is not yet clear.
The Swiss couple were found in their apartment by someone who knew them about 09:00 Friday 9 September and police were called immediately. Those close to the situation and the two children of the couple, reportedly ages 4 and 7, were given counseling by police.
Police have ruled out the involvement of a third party in the deaths of the couple who, according to local media, had been living in Begnins for less than a year.
School is starting: watch out for little people crossing the road!
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Cantons Geneva and Vaud are back in school today, 29 August, and police are reminding motorists to slow down near schools.
School buses at Ecolint, the popular name for the campuses of the International School of Geneva, will start the year Thursday 1 September with a difference: the school has been working with EPFL in Lausanne to come up with the most efficient, environmentally-friendly system for its fleet of school buses in the two cantons.
“Our student population is increasing rapidly,” said Michel Chinal, responsible for the project shortly before his retirement in June. He noted that the rising number of parents picking up and dropping off their children is creating traffic problems in the village of Founex, just outside Geneva. The bus service offered by the school is too slow. The Founex campus, La Chataigneraie, will be adding nearly 300 students with its new primary school opening this week.
“Parents often say that they would like to sign their children up, but the bus ride is too long,” according to Chinal. The school transports nearly 300 students in an area bounded by Morges in Vaud, neighbouring France and Geneva.
The solution was to work with mathematicians in EPFL’s Discrete Optimization Group.
EPFL chemist Rainer Beck, whose child attends the school, offered to optimize the service and he asked his mathematical colleague Friedrich Eisenbrand to tackle the problem.
Eisenbrand notes that “coming up with a simple arithmetic algorithm is not difficult. But that’s not an efficient approach; due to the enormous number of possible itineraries, the calculations are painfully slow. We needed to develop an algorithm that quickly rejected most routes, so that the computation could be completed before the end of the Universe.”
Risenbrand and PhD student Adrian Bock came up with a solution for this complex problem. Using a few clever techniques, says EPFL, the calculations only take half a day to complete.
Grens, Vaud, near Nyon (Google map)
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – A huge and costly fire in Grens, Vaud Saturday 20 August, at 15:00, was set off by three children from a Jura family, playing with lighters and straw, say Vaud police.
The parents noticed that the fire originated in an area where their children, ages 8, 9 and 12, had been playing, and when the family discussed it the children admitted to finding a box of lighters at the festivities to inaugurate the “ultra-modern” barn that would have housed 160 animals next week.
They then played with the lighters and some of the straw in the barn, which housed more than 800 bales of hay and straw.
The children, who were attending the festivities with their parents, were interviewed by the police and the file is now in the hands of the Juvenile Police Department.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Health-minded parents have won: McDonalds in the US will be putting fewer french fries in children’s Happy Meals and adding an apple plus low-fat milk and chocolate milk as drink options. The company will introduce the new meals in September as part of a nutrition drive that includes providing calorie and nutrition information via iPhone and other apps.
The new menus will be 20 percent lower in calories; Happy Meals account for an estimated 10 percent of the company’s business in the US, according to Ad Age, which notes that “the announcement comes just weeks after the National Restaurant Association, in conjunction with Healthy Dining, launched a voluntary initiative by the restaurant industry to spur chains to offer and promote healthier kids-meal options. Chains such as Burger King and Chili’s jumped on board, but McDonald’s was noticeably missing from the list of participants.” The advertising industry newspaper says that McDonalds, under pressure from consumer groups to reduce or completely cut marketing to children, reduced its marketing for Happy Meals by almost 46% in the first quarter of 2011, compared to a year earlier.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – London has not seen a show like this for a while, excluding the recent royal wedding: more than £17.2m million raised in one night Thursday 9 June at a party for Absolute Return for Kids (ARK), a UK-based charity, whose founding chairman is Swiss-British-French financier and social celebrity Arpad Busson, who heads EIM in Nyon.
The money will go to a series of children’s health programmes, including retro-virus vaccinations in southern Africa, to reduce the high incidence of dangerous early childhood diarrhea.
The charity had been honoured the previous day with the UK’s top award for charity, the UK Charity Awards 2011, for its work in Bulgaria.
