The Swiss remain very big meat eaters!

blue News and Keystone-ATS give you a first overview of the news, with the latest news unearthed in the press. Without forgetting birthdays and the saying of the day!

Today's highlights

RELIGION: Pope Francis is due to celebrate Christmas mass in Rome on Tuesday and open the holy door at St. Peter's Basilica. The sovereign pontiff will thus mark the beginning of the jubilee of the Catholic Church which takes place every 25 years and must last one year.

FRANCE: The ministers of the new French government take office on Tuesday, on Christmas Eve, during transfers of power which must specify the road map of Prime Minister François Bayrou, confident in his ability to avoid censure from Parliament. The two former prime ministers Elisabeth Borne, appointed to the ministry of education, and Manuel Valls, to that of overseas territories, will be particularly scrutinized, as will another returning minister, Gérald Darmanin, who will occupy the justice portfolio.

THE NETHERLANDS: An Amsterdam court is due to deliver its verdict on Tuesday in the case of seven men accused of violence against Israeli football fans on the night of November 7-8. These events occurred after a match between Ajax Amsterdam and Maccabi Tel Aviv. The prosecution requested sentences ranging from one month to two years of imprisonment. The images of this violence sparked a furious reaction from Israel, which had spoken of a “pogrom”.

Seen in the press

FOOD: Nearly 20% of Swiss spending is devoted to meat when shopping for food, the Basler Zeitung, the Berner Zeitung, the Bund and the Tages-Anzeiger reported on Tuesday, referring to an analysis by the meat industry association. Provenance meat.

The trend is downward, but consumption per person remains well above the maximum 18.7 kilograms of meat that an adult should consume, according to the criteria of the Swiss Confederation and the Swiss Nutrition Society. According to the latest figures from Proviande (2023), each Swiss consumes 50.8 kilos per year. Pork is the most popular, followed by chicken, beef and veal.

ALCOHOL: Thirty-two of the 67 Geneva restaurants and bars inspected in October during a test purchase campaign served beer to young people under the age of 16, recruited for the occasion, the Tribune de Genève reported on Tuesday. Among the selected establishments, some had already been put to the test last February, during a previous campaign.

At the time, there were no fines, but a simple reminder of the instructions. Five of them reoffended during the check carried out in the autumn. This time, offenders will receive a fine of 500 francs and 1000 francs in the event of a repeat offense.

BANKS: National Councilor Roger Nordmann (PS/VD), member of the parliamentary commission of inquiry (CEP) into the Credit Suisse debacle, calls in Tuesday's Le Temps to link the supervision of UBS to the Swiss National Bank (SNB) , like in the United States or the United Kingdom. According to him, FINMA, the Swiss financial market supervisory authority, “is not up to the task”. Bank leaders “will never respect an entity that does not have tens of billions on its balance sheet,” he explains.

He also proposes to make the state rescue of a systemic bank “very unpleasant” for shareholders and management, in particular by fixing in advance in the law the expropriation of shareholders and by providing that dividends and a part of the bonuses are deposited in a fund blocked with the SNB.

CYCLING: The father of cyclist Muriel Furrer, the 18-year-old from Zurich who died at the end of September during a fall in the junior race at the world cycling championships in Zurich, calls in Tuesday's Neue Zürcher Zeitung for the implementation of a bicycle tracking system. The Worlds race route made two laps around Zurich.

The accident occurred on a descent near Küsnacht (ZH). The sportswoman was only found an hour and a half later. “For me, it took too long until she was found,” notes Reto Furrer. The bikes were equipped with transponders, but for seamless tracking, a motorcycle would have been needed nearby.

Birthdays and jubilees

– 25 years ago (1999): coup d'état in Ivory Coast. General Robert Guei overthrows President Henri Konan Bédié.

– 30 years ago (1994): death of British playwright John Osborne at the age of 65. He had achieved fame in 1956 with “The Peace of Sunday”, a play which was to be at the origin of the literary movement of “angry young people”.

– 50 years ago (1974): Cyclone Tracy devastates the town of Darwin in northern Australia, killing 71 people and causing a supply shortage in the isolated town.

– 70 years ago (1954): Laos was declared independent at the Geneva conference on Indochina, subject to neutrality and the withdrawal of all communist and French troops.

– 100 years ago (1924): proclamation of the republic in Albania.

– 100 years ago (1924): birth of the French historian Marc Ferro, a great specialist in the USSR and Russia, but also in the wars of the 20th century, colonization and cinema. For 12 years he presented the program “Parallel History” on Arte.

– 600 years ago (1624): death of the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, first European to reach India by circumnavigating Africa.

Saying of the day

“Good weather in Sainte-Adèle is a gift from heaven.”