Xinhua has a nice photo collection entitled “Think you can hold back your laugh?” Humour is notoriously culturally-linked, so I had my doubts. And despite political correctness, East vs West, what startled out as a smile went to a chuckle and – you betcha – a laugh. Try it.

“The survey of primary and secondary school children in the UK suggests there is some confusion about key scientific achievements.” The BBC put this delightful sentence halfway through an article that starts out saying that one in 10 children in the UK believe the queen invented the telephone.

My guess is that the two, the queen and phone, seem equally archaic if you’re 10 years old and messaging your pals to ask who invented the phone because some twit of an adult is asking you for the answer.

The article refers to the results of a March poll of 1, 000 children in the UK.

A couple of nice headlines to go with the morning coffee:

• from Xinhua, “Men want sex until almost dead” (women have better stamina?)
• from the UK’s Telegraph, “Thousands of police could face axe” (uncivilized Brits! Americans just use guns)
• and from the Belfast Telegraph, “Wife’s breast milk cheese sold at restaurant’ takes the cake for being intriguing and having a fun first sentence: “A New York restaurant has gone from brasserie to brassiere.”

Barbie falls for Mad Men!

I admit I’m getting confused about reality. I thought Mad Men, the US TV show, was about real life, admittedly an outrageous little patch of it during a certain era. I confess I love the show and can’t wait for season 3 to be available in Switzerland on DVD in another couple weeks. I love the women who think they are Barbie dolls, the silly glitz, the – but wait, now it seems that Barbie has invited Mad Men to be part of her world! Don Draper, with those wonderfully creased suits and some of the dubious people he works with, will be showing up in her dollhouses, complete with their wardrobes.

They will all get along famously, I’m sure – old Barbie standby Ken, Don’s wife Betty, oohlala Joan.

Maybe the overdose of sleeze and glamour will encourage the next generation of women to give up these dollhouse fantasies. But don’t hold your breath, feminists, and please don’t turn over in your grave, Mr Ibsen.

Meanwhile, I’m getting the popcorn ready for the next episode. Now I can fret over which clothes Don will take to Barbie’s house.

Ed. note: all work and no play makes for a dull editor.

The world is a funny inter-connected kind of place when you’re sitting in a small town near Geneva, Switzerland and you see in the Los Angeles Times page for local animal-lovers that a couple of kangaroos have had a gooooood kissing and cuddling session in Basel. Check them out (warning to Australians: you might find them less cute than some of us). Much easier than going to the zoo in Basel in this icy Swiss weather. Clearly, Australian animals win the cutes prizes today.

I was puzzled to see that the Guardian has an article today on Libya, Switzerland, the European Union and the ban on travel by top Libyan officials. I read nearly to the end before I found the news peg – normally higher up in a story, but when the news is old and editors are looking for an excuse to run it late, the peg gets hidden a bit further down in the story. Here it is:

The problem was sufficiently worrying for Libya’s man in London, Omar Jelban, to convene a rare press conference at the Knightsbridge offices of the people’s bureau (embassy) to “clarify” Tripoli’s position. “It is now difficult for any EU citizen to come to Libya,” he said on Tuesday, insisting that Libya had been forced to take reciprocal action because of Swiss bad faith. “We are ready to resolve this problem with the Swiss. This is a bilateral issue that has nothing to do with other European countries.”

That doesn’t tell me why the Guardian wanted to bother running this, since there is nothing new in the story, just rehashing. I think the clue is the last sentence. My guess is that the editor couldn’t resist running this sentence, a good decision:

Gaddafi-watchers say the key to understanding these rows with the Swiss and the Americans is his acute sense of personal honour – the slight to his son, his family and to himself. In reflective moments, Libya’s diplomats must sometimes hark back to simpler times before their leader abandoned terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and came in from the cold.

Link to story in the Guardian, UK

Today’s best headline and summary prize goes to The Guardian in the UK:
Vatican hit by gay sex scandal
Chorister sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for ceremonial usher of the papal household.

Editors are always scrambling to make sure they have headlines that grab attention, especially on the Internet where the headline evolves into the whole story by the time it reaches Twitter. It’s tough to make them catchy without being obscene (that gets readers) or using celebrity names (Michale you-know-who). But the Guardian’s headline reads like a Medieval whodunnit. Here’s the rest of the story.

Google has asked the US National Security Agency to help protect it from the Chinese government and cyber attacks, Telecom TV says. This is the strangest bit of Friday news I’ve read, beating out the US Tea Party with out-on-bail thug Joseph Basel joining Sarah Palin, or the death of Boa Sr, “the 85-year-old last speaker of ‘Bo,’ the oldest member of the Great Andamanese tribe” on a remote island of India, reports Reuters. Bo is now officially dead, and some might say the same of a world without Big Brother watching over us.

