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

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.

Geneva, a city you’ve probably never seen, even if you live there

The pot at the end of the rainbow, for British bankers, might be in Geneva

Some things never change, and a certain class of wealthy Brits seeing quaint little Switzerland as a playground is one of them. Another is the itch of UK newspaper writers to get the editor to pay for a trip, preferably during the ski season, to trot along on the heels of the rich to write about this fabled, gorgeous, expensive, boring little police state where people survive on chocolate and cheese. The Times has just done it and so has the Telegraph.

If you’re determined to see a place as an old cliché, you will, and they did. Clichés work, of course, because they have an element of truth in them. The younger brother of a friend was put under my care for a long 24 hours in Paris when I lived there, and at the end he dismissed the city as boring, with terrible food and ugly people. The women were short and bony, he said, and restaurants didn’t even serve ketchup with their hamburgers which were, by the way, awful, he added.

I couldn’t disagree, but I did think he’d missed something.

So did England’s newspaper writers. Geneva officials might be annoyed with the articles, Times and Telegraph fans will lap it up, and the rest of us will roll our eyes in wonder.

Once a year people in Geneva dress alike, many in gray, it is true (photo: Laila Rodriguez)

When I began to work as a journalist in Switzerland my editor at Business Week, who was based in Paris, admonished me to always include something about cheese with holes, cuckoo clocks or gold under the streets of Zurich. Why, I asked, assuming that my job was to add something new, preferably intelligent to what the world knew about the place. “The editors back home want it. They say that’s what readers like, and they’ll never read the more serious stuff if we don’t give them the clichés first.”

I also worked for Time magazine then, and asked the bureau chief there if he agreed. Absolutely, he said. It helps the editors in New York keep Switzerland and Sweden straight in their minds. Those white, snowy capital S places.

A little cliché-busting

The Times and Telegraph reporters got some of the basics wrong and don’t appear to have entirely understood the Swiss tax system.

Sign out for British bankers?

Here is a summary of the news story, the more or less serious stuff that’s prompted editors to shell out the cash for an EasyJet flight from London, I assume (times are tough in the media world). Hedge funds are moving out of London to Switzerland: 8 of them made the decision in December. British media are increasingly focusing on the story because UK tax rates on bank bonuses and high income levels will go up sharply as of 1 April 2010, and this is prompting some companies to move.

Here are my two bits on the story: Geneva’s Ivan Pictet, president of the board of the Geneva Financial Center, said in October when asked about hedge funds moving in, that Switzerland is and will continue to have only a tiny role to play in the international hedge funds business. He used a figure of maybe up to 2 percent of the global business. Geneva would welcome more companies moving in, but it’s not about to replace The City as a hedge fund capital, he noted.

End of story. But if you want the editor to pay for that trip to the fabled playground you have to have a bit more to write. So here’s what we get: Geneva is boring, expensive, people all dress alike, and communes dictate how you live. Taxi drivers think only about money (well, you probably do recognize that one, but London has a couple of these, too). The place is crazily racist.

Geneva and Switzerland, as viewed by London’s newspapers

From the Times:

