"Florian Willet, a euthanasia advocate who was detained by Swiss authorities last year after being present when an American woman ended her life using a chamber-like device, has died."

"Mr. Willet’s death was reported in an obituary posted on the website of The Last Resort, his assisted dying group, written by Philip Nitschke, the inventor of the device, known as a Sarco capsule. Mr. Nitschke said in an email that Mr. Willet had died by assisted suicide, but further details about his death remained unclear.... Mr. Willet, who was 47, according to the obituary, was the only person with the American woman when she died using the Sarco device in a remote forest in Switzerland in September... Mr. Willet was released from pretrial detention in December, after which 'he was a changed man,' Mr. Nitschke wrote. 'Gone was his warm smile and self-confidence. In its place was a man who was deeply traumatized by the experience of incarceration and the wrongful accusation of strangulation.'..."

From "Euthanasia Advocate Who Assisted in Woman’s Suicide Dies in Germany/Dr. Florian Willet had been under investigation in Switzerland after being present when an American woman died using a so-called suicide pod" (NYT).

"Central to the questions around the woman’s death is the use of the Sarco capsule. The device, which can be transported to a location of a user’s choosing, is an airtight pod with a window. Inside is a button that initiates the process of replacing life-giving oxygen with nitrogen, killing the person inside within minutes.... 'In the final months of his life, Dr. Florian Willet shouldered more than any man should,' Mr. Nitschke wrote. 'He knew that he did nothing illegal or wrong, but his belief in the rule of law in Switzerland was in tatters.'"

Stay and fight, if you believe in your cause. And yet, what if the cause is the power to push the button on the escape pod when troubles abound? 

"The Sarco, short for sarcophagus, can also be voice-activated, so that physically incapacitated individuals can achieve suicide."

"Its inventor, a retired Australian physician known as Dr Death for his decades-long place at the vanguard of the right-to-die movement, tweeted on Monday that the (unnamed) American woman 'had had an idyllic, peaceful death in a Swiss forest.' Dr Philip Nitschke — for that is his real name — also announced, via The Last Resort, whose website describes it as 'the only accompanied suicide service in Switzerland where the 3D printed Sarco capsule will be used,' that he was 'pleased that the Sarco had performed exactly as it had been designed to do: that is provide an elective, non-drug, peaceful death at the time of the person’s choosing.' The response from the Swiss authorities has been less positive. Asked in parliament about the legal conditions for the use of the Sarco capsule, health minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider suggested that its use would not be legal, saying she doubted the device would comply with product safety law...."

From "I sat in Dr Death’s suicide pod (then had dinner with its maker)/A woman has taken her own life in Switzerland, using the Sarco. Mark Smith met the device’s creator" (London Times).

"15 Countries where people eat dogs and cats."

From Taazakhabar News Bureau.

Highlights:

10. Canada: Dog meat is legally sold at restaurants in Canada.... Food animals are “mammal or bird raised in captivity–whose meat or meat or by-products were for human consumption.” So to obtain a license you have to prove that the dogs were raised explicitly for food and not keep as pets....

12. Switzerland: A small percentage of Swiss population secretly eats cats, dogs, and horses. Eating cat and dog meat is part of Christmas celebrations. While there are no commercial slaughterhouses for cats and dogs, farmers kill the animals themselves.... Swiss cantons of Appenzell and St. Gallen have a tradition of eating dog meat, preserving it as sausages, as well as using it for medicinal purposes.

"After a meeting with the Swiss Federal Council, Switzerland’s president, Ignazio Cassis, said that the country would immediately freeze the assets of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail V. Mishustin and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov..."

"... as well as all 367 individuals sanctioned last week by the European Union.  Switzerland said it was departing from its usual policy of neutrality because of 'the unprecedented military attack by Russia on a sovereign European state,' but expressed a willingness to help mediate in the conflict."

From "Switzerland says it will freeze Russian assets, setting aside a tradition of neutrality" (NYT).

"An Italian man spent 30 years living in Switzerland, starting his own successful ice cream business and raising two sons. But when he tried to become a Swiss citizen in 2015..."

"... he was rejected. The reason? He didn’t know that bears and wolves shared an enclosure at the zoo. That decision — which authorities said pointed to the man’s failure to integrate socially — was overturned on Monday, when the Swiss Federal Tribunal, the country’s supreme court, deemed it to be unreasonable and arbitrary.... [A] panel of judges ordered that the man be granted citizenship immediately.... Several high-profile cases have brought international attention to the peculiarities of Swiss immigration law in recent years — from a Muslim couple who were denied citizenship for refusing a handshake to an animal rights activist deemed too annoying for naturalization."

WaPo reports.

"North Korea said on Tuesday that its leader, Kim Jong-un, had opened a new mountain resort this week, calling it 'an epitome of modern civilization'..."