The report of this death might be exaggerated, of course, but only if you really believe China = evil and the US = good, with no gray areas. Personally, I am a skeptic on this point.

Media coverage of the story about Baby Doc Duvalier’s family fortune, which took a turn for the worse today, has me shaking my head yet again at international reporting on Switzerland. Quite simply, too few editors – who are not in Switzerland – do their homework, and the result is headlines and stories that are inaccurate.

A Swiss court ruled in January that frozen assets which the Duvalier family has been trying to claim for 23 years cannot simply be handed back to the Haitian people, as the Justice Office decreed in February 2009. Sounds terrible, right? Those awful Swiss again, always protecting the rich and getting fat off the interest of their wealth, stashed away in such piles that the Alps are probably growing, not shrinking.

Right? Wrong. No matter how badly they want to do Swiss-bashing, responsible media still have a responsibility to get basic facts right, which means taking a little more time. But the pressure to be the first on the block with the story doesn’t encourage this, particularly when the extra work means trying to make sense of the slow machinations of a small nation that believes in precision, including in its legal system.

Here are some of the headlines: AP – Haitian despot’s family to get ‘stolen’ millions, CBC, Exiled Haiti ruler can reclaim $4.6M: Swiss court, Guardian – ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier’s family can reclaim £2.9m in Swiss bank, court rules

And from there, thanks to the Internet, the incorrect stories become web fact and take on a life of their own.

Unfortunately, the headlines are inaccurate.

Funds are not being freed, much less given to the Duvaliers

The Swiss government was technically “invited” by the court to unfreeze the funds, but no one -  not the court, not the government and if they have any sense, not the Duvaliers – believed this would happen. The reason is that this was all quite predictable, and was predicted: in early 2009 the federal government announced that it would need a new law to cover cases such as the Duvalier one and a similar saga with dirty Mobutu family money. It said the law should be ready by 2010 and a Foreign Affairs Department told GenevaLunch today that the draft is expected to be completed by the end of February, at which point it wends its way through the consultation and parliamentary process. Clearly, the decision was not taken by the Federal Council today, as has been widely reported, to create a new law because of the court decision. Drafting laws takes months.

In February 2009, with the statute of limitations reaching its final limits, but a new law not yet  in place, the federal Justice Office stepped into the breach and said the money should go to the Haitian government. There was plenty of discussion in Swiss media at the time about how this was likely to be contested by the Duvaliers, but the move bought the Swiss government time and allowed the funds to remain blocked.

A key line published by AP was picked up by other media today en masse. Member newspapers can opt to run the news agency’s stories, far cheaper than writing their own, but it means that an error is rapidly amplified: “In an embarrassment to Switzerland’s government, the country’s top court said Wednesday that at least $4.6 million in Swiss bank accounts previously awarded to charities must be returned to the family of Haiti’s ex-dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.”

It’s not an embarrassment to Switzerland, quite the opposite, but the mistaken information quickly leads to a wrong conclusion. Switzerland is the only country that has given back to countries money stolen by their dictators, some CHF1.66 billion in the past 20 years. The US has not done this nor has the UK. And Switzerland is determined to find a way to do it with Haiti.

The Swiss are no saints, but let’s get the story straight.

Maybe some of the money stolen by what the Swiss court called the “criminal” Duvalier clan is part of the $58 million in aid that was given to Baby Doc’s regime by the US government until 1986.

I haven’t seen that mentioned in any of the stories.

Here is the 12 January court decision, if you want to get it from the horse’s (aka Swiss supreme court) mouth.

GenevaLunch has received a spate of anti-Muslim comments in recent days, linked mainly to articles about fighting in Nigeria between Muslims and Christians. Most have been spam, others have been from individuals who clearly have strong negative feelings about Islam. The policy for comments at GenevaLunch is clearly stated next to the comments box: “We are happy to have your comments, which are approved before they appear: please remember to be courteous and brief. We accept only comments directly related to an article. We do not accept comment spam – messages sent to more than one site. Thank you!”

”Courteous” covers showing respect for other people’s religions, no matter what your own beliefs are. We won’t be publishing any comments that verge in this direction and we’ve removed a couple comments that were dubious and that appear to have prompted more comments along the same lines. The comments space is offered to readers so they can contribute in a positive way to discussions about the news. A good example of this is the large number of comments we had in early January on our articles about luggage lost when Geneva airport baggage handlers went on strike. You can see all these articles and their comments here.