FC Basel Celebrates 20th Swiss Championship; Title Paternity Leave Referendum Gathers Momentum; Learn To Speak Klingon, NOW!; Basel Chef Competes For World's Best Pastry Prize

News For 6 June 2017

With a spectacular celebration in the heart of Basel the FC Basel commemorated their 20th Swiss championship title last Saturday.  Over a thousand fans were present to celebrate their club’s achievement. Starting next season, their jerseys will feature two stars; each star symbolizes 10 championships won. 10 Waggis floats made the party a summer Fasnacht parade of sorts, and even the trams through the heart of the city were rerouted. Several former players also joined the the festivities, including Murat Yakin, Yann Sommer, Marco Streller and Xherdan Shaqiri, to pay their respects to the club and its management. Even Roger Federer, instead of attending the French Open in Paris, decided to come out so support his hometown team celebrations at the St. Jakob stadium.

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A popular Swiss initiative requiring 20 days paternity leave for fathers has gathered the requisite 100,000 signatures to force a referendum later this year.  Sponsored by Swiss labor organization Travail Suisse, Pro Familia Suisse and groups representing feminists and parents, the initiative was started last year.  Unique in Europe, Switzerland is the only country that currently has no statutory paternity leave.  Seeking to rectify this shortfall, the initiative, if passed in its current form would require 20 flexible days of paternity leave for employees during the first year of the baby's life.  The law in Switzerland currently requires 14 weeks of paid maternity leave for new mothers.

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If you are fluent in Klingon, you belong to an exclusive group of around 20 people from around the world. Swiss linguist Andre Müller, who is one of the 20, would like to make the language more accessible, and has started offering Klingon language classes in Basel, Bern and St. Gallen. He said that the classes in Basel and St. Gallen each had eight students – the one in Bern boasted a total of 36. Müller’s crash courses are divided into two parts: in the first, he takes a wider approach and talks about constructed languages in general, the Klingon community, and how the language was invented. The second half is more applied, looking closely at the grammar and pronunciation of the language. The classes are offered at Migros Klusbschule and cost around 20.- CHF per lesson.

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Yoshiko Sato left Japan at the age of 23 to pursue her career as a pastry chef.  Having worked as the Chef Patissierre at the Dolder hotel in Zurich, since the beginning of 2017 she has been working at Roche's employee fine-dining restaurant Tavero in Basel.  Now she is on her way to the Patissier of the Year competition in Hamburg on June 11 to compete against four other chefs for the title Best In the World.  The winner will be crowned in October at the Anuga Expo in Cologne, the world's largest food fair.  The competition will be judged by 13 world renowned pastry chefs and gastro critics in the categories of petit-fours, pralines and desserts made from compulsory ingredients.