Switzerland Today
Greetings from rain-soaked Bern,
The good thing about Switzerland is that things work. Especially when you need them. Emergency numbers in storms and floods, for example. Well, not this morning. Following days of incessant rain – I’ll be building an ark this weekend – not only were flood warnings issued and train services disrupted, but emergency numbers for the police, ambulance and fire services were down in many parts of the country overnight. A glitch with the Swisscom network, now fixed, was to blame.
In the news Faster, higher, stronger – emptier.
- The beleaguered organisers of the Tokyo Olympics have been forced into a U-turn and now say most events will not be watched by spectators after all. “The number one goal is to make the Games safe for everyone,” said Switzerland’s Christophe Dubi, Olympic Games Executive Director, adding that “not to hold [the Games] would be inconceivable”.
- The pace of vaccination has dropped sharply in Switzerland since mid-June, and the pool of people willing to be vaccinated may soon be exhausted. Unless the trend is reversed, Health Minister Alain Berset’s target of 80% will be missed.
Deep Dive Lab-grown chocolate: scientific marvel or filthy abomination?
SWI swissinfo.ch headed to Zurich University of Applied Sciences and witnessed “a brown mass being shaken around inside a big, bulging plastic bag”. But how did it taste?
Chocolate has been around for thousands of years, but it’s largely thanks to pioneering Swiss confectioners and entrepreneurs that it’s become a $100 billion a year industry. But Swiss food scientists are still always on the look-out for the next big thing that will part chocoholics from their change. There was melt-resistant chocolate, then “chameleon” chocolate that – if you could find it – shimmered like a rainbow. And whatever happened to pink chocolate, heralded a couple of years ago as the “fourth kind of chocolate” that was going to be a hit with millennials?
Word from the street What goes up, often doesn’t come down – at least when it’s rubbish on mountains.
In his latest newsletter on the Alpine environment, SWI swissinfo.ch journalist Dale Bechtel looks at the causes, consequences and possible solutions to an increasingly common phenomenon.
In the past, Dale notes, “it was not unusual [in Switzerland] for notices to be pinned to the walls of huts, directing visitors to the nearby cliff where they were instructed to throw over their used cans and other waste”.
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