• Hedge funds and wealthy people want to take up Swiss residence so they can get a tax forfeit: lump sum taxation (GenevaLunch: Some  confusion here: the rules are clear that this is only for people who “do not pursue an occupation in Switzerland”, which lops out anyone employed by a hedge fund, no matter how much they make. There were, 5,000 people who paid lump sum taxes, less than 0.1 percent of the Swiss population, in 2008)
• “There are hardly any normal shops: most seem to sell only diamonds and furs.” (GL: That’s not called Geneva – it’s called a two-block area)
• “. . .supper at a studenty restaurant where they serve only steak and chips: £150 [CHF220] for three, excluding service (GL: That’s a silly price for what you ate unless it was in a trendy restaurant and included a bottle of wine. The wine is generally better and cheaper than in London – and service is included, by the way)
• A Geneva lawyer says he buys his groceries in France because Switzerland is too expensive (GL: ask him what he buys: some stuff is cheaper in France, other stuff cheaper in Switzerland, and the great thing about Geneva is you can do your shopping in both – toilet paper in Switzerland, steak in France)
• Geneva is boring. (GL: No, it’s small. There’s a difference. I have been to Cardiff three times, a city about the same size as Geneva, and thought it was boring, too – everything shut before 6 in the evening, food was either bad or else it was good but way too expensive. I had the good grace not to write that because I figured there might be more to the place, if I took the time to find out.)
• Communes rule people’s lives with police-state style rules (GL: okay, at this point the writer veers off into fiction, with visits from Interpol and commune rules about flowerbox colours, which is fun, but I’m starting to wonder if she really caught that EasyJet flight or just cobbled together the story over a nice cup of tea in London.)
• CHF40 an hour for cleaning help. (GL: that’s the rate you pay for a cleaning company, not a regular cleaning woman, who gets CHF20-25, and for this you get someone who is used to cleaning to Swiss standards, which is nice)
• Crans-Montana is not as well known as Gstaad because wealth whispers. (GL: Rubbish. Italians have been flaunting wealth for years in Crans-Montana, but the Brits don’t mingle with them – a language problem?)
• You can’t make friends in Switzerland. It’s an expat’s life or nothing (GL: The woman quoted is 26, can’t have been here long or have lived in many cities, and she goes home to London every weekend – a little reminder needed here that life in any city is what you make it, but you do have to make an effort).
• Switzerland, and especially Geneva, is racist (GL: Calling kettles black, etc. – look around you when you get back home).

The Times is having a hayday with Geneva-drubbing in its Sunday 16 January edition: we get another Times article, by a different Times writer, saying Geneva has no nightlife, so it won’t be able to attract London’s high-flying financial companies. He quotes the Economic Development agency in the city and some relocation agencies, looks briefly at the Glocals.com website. He doesn’t find much going on. It’s not at all clear that he actually visited Geneva  to write this. He makes the weird remark that a lack of nightlife and no show-off flashy lifestyles “constitutes one of the main obstacles facing Geneva, along with the rest of Switzerland, in the quest to attract the financial sector away from London.” (GL: Surely people with the smarts to make that kind of money can figure out how to spend it having fun? And outside London, not many people think Switzerland is scrambling hard to attract these people.)

And then the Telegraph jumps into the fray, but with a much more upbeat story, which appears the same day. I suspect they heard about the Times articles and decided to write the opposite story. But it, too, suggests London’s financial crowd wants its Little London in Zug or Geneva. Some do. Many don’t, from what I’ve seen.

From the Telegraph:

• “Jay-walking [is] an arrestable offence” (GL: And yet people do it all the time, but people are very rarely stopped for it unless they do it in front of a bored police offier – but hasn’t the journalist ever been to California? Switzerland is pretty relaxed on this, compared to a lot of places)
• “Each of Switzerland’s 27 self-governing cantons sets its own tax rate, many with ultra-low levels to attract foreign finance firms and workers.” (GL: true, but the thing that makes Switzerland interesting for staff is the relatively low income tax rates for individuals, which apply to all of us, not just rich bankers)
• “The Swiss, a conservative nation, generally expect mothers to look after their own children.” (GL: an urban myth related to the idea that Swiss women don’t work – although this was true 35 years ago. Things change. Switzerland has one of Europe’s highest number of couples where the husband works full-time, the wife part-time: twice as many as the number of couples where the wife does not work, which is about equal to the number of couples where both work full-time. And it has one of the highest percentages of couples where both work part-time, according to 2008 figures published by the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe. Childcare options are limited, but changing. The Swiss political system reacts slowly.)
• Switzerland’s 27 cantons (GL: 26 – more on them at www.ch.ch)

I’m left with a sense that the British, or maybe just British bankers and wealthy Brits, don’t relocate well. Fortunately, I know quite a few of them in Switzerland, and I suspect that the ones who like to live well and who know how to spend their money well were all out doing that when the UK journalists came to town for a day. The problem might be that these people are hard to spot: they’ve learned how to fit in and enjoy life.