Children might be the reason for the glamorous party, but all eyes were on the 1,000 people who paid £10,000 each to attend the fundraiser. The highlight of the evening, at least for the crowd outside, was the arrival of a stunning couple, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the royal newlyweds, who were attending their first official function, dressed to outshine anyone. And there were plenty of people to outshine, as the Daily Mail was at pains to point out Friday morning with a fine collection of photos to accompany its front page story.
EIM is a Swiss hedge funds company that manages some $13 billion in funds, up from $10b in October 2010, when the firm ended its distinction between alternative and other funds management, according to Swiss Bilan magazine. The recent rapid growth in the funds managed by the companies was cited by the San Francisco Chronicle as a sign that the recovery of the hedges fund industry is now well underway.
Busson is no stranger to the celebrity life, first as a student at Le Rosey in Rolle, canton Vaud, then in an early and well-publicized relationship with actress Farrah Fawcett and later during his long relationship with super-model Elle McPherson (mother to his two children) and four years with actress Uma Thurman.
The United Nations agency for children affairs, Unicef, appealed for a ceasefire in Lybia saying at least 20 children had been killed in attacks by government forces.
Anthony Lake, Unicef’s Executive Director said at least 20 children have been killed and countless others have been injured in the city of Misrata in Libya.
“Reports of the use of cluster munitions are particularly alarming,” saysLake.
According to Unicef, the situation is also critical in Yemen, where at least 26 children have been killed and more than 800 have been injured since early February.
In Syria, Unicef reports,nine children were killed and many injured over the last few weeks.
Links: Unicef, GenevaLunch
Missing St Sulpice twins, Alessia and Livia Schepp
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - SwissMissing, with help from Canton Vaud Police, carried out an 8km2 search in the Geneva countryside Saturday 9 April to Monday morning, looking for the bodies of the two missing six-year-olds, Alessia and Livia Schepp. Twelve people including a police officer and three dogs that are trained to look for bodies, teamed up and worked out of Confignon et à Chancy, Jean-Christophe Sauterel, head of press and communications for Vaud Police, told GenevaLunch.
He confirmed that the search turned up no results.
The search was undertaken after a sniffer dog confirmed the presence of the father, Matthias Schepp, in the area: a Geneva woman earlier reported that he had been seen with his daughters in the area Sunday 30 January.
SwissMissing has published a short report, in English, on the search, to thank donors who covered the CHF34,000 cost of the weekend search. The organization has also posted a YouTube video showing the search (in Italian). The family was not directly involved in the search.
Matthias Schepp’s treasured tape recorder may have been found in Italy
Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Police in three countries have issued no new reports Wednesday morning 16 February on their progress searching for missing twins Alessia and Livia Schepp. The mother, Irina Ludici, in an interview with 20 Minuten in German, mentions questions that have been raised, notably about the father’s presence in Lyons.
Matthias Schepp, was close to the airport in Lyons, France, not the logical route to take to Marseille or the one most likely proposed by his GPS navigation system. This is also the end of the trail of his cell phone. The girls’ mother is quoted by 20 Minutes as asking “We’re wondering if Matthias met an accomplice at the airport”.
The online daily notes that this might explain who was watching the girls while the father went into a travel agency in Marseille alone to buy three tickets for the ferry to Corsica.
20 Minuten also reports that a tape recorder, an older model that the father always kept with him, was found by Italian police, but this has not been confirmed officially.
Police from the three countries investigating the disappearance of the two six year olds are meeting today in Marseille to compare notes.
In other reported developments, none of them confirmed by investigators:
- French television TF1 reports that French police continue to search beaches in Corsica and spent Tuesday 15 February combing the area at the northern end of the island
- Macinaggio is reported by several media to have piqued police searchers’ interest, based on reports by a man in his 60s who claims to have seen Matthias Schepp with a blond woman in the passenger seat, in a parked, muddy car with Swiss license plates, near the harbour
- Police in Corsica are also checking wells and ancient furnaces among the ruins in Macinaggio, according to 20 Minutes.
