April fool: you choose
Reading today's news, looking for the prank
Today being 1 April, news outlets here in Switzerland traditionally run a fake story. Even here, a safe and affluent paradise of direct democracy, it is getting hard to tell which of today’s reports in the NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the world’s best German-language newspaper) is just pretending.
For your (and my) amusement, there is a poll at the bottom of this article so you can guess which one of these might be the annual prank. I promise the resolution at the end of the week.
On page one we have “Marine Le Pen banned from standing for election,” which might have made me suspicious once. Since I follow the news from our neighbors to the west, I already knew that there was an ongoing court case regarding the, ahem, redirection of European Union funds into the coffers of Mme Le Pen’s political party.
How about “The working population in Switzerland suffers more than retirees”? I laugh. This is completely true! The current generation of Swiss retirees is living large!1 This front-pager continues in the national news section on page eight and cites the latest federal statistics on the “rate of deprivation.”
Moving right along… on page nine, I read that the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lugano in southern Switzerland has appointed an official exorcist. Apparently the last priest with this function died in 2020 and the office had been vacant ever since. This brings the total of official exorcists in Switzerland’s six dioceses to three. Two exorcists are in the combined diocese of Fribourg-Lausanne-Geneva. Interestingly, the dioceses in German-speaking Switzerland (St Gallen, Chur, and Basel) don’t seem to need an exorcist; nor do the Catholics in Sion (southern Alps).
Next we have “The Wizard of Entlebuch versus mass tourism.” The so-called Wizard of Entlebuch is the Michelin-starred chef Stefan Wiesner, internationally known for his avant-garde, nature-based cuisine. Participants in a sustainable tourism conference in the Swiss tourism hotspot Lucerne made an excursion to Wiesner’s restaurant in a remote village in the UN-recognized Biosphere Entlebuch (in the Canton of Lucerne).
In the Zurich and Region news section is always something that’s hard to believe. Today on page 11 we have “Canton2 puts a stop to the city’s speed limits.” The city of Zurich has been governed by the left, farther left, and green parties long enough to make even their serious initiatives seem a bit wacky. Here we a have a city with excellent, popular, regionally-anchored public transport, but like everywhere else in the world, there are more cars as the population grows. One of the many methods to discourage drivers has been to reduce city speed limits from 50 kph to 30 kph (for US readers, 30 mph to 18 mph). Now some city council members are now calling for 20 kph (12 mph) to change the “street hierarchy”. Seemingly tired of this, the cantonal council has revoked the city’s override privilege after 154 years and will now be setting the speed limits on cantonal streets and roads with supra-municipal significance.
I cannot wait to join this happy bunch of healthy and wealthy pensioners! “Becoming a Swiss retiree” was not on my list all those years ago, but now that I have read the fine print, I am all for it.
Within the canton of Zurich, the cities of Zurich and Winterthur have had the privilege of making traffic rules for cantonal roads on their territory since the end of the 19th century.
This is such a great post style/idea! Loved it. It has to be the official exorcist, surely!?