"...  as the isolated country tries to attract more foreign tourists to blunt the pain of international sanctions.... Tourism is excluded from the sanctions that the United Nations has imposed on the North, which prevent it from earning hard currency by exporting its coal, iron ore, fisheries and textiles. ​Transforming Samjiyon​ from a decrepit holiday town into a modern resort complex complete with ski slopes, spas and hotels has been one of ​Mr. Kim’s pet projects....  As his diplomatic efforts with Mr. Trump have faltered, Mr. Kim has increasingly emphasized a 'self-reliant' economy.... He has been particularly ​focused on building resort towns, a taste some analysts suspect he had acquired when he studied in Switzerland in his teens...."

The NYT reports. The tourists come from China.

According to Wikipedia, Kim Jong-un lived in Switzerland from about 1992 until 1998 — something like ages 9 to 15. (He's only 35 or 36 now (did you realize he was so young?).)

He was described as shy, a good student who got along well with his classmates... a well-integrated and ambitious student who liked to play basketball.... According to some reports, Kim was described by classmates as a shy child who was awkward with girls and indifferent to political issues, but who distinguished himself in sports and had a fascination with the American National Basketball Association and Michael Jordan....

The Washington Post reported in 2009 that Kim Jong-un's school friends recalled he "spent hours doing meticulous pencil drawings of Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan". He was obsessed with basketball and computer games, and was a fan of Jackie Chan action movies....

On the topic of tourism and a country's economy, let me give you this passage I read last night in "The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity" (a book I put in my Kindle a while back, perhaps because one of my readers recommended it):

"He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west. He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be..."

"... but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.... Sam promised me that one day he’d show me the landscape of the Southwest, for though well-travelled, I’d not seen much of our own country. But Sam was dealt a whole other hand, stricken with a debilitating affliction. He eventually stopped picking up and leaving.... Long, slow days passed.... Sam walked to his bed and lay down and went to sleep, a stoic, noble sleep.... I was far away, standing in the rain before the sleeping lion of Lucerne, a colossal, noble, stoic lion carved from the rock of a low cliff.... A long time ago, Sam sent me a letter. A long one, where he told me of a dream that he had hoped would never end. 'He dreams of horses,' I told the lion. 'Fix it for him, will you? Have Big Red waiting for him, a true champion. He won’t need a saddle, he won’t need anything.'..."

Patti Smith writes about Sam Shepard (in The New Yorker).

It was interesting reading that today. I love both Patti Smith and Sam Shepard, but I was just reading — also in The New Yorker, the July 31st issue — an essay called "Can Poetry Change Your Life?" by Louis Menand that said something pretty mean about Patti Smith's writing:

A writer with a playlist of culture heroes must also have a list of the undeserving, the fake, and the fallen, and [Michael Robbins, in "Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music."] does not disappoint us. He writes of the poet James Wright, “It is easy to feel that, if fetal alcohol syndrome could write poetry, it would write this poetry.” He suggests that Robert Hass “has made a career out of flattering middlebrow sensibilities with cheap mystery.” Of Charles Simic: “If the worst are full of passionate intensity, Simic would seem to be in the clear.”

He calls Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” “wimpy crap.” He says that Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” is “highly acclaimed despite her apparent belief that serious writing is principally a matter of avoiding contractions.” His reaction to Neil Young’s memoir is “It’s depressing to learn that one of your heroes writes like a composition student aiming for the earnest tone of a public service announcement.”

I don't know what you think of that writing in Smith's tribute to Shepard, but I think there are about 13 contractions in that short essay. If I were in the mood to imitate Smith's lofty, arty style, I'd blithely, slyly drift from talking about contractions of the 2-words-are-one-word type to an earnest metaphor involving the contractions of childbirth. But I'm just about never in that mood. I'm more in the mood to look up "the sleeping lion of Lucerne" and see if I can get it in Google Street View.

Yes. Here it is:

"Muslim Girls in Switzerland Must Attend Swim Classes With Boys, Court Says."

The NYT reports.

On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the Swiss officials’ decision, rejecting the parents’ argument that the Swiss authorities had violated the “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, which the court enforces.

“The public interest in following the full school curriculum should prevail over the applicants’ private interest in obtaining an exemption from mixed swimming lessons for their daughters,” the court found....

But if you keep reading, you'll see that the court is nowhere nearly as briskly sectarian as the headline and the first few paragraphs make it sound. Further down, there's this (boldface added):

In the case of the swimming classes in Switzerland, the authorities ruled that lessons mixing boys and girls were an important part of the school curriculum; they did allow that the girls could apply for an exemption on religious grounds, but only if they had gone through puberty, which was not the case for the daughters of Mr. Osmanoglu and Ms. Kocabas.