- Ansa, the Italian news agency which has been closely following the story, reports that there have been no new elements.
Sarah Oberson disappeared in 1985 from Saxon, Valais (photo, Sarah Oberson Foundation)
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland’s kidnap alert system, adopted in early 2010, is now available via cell phone networks and the government is asking the public to register online to participate, to ensure the widest possible alert network.
The minutes that follow a kidnapping are crucial, they say, and the quicker the alert is out to as many people as possible, the better.
The system works in four languages: English, French, German and Italian, in Switzerland only. It takes just seconds to register.
The system is based on the widespread success of a similar system in France and elsewhere. A young girl in Fresno, California was saved in October 2010 when a man who had just heard an alert saw a car going by that matched a description and he chased the kidnapper until the man stopped and pushed the girl out of the car.
The Sarah Oberson Foundation was set up in memory of a five-year-old Valais girl who disappeared walking from her parents’ to her grandparents’ house in the village of Saxon in 1985. The foundation’s site provides advice on what to do in case of a suspected or known kidnapping, with useful phone numbers.
Le Nouvelliste, Valais newspaper that has been active in the search for Sarah over the years and the campaign to set up a national alert system, proves more information on how the system works.
Family allowances are designed to provide cash to help cover a child's costs
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerlandta has a system of family allowances in lieu of standard tax deductions for children, with monthly payments for dependents, and it is about to take a step towards greater transparency.
Starting in January 2011 the public will have access to new, nationally coordinated online records for family allowance payment.
The rationale is to ensure that those who should be receiving the monthly payments can see when money has been issued, while also making it more difficult to fraudulently collect more than one payment per child.
The federal, cantonal and communal governments in Switzerland have been gradually harmonizing digital records and registrations data bases, as this week’s decision to move from a once-a-decade to an annual census made clear.
The combined records will now indicate if someone is registered in more than one place to receive a family allowance. The children who should be benefiting directly from the payments do not always receive them, says Bern, noting that “it is not unusual for a parent who has the right to receive the payment not to pass it on to the parent who is living with the child, even though they are obliged to by law.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Santiago Penados de Rivero, 10, wanted to join his mother Thursday morning 11 November, like so many other children in Geneva and Vaud who took part in the bring your kid to work day, which 11 Swiss cantons offered last week. Juliette de Rivero, his mother, is the Geneva advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, an NGO, and her work day included plans to meet with other advocacy groups representatives as well as some UN member government agencies in her role observing the UN Human Rights Council meetings at the UN, reports Foreign Policy magazine. But Santiago was stopped at the door and the pair were told he did not have the right to enter.
The guard told his mother that “Geneva ends when you step foot in this building. This is not Switzerland,” reports Foreign Policy. The UN communications office in Geneva later clarified that while UN employees and diplomats may bring their children, other children must have advance security clearance. Santiago, for his part, sat down and wrote a letter of protest, arguing for his rights.
In canton Vaud in 2010 more than 14,000 children joined their parents at work for the day. Figures for Geneva and for this year are not yet available.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - It’s not your eyes or the chilly weather, you can reassure yourself, when you notice that Geneva’s landmark jet d’eau is blue Friday 12 November. The Geneva-based Gavi Alliance, a founder member of the Global Coalition again Child Pneumonia, is gathering early Friday afternoon at the Bain de Paquis with partners from several international organizations, all of whom have been asked to wear blue jeans, to honour World Pneumonia Day.
Pneumonia is the leading killer of children under age five worldwide. It kills more than 1.5 million children every year, despite the fact that there are effective vaccines and treatments to combat it, the group notes.
.
Upper house of Swiss parliament
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A hotly debated measure has passed in parliament, to allow students who do not have Swiss residence permits but who are registered for school to take up apprenticeship places.
The two houses of parliament as well as cantonal parliaments have been struggling with the issue for months, with Green and Socialist politicians arguing for more help for children of illegal immigrants while right-wing politicians have insisted the system should not help them.
Reliable figures are difficult to come by, but the Tribune de Geneve recently cited an official register as saying that of 5,000 registered students in canton Geneva, only 250 were between ages 15 and 20, the age for apprenticeships, which are a key part of the Swiss education and training system.