Links to other sites:

• Times, UK: “Bonus supertax sends the City’s super-rich to Switzerland”,
• Times: “Lack of Nightlife could dull Geneva’s appeal”
• Telegraph, “British bankers find the good life in Switzerland – even before tax“
• Swiss federal government page on tax forfeits (lump sum taxation)
• social networks popular with English-speakers in Switzerland: English Forum, Glocals
• to keep track of what’s happening in the Lake Geneva region: our own very popular blog for newcomers in Geneva, Geneva’s best-read source of news in English (guess who!) and GenevaLunch resources and events
• radio in English
• Geneva Welcome Centre has a What’s on page in English, and the Sortir web page at TSR (public television) has the most complete listing around of music, movies, shows and other entertainment in the region.

Nicholas Nova on Twitter just pointed out the most surprising thing the Swiss government has done this week. Its latest photo of the cabinet, or Federal Council (see New to Geneva? Me too post) can be ordered as a print, is available online and – this is true – is also available as a 3D photo, for which the government will send you the glasses to view it! I’ve ordered mine, too curious not to. And there is a whole selection of 3D images of Switzerland.

A government of more depth than I’d realized.

Great powder and off-piste skiing and snowboarding go together, and no one is going to ban them, but accidents in recent days in Switzerland have raised the issue of responsibility, moral and legal.

Recent avalanches raise the issue of responsibility

The past five days have seen eight people die from avalanches in Switzerland and more than a dozen others caught by them, with several people hospitalized. Two groups were ski- touring, and in two other cases off-piste skiers and snowboarders appear to have set off avalanches that ended on groomed slopes.

Swiss law

The quick answer is that skiing off-piste is not illegal, but you always carry the risk of setting off avalanches for which you might be held responsible. The tricky part is: who decides if you were responsible, how is it decided and what are the implications if it’s your fault. Police initially seek those who might be responsible for setting off an avalanche, and if they suspect someone is at fault, they file a report with a cantonal magistrate (judge) who is assigned to investigate the case. A judge always investigates in cases of injuries or deaths caused by avalanches, but there have been some cases of damages caused, or even no damages but behaviour judged irresponsible, where a skier or snowboarder was considered to be acting against the public interest.

The Swiss penal code calls for a fine or up to three years in prison if the person acted out of negligence or put a life in danger. In the case of putting several lives in danger the prison sentence can be up to 10 years.

In recent memory people have been fined CHF1,000, according to swissinfo. But they can also be held liable for related expenses, including injuries to other people and cleaning up if an avalanche hits a groomed piste, for example. If a search party, with avalanche dogs and helicopters plus scores of people, is called out to look for people after an avalanche, the cost can soar into the thousands. In the case of the seven people who died Sunday in canton Bern in two avalanches just minutes apart, eight helicopters were called in the first day, then helicopters, private rescue teams and the army were used Monday and Tuesday. A judge is investigating the accident and there is not, for now, any indication that humans caused the two avalanches.

But at what point is someone held responsible? Several factors are typically taken into account, such as whether or not warning signs were ignored, or skiers slipped under fences delimiting zones. A sense of responsibility is taken into consideration. Three off-piste skiers who appear to have set off an avalanche that hit a groomed slope in Anzères did the right thing by stopping to help look for people. They then left, say police and it took police a week to find them. It probably won’t be a point in their favour that they left the scene without giving their names to police, nor did they respond to a police press release asking them to turn themselves in.

Read further

Le Temps newspaper (Fre) and Swiss public broadcast system’s web site, swissinfo, both carry lengthy articles about this today. Le Temps in fact has several related articles, worth taking the time to read. They both interview legal experts and come to the same conclusion, that the Swiss most likely don’t want police on the slopes, monitoring, as they do in Italy.

Helena Bachmann, who lives in the Lake Geneva region, has written a good overview for Time magazine on assisted suicide and Switzerland’s efforts to rein in death tourism. She reminds us that the current law dates back to 1942 and brings us up to 2009, with the Swiss government saying the law is now too lax and must be rewritten. Bachmann includes an interesting interview with maxillofacial surgeon Jerome Sobel in Lausanne, who is the president of French-speaking Switzerland’s Exit office (Dignitas is the other main organization that offers suicide assistance). As with so many issues, this one is not as black and white as we might like it to be and her article explores some of the gray areas. Recommended reading.

Stories not making front page headlines but that are worth a moment’s reflection:

The US Justice Department says crimes by girls have been rising and by 2004 girls’ crimes were 30 percent of the total by juvenile delinquents. Little research has been done in this area, so no one seems to know why crimes by girls are increasing, although one part of the answer could be changes to the justice system in the US.

