Switzerland is the best place to be born

Switzerland, which has a reputation for jealously guarding banking customers' identities with a numbered system, no longer shields criminal assets and generally cooperates with foreign investigators, United States officials said. It is a member of the group that drew up the list.
Governments decided to pressure laundering centers in part because the sheer volume of transactions by drug cartels, mafias and corrupt officials has expanded dramatically, to at least $600 billion a year, United States officials said.

The greater impetus was from a succession of market-shaking crises made possible, the thinking goes, by the ease of moving giant sums of money around the globe without oversight. Speculators used financial havens to shield themselves from scrutiny as they focused on Asian and Latin American currencies, government officials said.
Destabilizing capital flight from Russia, most notably the $7 billion handled by the Bank of New York and investigated by United States officials last year, was impossible to stop, because some nations, including Russia, did not have laws against laundering.
Closer to home, leading banks and regulators knew little about transactions that Long-Term Capital Management, a giant Connecticut hedge fund, had worked on because the fund did much of its business through offshore centers. Long-Term Capital melted down in late 1998, rattling markets and prompting a $3.6 billion Wall Street bailout.
Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, who made combating laundering and tax evasion a high priority for the Clinton administration, hailed the list. Washington ''welcomes this landmark step to limit the capacity of drug dealers, terrorists, organized criminals and corrupt foreign officials to launder their ill-gotten gains through safe havens,'' Mr. Summers said.

In Switzerland, a life sentence can be given for murder, but under Swiss criminal law “life” doesn’t mean that the perpetrator remains in prison for the rest of their days.

+ What does “life” mean in Swiss criminal law?

After 15 years, sometimes after just ten years, a conditional release is possible. It is generally the norm in Switzerland that a criminal is conditionally released after serving two-thirds of their sentence.

Lenient judges

Hans-Georg Koch, a criminal law expert at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, Germany, downplays these international comparisons. First, he says criminal law comparisons are generally very difficult to make because of differing legal systems. Second, he says it is important to compare the actual penalties, rather than the sentences stipulated in the law, as these can reveal little.

Unfortunately, there are no statistics comparing sentences across countries. But it is clear that Swiss judges tend to deliver lenient sentences: their length tends towards the lower end of the range. “Switzerland has a very unusual penalty law, above all in the day-to-day application of penalties by the courts,” says Martin Killias, a renowned Swiss criminologist and criminal lawyer.

Gabriella Matefi, the president of the Court of Appeal in Basel City, explains further: “The higher end of the sentencing range is intended for the very serious cases that a normal person can perhaps not even imagine. In judging real crimes, sentencing is on average in the lower half or lower third of the possible range, whether it is a matter of fraud, bodily harm or even manslaughter.”

“In Switzerland, heatwaves usually occur in conjunction with high-pressure conditions and a south to south-westerly flow of air, so that warm, dry air is pushed toward the Alpine region,” notes the federal Natural Hazards Portalexternal link, which defines a heatwave as “a period of extreme heat stress, which can endanger human health”.
MeteoSwissexternal link, the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, bases its heat warnings on a heat index that takes air temperature and humidity into account. The warnings are issued via media release and teletext, with regular updates online.

A little late night rant.

I have been here for three days now (long story - this is my second attempt to drive my new car back to Malta, having been delayed due to the weather conditions).

However, since being here I have felt the same general sense of malaise and lethargy that I felt when I lived here full-time. The physical manifestations are dry skin (yes, I know it's cold but I use a very good moisturiser), limp, lacklustre hair and serious fluid retention. I am very intrigued as to why this should be in a country that I had always considered to be a very healthy place to live. Spending a lot of my time in a sunnier climate I know that this has nothing to do with SAD or lack of vitamin D since I have been here for such a short time.

I can only surmise that it is the water that is affecting my skin and hair and possibly the liberal use of Aromat that is causing my fluid retention ... can anyone else shed any light on this?

I wish I could! My skin has been dry and the psoriasis on my scalp has gone mad ever since I moved here

My former flatmate (from Brazil) also had similar problems and we put it down to the water (in our non-expert, non-medical opinions).

It's amazing how quickly the body reacts really!