BERN, SWITZERLAND – Shortly before the holidays the good news made it into the UK press that Jack Widdowson, the 19-year-old British dancer with Bern Ballett, is recovering far better than expected in the hours after a mugging appeared likely to leave him paralyzed for life.

Widdowson was attacked in Cardiff, Wales, apparently for the theft of an iPhone, in early December, and it was feared the dancer might never walk again, much less dance. He was visiting his family for the weekend after making his first solo performance with the Bern troupe. He and a brother were out for the evening and he was walking home when the attack occurred near the docks area.

By Christmas, the family was able to celebrate that Jack could take a few steps unaided.

Links to other sites: BBC, Daily Mail, Walesonline

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss Statistical Office in Bern should be applauded for making stats a little more fun with their one a week dose, and they even offer this in English, so you can turn it into a foreign language lesson. There’s a little problem on the right edge, but you’ll probably work out the missing bits.

Royal weddings, such as that of Britain's Prince William and bride Kate, are widely credited with influencing couples to have more lavish, costly weddings

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – How many people get cold feet before they marry? According to an insurance broker interviewed by Bloomberg‘s Carolyn Bandel in Zurich, “the percentage of claims for change of heart is ‘very high.’”

Bandel has written an intriguing article about the relatively new niche insurance business, insurance for couples about to marry, which has grown up because people are spending more on their weddings than they used to. The average cost of a wedding in Switzerland has doubled in 10 years, to about CHF30,000, according to a Zurich Insurance company official interviewed by Bandel. If you think you might get off more cheaply in the US, given the low dollar, that’s one option, given that the average cost rose in 2010 to just over $24,000.

So what kind of coverage do brides- and grooms-to-be get? Power outages, caterers being shut down by health inspectors, illness and flooding are specifically mentioned in the general conditions at Zurich, which has been offering wedding insurance since January 2011.

A quick look at Zurich’s offer (you can buy the insurance online for CHF69) shows that it even includes the possibility of fire. I recall a niece’s lively wedding where the barbecue set the rest of the wedding area on fire; maybe there is something to this. You’re covered in case of rock slides and avalanches, but not for earthquakes and volcanoes.

Zurich’s policy covers only post-ceremony events and the limit is CH20,000, so there’s no coverage for bachelor parties the night before – and no coverage for cold feet, which is sometimes on offer by US insurers according to Bloomberg.

So how many brides or grooms don’t show up? A US writer says she believes the figure commonly mentioned of half of one percent is low, possibly 10,000 a year. Could they have saved money by getting “change of mind” insurance? No, but their parents might have: you can only take out the insurance if you are not one of the people getting married, so with parents of the bride footing bills that run into thousands of dollars, Dad might be able to get a little peace of mind ahead of the big day.

Jonathan Manthorpe at the Vancouver Sun has written a well-researched, long story about public discontent in China with the abuse of wealth and power, focusing on a road rage accident that involved a general’s son.

Hat’s off to his incisive yet critical article on of the Chinese public’s attitudes towards officialdom, a rarity in western media: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Opinion+Chinese+recoil+antics+arrogant+spoiled+princelings/5422350/story.html

I was about to write something on the long memories of those who watch cheats get ahead, at least for a while, when this elephant story title on NPR caught my eye, “Gotcha! Elephant caught cheating”.

I’m still laughing, which must mean I’m on the side of the cheat. Or maybe she’s just invented a better elephant trap. The one designed by the humans overlooked a great motivator and innovation driver: how to get a job done more efficiently, from your own point of view.

So I say she’s an inventor, not a cheat. Her partner might decide she needs to refine the invention a bit, though.

I’ve embedded three videos showing three of the 10 pairs of elephants tested, but you really must read the background on NPR or in the New Scientist about this elephant intelligence test experiment, designed and run by Joshua Plotnik, a graduate student at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Note that the embed code seems to have a problem and if you want to re-watch a completed video you’ll have to refresh the page.

Thank you, Jane Arraf, for thoughtful reflections on women journalists who report on places where women are invisible or worse. NPR, Women journalists dodge bullets, sexual assaults

Here is another report on the same subject, but it seems more concerned with the impact on major media than on indivuduals, and I think the choice of photos was inappropriate: how often did Lara Logan report from the front line, her main role, in a dress like this? She was probably not beaten for looking like this, but for the job she was doing. Give her credit for that, please, BBC.

I tip my hat to the journalists who have followed this British court case, worthy of a whodunnit board game.

The BBC describes the boss of Ann Summers, a less is better clothing company, as “being known as one of Britain’s most successful businesswomen”. A bit of safe distancing there, before the writer carries on with the fascinating story of a) a poisoning at the woman’s home, b) where the nanny is involved, and c) where the cook may or may not have done it with a ladle.

After that, it seems to unravel a bit:

“Cox was bailed on Thursday to await sentencing on 4 March. She was originally charged with a further two counts of attempting to poison Ms Gold with sugar and salt, but the indictment against her was amended during the hearing.

“Prosecutor Rachel Davies said Ms Gold, who she referred to as Ms Cunningham, was not harmed after eating the food laced with screen wash on 5 October last year.

‘The harm wasn’t physical. It was anxiety, really, that this was happening to her,’ she said. ‘There was, it appears, some animosity from the defendant towards the cook which then caused the defendant to put certain articles including the screen wash and the salt and sugar into certain food items consumed by Jacqueline Cunningham. She put it into the food to cause the cook to be questioned about it.’”

Sky adds a bit to the story, notably the size of the fortune of the successful businesswoman, but it confuses things a bit at the end by saying this:

“Ms Gold, who has an estimated fortune of £180m, did not attend the hearing. She will be sentenced on March 4.”

Poor thing, doesn’t seem quite fair after all she’s been through.

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Regular reports from the Iso office in Geneva, where the world’s standards are set on everything from beach balls to food safety to lightbulb sizes, tend to make editors’ eyes glaze over. But now and again, along comes news of a standard the world really needs, probably should have had long ago, and finally, someone is doing something about it.

Here’s to the new Iso standard for cigarettes that “limit the serious risk posed by the inadvertent dropping of a lighted cigarette onto flammable materials such as mattresses or upholstered furniture”. It gives manufacturers and regulators a standard test for cigarettes. According to Iso, it can reduce the number of deaths from fires started by cigarettes, by up to half.

The Immaculate Conception, painted by Juan Antonio de Frías y Escalante, Inmaculada Concepción. Museo de Bellas Artes de Córdoba (photo, Wikipedia)

I grew up Catholic, had religion courses regularly in Catholic schools, but somehow I always fell asleep, it seems, when they explained the feast of the Immaculate Conception. I never could work out how Mary conceived Jesus in early December and had him in late December. Or did he bake in the Mama oven for over a year? Biology and religion were tough to match up when it came to the Christmas story.

I remember staring at old masters’ paintings of angels and a young girl but I missed the message, it seems.

Today I tried to reach someone in traditionally Catholic canton Valais in Switzerland, where it’s a holiday, I was reminded, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. It’s not a holiday in neighbouring canton Vaud.

I tried to remember how that story of Mary was explained in the end. Here it is, with a little help from Wikipedia, in case you, too, missed those  religion class lessons.

Geneva’s Patrick Chappatte, whose cartoons we publish on GenevaLunch, recently sent me a link to a Ted Talks speech he gave in July 2010. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing him talk about “The power of cartoons”, as did his international audience. His work, in English, French and German also appears in the International Herald Tribune, Le Temps and NZZ. Here’s the talk: