Did you know that Switzerland has around 65'000 kilometres of hiking trails? That's about 1.5 times the circumference of the earth! A huge number of municipalities and volunteer organisations maintain the hiking trails and offer hikes in all the cantons.
Basel Blackout; Transport Battle Concludes; Teen Depression Distress
News For 18 May 2021
In the early hours of Monday a blackout left 11,000 IWB customers without power. The outage affected the neighborhoods of Gundeldingen, St. Jakob, and Gellert and lasted in some parts of the affected areas until past three in the morning. Jasmin Gianferrari, project manager for public relations for the power utility said the outage was caused by a defective power cable in the medium voltage network. She went on to say that workers were quickly dispatched to restore function to the power network. Lengthy power outages are uncommon in Basel, with the average interruption lasting less than 5 minutes.
**********
The letter E is the most commonly used letter in both the German and English language. But one must be careful where one writes those letters - especially when it comes to brand names. Baselland Transport AG (BLT), operator of Basel's public transport system, found this out when a lawsuit landed on their doorstep from the billion-dollar US rental-car company Enterprise Holdings. The U.S company says the name “Pick e Bike”, as the BLT's mobility sharing service is called, violated their trademark rights and took them to the Swiss Federal Administrative Court. In the end, the court found that the BLT brand “Pick e Bike” stood out sufficiently from “Rent-A-Car” and that there was no likelihood of confusion. The judgement called that Enterprise has to bear the procedural costs of 4500 francs, the BLT has to pay compensation of 3200 francs and its own legal fees.
**********
A survey of four hundred 16-19 year old high school students in Basel conducted by researchers from the University of Basel has revealed an astonishingly high rate of depressive symptoms. Professor Dominique de Quervain, leader of the study, also pointed out that compared to the study concluded in the prior year, the rate had climbed from 19 to 27 percent for the same population. The studies were undertaken to evaluate the impact of Covid-19 related stress on teen populations. In the preliminary results, it appears the greatest cause of stress for affected students stems from the fear of missing schoolwork, scheduling related to unplanned school closures and fear of quarantine.