The parents argued that even though the Quran does not require girls’ bodies to be covered until puberty, “their belief commanded them to prepare their daughters for the precepts that would be applied to them from puberty” onward, according to the court’s summary of the case.

The court did provide for a religious exemption, but only at the point where the religious text draws the line: puberty. The court isn't simply imposing a standard government rule on religious people who ask for special treatment. It's just demanding a showing that there really is a religious burden as opposed to a cultural preference. It seems that those asking for an exemption have to premise their request on religious doctrine and they need to prove what they say is religion really is part of their religion. Parents can't just say they are members of a religious group and then force the school to vary the rules to accommodate their tastes and their culture.

Here's a related story from last May: "Muslim Boys at a Swiss School Must Shake Teachers’ Hands, Even Female Ones."

The boys’ school had initially decided to grant the brothers an exemption from the custom after the boys, ages 14 and 16, the sons of an imam from Syria, had argued that Islam did not permit physical contact with a person of the opposite sex, with the exception of immediate family members. Seeking a compromise, the school decided that the boys would not have to shake male teachers’ hands either.

But when the compromise became public last month, it provoked an uproar from educators and politicians across the ideological spectrum.....

After the political pressure, a government board ruled that the students would have shake hands:

[T]he cantonal board for education, culture and sport in Basel-Landschaft...  acknowledged that forcing the students to shake their female teacher’s hand was an “intrusion” on their religious beliefs but said that it was a proportionate one since, in its view, “it did not involve the central tenets of Islam.” 

"Tüpflischiesser — Literally someone who 'shits little dots,' a Tüpflischiesser is a pedant for whom everything has to be done in the right way."

"This could include the government official who makes you redo a form because you’ve filled everything out in black pen rather than the blue pen clearly specified. Or it might include the neighbour who enjoys reminding you cleaning is not allowed after 10pm."

From "Nine surprising Swiss German words you need to know now."

At the Café Fellatio in Geneva.

You can get café and fellatio.

Modelled on similar establishments in Thailand, the proposed Geneva café would add a new dimension to the sex trade in the city of the protestant reformer Calvin.

Put simply, the business model would see men ordering a coffee and using an iPad to select a prostitute they want to perform oral sex on them. They would then sit at the bar.

I like the way Calvin made an appearance in this news story.



In other Swiss sausage news — cutting the other way — the school district of Binningen in Basel-Country, in deference to Muslims, has taken pork off the primary school lunch menu. Not without objection:

“We are outraged. When we first hear [about the decision] we thought we weren’t reading it right,” Swiss People’s Party representative Susanna Keller said at a local council meeting on Monday. Speaking at the meeting, she argued that sausages such as the Klöpfer – a boiled sausage similar to the cervelat – were part of Switzerland’s cultural heritage.

“Could it be that we are adapting to certain cultures, rather than the other way around,” Keller said...

Can't we all — like the bratwurst, the schüblig, and the cervelat — just get along?



We all know that people are the same wherever you go/There is good and bad in everyone/And we learn to live, we learn to give each other/What we need to survive together alive/Cervelat, brat, and schüblig live together in perfect harmony/Side by side on my buffet sideboard, oh Lord, why don't we?

"Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture."

A Vox piece.

"We are fuming - this person acted terribly wrong. We are sorry this happened to @oprah!."

So tweets the Swiss Tourism office after Oprah cries racism when a shopgirl deems a $38,000 handbag "too expensive" and steers her toward other merchandise. Racism has many manifestations, some terribly subtle. Who can tell the difference between a rich lady in don't-you-know-who-I-am mode crushing a humble retail employee and a woman imbued with racial memory vindicating centuries of suffering by perceiving the last nuance of insult?

Michele Bachman renounces her Swiss citizenship "to make it perfectly clear: I was born in America and I am a proud American citizen."

"I am, and always have been, 100% committed to our United States constitution and the United States of America."

Roman Polanski, free at last.

Switzerland has rejected extradition.

The 76-year-old French-Polish film director Roman Polanski will not be extradited to the USA. The freedom-restricting measures against him have been revoked. This announcement was made by Mrs Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, head of the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police (FDJP), in Berne on Monday. The reason for the decision lies in the fact that it was not possible to exclude with the necessary certainty a fault in the US extradition request, although the issue was thoroughly examined. Moreover, also the principles of State action deriving from international public order were taken into account.

What fault in the extradition request? What "principles of State action deriving from international public order"?

UPDATE: NYT reports:

[Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf] said the American authorities had rejected a request by her ministry for records of a hearing by the prosecutor in the case, Roger Gunson, in January 2010 which should have established whether the judge who tried the case in 1977 had assured Mr. Polanski that time he spent in a psychiatric unit would constitute the whole of the period of imprisonment he would serve.

“If this were the case, Roman Polanski would actually have already served his sentence and therefore both the proceedings on which the U.S. extradition request is founded and the request itself would have no foundation,” the Swiss Justice Ministry said in a statement.