Many students do not register, out of fear of being sent away from Switzerland, although the school registration system offers some protection.
Swissinfo in an article early in 2010 estimated the country has 10-30,000 unregistered children up to age 16, when compulsory schooling ends.
The upper house vote to adopt a measure earlier accepted by the lower house was relatively close, 23-20.
Overseas US citizens often surprised to find children have obligations but not the right to vote
By Clair Whitmer
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Most Americans assume that US citizenship automatically grants individuals the right to vote. However many expatriate American parents are shocked to learn that their children raised overseas, even if full US citizens in all other respects, do not necessarily have the right to vote in US elections. The states require that citizens establish residency prior to registering to vote. These residency requirements exist to facilitate election administration, not to exclude voters, and they are easily met in most states. That is, they are easily met unless you are an American born and raised overseas.
These Americans are called “non-domiciled citizens” and are full US citizens: they have American birth certificates and passports, must file US federal taxes, and males must register with the Selective Service. However, only 18 states allow them to register to vote using a parent’s [former US] voting address. The other 32 states will not accept their registration forms unless and until they move back stateside and meet residency requirements.
The fact that citizenship can still be granted without a guarantee of voting rights flies in the face of most Americans’ understanding of what it means to be a citizen. The constitution prohibits states from denying the right to vote from certain categories of citizens: women, blacks, adults aged 18 to 21. But, there is no constitutional guarantee of general voting rights.
Number of children born abroad
Claire Smith in an article, “These are our numbers: civilian americans overseas and voter turnout”, writes that the US Census Bureau does not count overseas citizens, thus there is no accurate way to know how many potential voters are left out of the democratic process in this way. It is almost certainly a fairly small number compared to the estimated 6 million Americans who live overseas and who exercise federal voting rights under the 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizen Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA).
Fortunately, new data provides insight into the number of children abroad.
Swiss police at the start of every school year run campaigns to emphasize road safety near schools
Sion, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A 63-year-old school crossing guard in Vouvry, at the eastern end of Lake Geneva, is in stable condition with head injuries after she was hit by a car and dragged by it at 13:10 Monday afternoon, 6 September. She was conscious when she was taken to the nearby Monthey hospital.
The accident was witnessed by a number of children returning to school after lunch, and they are being given counselling.
The driver of the car was a 54-year-old Zurich woman who lives in canton Valais. She was arrested and has had her driver’s license confiscated after the accident. She was found to have an alcohol level of 2,03 %o, more than four times the legal limit. According to police, she did not see the crossing guard as she came up over a hill “due to her physical state.”
Indonesia is the only country in Asia not to have signed the World Health Organization’s framework on tobacco control. CNN has highlighted the extent to which children are affected by smoking with a story about two-year-old Aldi, a new media darling in the country who can’t give up smoking. His parents want him to stop, but not, according to health authorities because they recognize it’s bad for the child but because of the cost.
A new study in the US appears to show that there is a link between ADHD (attention deficit disorders) and the use of pesticides in food.
The report by researchers in Boston on studies of urine samples from 1,139 children, with 119 children in the group meeting diagnostic criteria for ADHD. The “findings support the hypothesis that organophosphate [pesticides] exposure, at levels common among US children, may contribute to ADHD prevalence,” say the authors.
Young children are more susceptible to the impact of pesticides, it appears, but further studies are needed to determine if pesticides can be pinpointed as a cause of the disorder.
Links to other sites: CNN, Pediatrics, Science Daily
A new study by universities in Michigan in the US and Montreal in Canada, with 1,300 children, draws a link between hours of television watched when little and poor performance by children as they get older. Higher junk food consumption, increased body fat, more bullying by others at school and worse performance at school were some of the results of watching more than the recommended maximum of two hours a day.
Links to other sites: BBC, Yahoo News Canada
A long unemployed man in his 40s attacked a group of four-year-olds in a kindergarten in eastern China, critically injuring two of them and wounding 24 others and three adults before police could stop the attack, reportedly thanks to a milkman hitting the attacker over the head with a mop handle.