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen where the IOC (International Olympic Committee) just awarded the 2016 Games to Rio de Janeiro, the sports group also adopted a number of recommendations. One of these is the challenging Recommendation 66: “The Olympic Movement should strengthen its partnership with the computer game industry in order to explore opportunities to encourage physical activity, and the practice and understanding of sport among the diverse population of computer game users.” (good luck!) Olympic Congress Recommendations in full

And, in a peculiarly American news approach, both Bloomberg and Associated Press have now managed to put Roman Polanski (sex crime escapee) and tax cheats (IRS tax dodgers) into bed together with a lovely duvet-style Swiss feather cover over them (read that: Switzerland and Swiss neutrality = haven for all crimes committed by right-thinking Americans, which indicates editorial confusion).

After this dubious snuggle-down, what comes out is that a) Switzerland is “no longer” a haven, which implies that it has been, for all crimes, while forgetting completely about accurate reporting and b) that Switzerland, tut-tut, will have to live like the rest of the world, which is a sign that the writers, or more probably their editors, haven’t budged since 1980. Switzerland may not be a member of the European Union, but it has adopted much of the legislation, for a start and, frankly, the days when Switzerland was an island of oddity are over. Now Switzerland is as odd as any other country around. Back in 1980 all Swiss stories published in the US had to include gold under the streets of Zurich, cheese with holes, chocolate and cuckoo clocks, even though the Swiss have tried for years to point out that cuckoo clocks are Austrian, not Swiss. As for the other three, my editors at three major US news publications all told me this, at one point or another during the early 1980s. It made for some slightly skewered reporting at the time.

Looks like some things never change, but I’m not talking about the Swiss, who have.

Pierre Bessard of the Liberales Institut, a Zurich-based research group, has contributed an Op-Ed article to the New York Times today called “Leave Swiss banks alone” which I think has the best explanation I’ve seen for the Swiss attitude towards paying taxes.

Ironically, given the US pressure on Swiss banking secrecy, it probably mirrors what many Americans believe they believe about the role of government. Switzerland puts it into practice.

The average Swiss on the street I’ve spoken with in recent months is embarrassed by and angry about UBS and its activities in the US, but these people also feel quite strongly about the importance of maintaining the citizen/government balance. They feel equally strongly about privacy.

Rich and famous people come to Switzerland for two reasons: the banks, and the fact they can breath more easily. True, the mountain air is crisp and relatively clean, but the Swiss respect their privacy – it’s all part of the same recipe, and it’s not so much designed to make a nation rich as to ensure national self-respect.

The jurors in the trial of Cécile Brossard for the murder of Edouard Stern have done us all a favour: they have underlined the importance of taking charge of our own emotional lives by insisting that Brossard was not simply a pawn or victim of a cruel man (she was, and he was): she carries some responsibility for allowing her emotional state to reach the stage it did, and she bears some responsibility for putting herself in the situation in which she found herself the night of the murder. Physically and emotionally. But to be clear: this is a far cry from saying “she was asking for it,” which she wasn’t, because no woman deserves to be treated as Stern treated Brossard.

The jurors have also not fallen into the facile trap of too readily seeing women as weak victims and men as powerful perpetrators of evil. In a strange way, this is a good thing for women. It’s time we moved out of that ancient mindset, for it leads to dependence, depression, wickedness and sometimes crime, including extreme crimes such as the Stern murder. I like to think that the 21st century could be the one where women discover balance – we’re not poor victims, nor are we outrageous abusers of other people, although unfortunately history is sprinkled with women who in ways resembled Edouard Stern.

”When a woman loves a man…” the Billie Holiday song goes, but where is the one about the man who loves a woman too much? Turn the story around for a moment.

You’re the juror – a man is on trial for murder

Picture this:

One of Europe’s wealthiest women falls for a man, younger than she is, less educated, far less privileged, but he adores her. She lets him, encourages him, pampers him. Then over time she begins to tire of him and to be embarrassed by his apparent weakness, his lack of social graces, his constant desire for attention, his unhappiness when he is forced to do what he sees as drudgery work to earn money.