"Swiss turn down lawyers-for-pets plan."

Now, there's a teaser/headline that confused me. I thought: What? Do you turn in your lawyer and get a pet in exchange?

But I clicked through — over at BBC.com — and saw that it was just about a proposed national system of government-funded lawyers who would provide legal representation to animals.

ADDED: It was just pointed out to me that I was confused the wrong way.  I should have thought that it was about handing in your pet and getting a lawyer. The expression "cash for clunkers" was used in the explanation of why I was wrong about being wrong. And somehow those 2 wrongs did not make a right.

Death in Switzerland.

Whenever you want:

Assisted suicide is also legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well as in the American states of Oregon, Washington, and Montana. But in all those places, the practice is restricted to people with incurable diseases, involves extensive medical testing and consultation with physicians, and requires that applicants be permanent residents. By contrast, Switzerland’s penal code was designed such that, without fear of prosecution, you can hand someone a loaded pistol and watch as he blows his brains out in your living room. And there is no residency requirement. There are only two conditions: that you have no self-interest in the victim’s death, and that he be of sound mind when he pulls the trigger.

The proposal to ban new minarets in Switzerland.

BBC reports:

Partial results from the poll which closed at 1100 GMT indicated that the German-speaking canton of Lucerne accepted the ban, while French-speaking cantons Geneva and Vaud voted against....

What is it about minarets specifically?

There are unofficial Muslim prayer rooms, and planning applications for new minarets are almost always refused.

The BBC could be clearer here. Is a Muslim place of worship "unofficial" if it lacks a minaret? Regulation of buildings can be neutral toward religion, and one can imagine a government regulation that happens to exclude the construction of minarets. But this is a case of targeting religion. (A ban like this in the United States would violate both the Free Exercise and the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.)

Supporters of a ban claim that allowing minarets would represent the growth of an ideology and a legal system - Sharia law - which are incompatible with Swiss democracy.

So it is not only discrimination against religion, it is a restriction of the sort of speech that is most valued in a democracy — criticism of the government. This argument, an attempt to excuse discrimination against religion, makes the ban worse, not better.

But others say...

One hardly needs to hear from the other side. The supporters make the argument against themselves.

... the referendum campaign has incited hatred. On Thursday the Geneva mosque was vandalised for the third time during the campaign....

The president of Zurich's Association of Muslim Organisations, Tamir Hadjipolu, told the BBC that if the ban was implemented, Switzerland's Muslim community would live in fear.

"This will cause major problems because during this campaign in the last two weeks different mosques were attacked, which we never experienced in 40 years in Switzerland.

"So with the campaign... the Islamaphobia has increased very intensively."

Now, this is the situation without the ban, so it's not obvious whether actually having the ban would make things worse or better. If the campaign for the ban is the problem, then Hadjipolu too is critical of free speech. Ironically, both the supporters and the opponents of the ban are afraid of free speech.

ADDED: Swiss feminists lead the fight against minarets, which they portray as "'male power symbols' and reminders of Islam’s oppression of women."

AND: Final results:

In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.

The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution.

Roman Polanski is now in custody for having sex with a 45-year-old woman.

He did that that 32 years ago, when she was 13. You would think that by now it would be — if not forgotten or even forgiven — at least irrelevant. He's avoided capture for so long as he's lolled about in Europe, collecting kudos, and he's gotten so old — 76 — that it seems as though the reprehensible crime only exists in the sealed-away past.

And now that another woman — a 61-year-old woman, who, when she was 21 (not as young as 13), murdered his long-ago wife and his never-born child — has died, that other world seems impossibly distant and deceased. His victimizer Susan Atkins is dead, and the woman he victimized, Samantha Geimer, has settled with him. It might be part of the secret settlement, but Geimer does not want the old criminal charges pursued.

Nonetheless, the Swiss police arrested Roman Polanski when he touched down in Zurich to pick up another prize. Why did that happen?

"There was a valid arrest request and we knew when he was coming," ministry spokesman Guido Balmer told The Associated Press. "That's why he was taken into custody."

Oh! There is memory, and there is law, and you cannot rise above it, not by extreme suffering or extreme old age, not by great fame or great accomplishment, and not by profuse reconciliation with the victim.

Roman Polanski has been called to account at long last.

Suddenly, the Swiss are inundated with nudist hikers, many from Germany.

It's called "FKK" — "free body culture."

Can you imagine a bunch of Germans arriving in America, thinking it would be okay to traipse about in the nude?

IN THE COMMENTS: bill says:

They're not wearing shorts, so they should get Althouse points for that.

"People who use heroin, they have the image of losers. They have the image of... junkies."

It's not fashionable anymore to be a heroin addict, so why not dispense it, legally, at a clinic?