The attack in Taixing, Jiangsu province, comes just a day after a 33-year-old man with a history of severe mental problems attacked a school in Guangdong province, injuring a teacher and 16 young children. Five of the chidren in Guangdong are in critical condition.
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.
Three US women are being allowed to leave Haiti with children they have adopted, from an orphanage in Haiti that has provided children for adoption in the past, after the women were stopped at the border Saturday 20 February. US officials have backed the women, saying the paperwork was done correctly, after angry Haitians questioned the validity of their documents. The incident follows tensions over children leaving the country after members of a US religious group were arrested in January for trying to leave the country with a group of children.
Links to other sites: CNN, Fergus Falls Daily Journal,Minnesota, USA
The number of deaths is rising from a Nato bombing mission that killed at least 33 civilians. The air strike was against a suspected “insurgent” convoy but many women and children were found among the dead.
Geneva UN and Red Cross groups work on sanitation, health problems
Installing a water reservoir in the women's prison at Petion-Ville. (photo: ©2010 ICRC/M. Kokic/ht-e-00577)
Work for cash, UNDP programme, Haiti 2010 (photo: ©2010 UNDP on flickr)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The arrest of 10 Americans accompanying a busload of children being illegally carried out of Haiti and into the Dominican Republic 30 January by a US religious organization has raised fears that children may be separated from members of their family who survived the 12 January earthquake in the country. Two Geneva-based groups, the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) and the Geneva office of Unicef, are active in the fight to ensure that children do not become victims of a new Haitian disaster, child trafficking, whether they are orphans or not.
The arrests come as fears are reportedly rising among Haitians of the ancient loup-garou, similar to a werewolf but a predator of children’s spirits, according to the Washington Post.
ICRC’s tracing service, usually deployed in times of conflict, is working closely with the Haitian Red Cross to re-establish family links. Working with lists provided by hospitals and first aid stations, the workers collate information to get families back together. ICRC says almost 1,500 people have been able to make “safe and well” phone calls. So far, it has a list of 25,600 names on its site www.icrc.org/familylinks.
The UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) concentrates on reuniting children with their families.
Title: Report presented: “L’Ecole et l’élève d’origine étrangère”
Location: Geneva, Haute Ecole, social work (HES-GE)
Link out: Click here
Description: Authors Geneviève Mottet and Claudio Bolzman present their new book, which looks at foreign children in the Geneva school system since 1960, followed by discussion with the public.
Start Time: 12:15
Date: 2010-01-19
End Time: 13;30
Four successive archbishops of Dublin, over a period of 30 years, “routinely” covered up child sexual abuse by priests in their diocese, an Irish government report published Thursday 26 November shows. Dermot Ahern, the Irish justice minister responsible for the “Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin”, said it documented “a scandal on an astonishing scale.” The Irish state is also blamed for not ensuring that all were treated equally under the law and “allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes.” Police are accused of actively colluding with Church officials and priests on a regular basis to cover up crimes from 1974-2004, the period covered by the study. This is the third major Irish investigative report in 10 years into abuse by Church clergy.
Links to other sites: Boston Globe, Guardian, UK, Irish Times and Irish Department of Justice statement
Some of the heaviest snow in decades in norther China has killed 38 people, mainly in road accidents, but four of the dead are children who died when school cafeterias caved in, in Hebei and Henan provinces. The children’s deaths raises anew the question of safety in school building throughout the country. The government has said shoddy building, sometimes due to corruption, played a role in the deaths of thousands of children when schools collapsed in Sichuan during a major earthquake in 2008.
Links to other sites: BBC, China Daily
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland registered 2,567 cases of dogs biting humans in 2008, a number that was very close to that for 2007, records published 15 October show. More than 200 varieties of dogs were involved in the incidents. Children are more frequently targets than adults and have the most serious injuries because dogs tend to bite them on the head and neck. CHildren were attacked in the dog’s home in 43 percent of cases and in public areas in 51 percent of cases. Doctors, veterinarians and cantonal officials have been obliged to report dog biting incidents since 2006.