They fight, they make up. He starts to insist on money as proof of her love. He doesn’t need it, he says, but if she really loved him she would make him independent. She teases him, calling him a gigolo, but neither of them are clear if this is a joke or a cruel way of distancing him. Their small circle of friends watch in dismay, but the couple, when together, are often so passionate that it seems petty to question this. Our lives are so mundane, they tell themselves.

It turns out he has a wife, a quiet somber person who is aware that her husband, an artist, often travels with his patron. He tells her the patron has promised a large sum of money, without providing details. She decides it is for some of his work; she has never questioned him and won’t now, she feels. Theirs is a relationship of trust. And convenience, for she long ago lost interest in having sex with him.

He becomes agitated, his behaviour erratic, she notices. One night she wakes up next to him, itching, and is startled to see he has shaved off his body hair. She knows now that he is a gigolo, the lover of a wealthy woman. She thinks of the money and makes herself a cup of tea, then goes back to bed.

The next day his lover, for he cannot think of her as a patron, laughs at him for taking her seriously when she said he was too hairy and should get rid of it. She ties him up, pours sweet sticky wine over him and then instead of the sexual activity which he expects, she throws dog hair over him, laughing uproariously. Later, he showers, they have sex and go to bed.

The wealthy woman is suddenly taken up by business affairs, has little time for him. He, in a fury, cuts off the relationship – again – for he told her he’d had enough some weeks ago, and to pacify him she’d promised him some money. He does, after all, find her desirable, she remembers, and sex with him is the adventure it has never been with the other men she’s had. She’s irritated that he’s not there when she wants him.

They go to dinner, spend a passionate night and in the morning she feels disgust as she watches him sleeping: his nails are dirty and too long. She pushes him off the bed and over to the veranda door, pushes him out, wearing next to nothing and she tells him coldly he is too disgusting to stay. She drops his clothes disdainfully out a window.

A week later they dine again, the episode behind them. He has brought her favourite flowers, a body oil she prizes and he plays her body and her senses like a violin. They can start again, be lovers the way they have been. Yes, yes, she wants to be tied up. Yes, she wants him to crawl on his knees to her, like a slave. Yes, she – but she could get all of this a lot cheaper elsewhere, and look at the paunch he’s developing – doesn’t he know she only likes pretty boys who take care of themselves?

Something snaps, suddenly, and he can’t breathe, can’t think straight, doesn’t remember later if she carries on mocking him, if he screamed at her or was silent. The murder is quick: he recalls how awful it was as a child to watch kittens dying slowly after his mother said the best way to get rid of the barn cats was to drown the little ones. He sees himself doing it as if this is a film and he is an actor. He leaves quietly.

That was ending one. Here is ending two.

You’re the juror: you choose

A week later they dine again, the episode behind them. He has brought her favourite flowers, a body oil she prizes and he plays her body and her senses like a violin. Yes, she wants to be tied up. Yes, she wants him to crawl on his knees to her, like a slave. Yes, she – he hears the abrupt coldness in her voice – yes, but she could get all of this a lot cheaper elsewhere, and look at the paunch he’s developing – doesn’t he know she only likes pretty boys who take care of themselves?

He says nothing. She looks momentarily surprised, and then she’s gone. The weapon was nearby, the murder is quick: he recalls how awful it was as a child to watch kittens dying slowly after his mother said the best way to get rid of the barn cats was to drown the little ones. He sees himself doing it as if this is a film and he is an actor. He leaves quietly. The money is still in the bank, but he’s not thinking about it right now. His wife mustn’t think he did this. The friends he’s made through the woman, they mustn’t either. He must remember to buy nail clippers tomorrow. He finds it hard to breathe. A cloak of calm settles over him.

Update 10 March 09:15 CNN runs a late-breaking story about seven tourists who are missing in Thailand after their boat sank in heavy seas off Phuket, a popular resort. Two of them are Swiss (TSR confirms this). Or they are if you read the article. The bulleted sub-headings mention two Swedes, not Swiss.

Well, it’s a classic mistake: cold, snow, Sw– something countries on the fringes of European politics. If someone slipped Sweden onto Nicolas Sarkozy’s tax havens black list, would anyone notice except those other Sw– people?