The number of obese children and adolescents aged 5-19 has risen tenfold over the past four decades, reports the World Health Organization (WHO)external link. Wednesday, October 11, is World Obesity Day.
On the occasion of World Obesity Day, the WHO and Imperial College London released their latest study on childhood and adolescent obesity worldwide, which was published in the medical journal The Lancet.
Swiss scientists say that $3.4 million worth of gold and silver end up in the nation’s waste treatment plants annually.
According to scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) about 43 kilograms of gold and three tonnes of silver pass through the nation’s wastewater treatment plant every year. With gold prices hovering just below $1,300 and silver above $17 an ounce, that waste is worth around $3.4 million annually – in other words that is expensive poop.
For the third straight year, Luxembourg has held on to its position atop UNCTAD’s ranking of 143 countries’ capacity to support online shopping and other business-to-consumer e-commerce. Among the top 10 economies in the 2017 UNCTAD B2C E-commerce Index, seven are European while three are from the Asia-Pacific region.
The index, first published in 2015, draws on data on Internet use, secure servers, use of financial accounts (including mobile money accounts) and the reliability of postal deliveries, and shows that e-commerce readiness varies by region.
With initial coin offerings getting attention from regulators around the world, European Central Bank governing council member Ewald Nowotny has disclosed that the European Central Bank is looking at putting regulation on the books regarding ICOs.
"Bitcoin is not a currency, it is highly speculative and volatile, it is not subject to any supervision either, and the stock market movements of the recent period make it clear,” explains Nowotny speaking in an interview with the Austrian weekly magazine Trend as covered by Bloomberg.
The Swiss National Bank’s holdings of foreign currency touched a record 724.4 billion francs ($739 billion) in September, an increase of 1 percent from August. The franc slipped against both the euro and the dollar last month, two currencies in which the central bank holds a large portion of its reserves. Still, the franc remains strong, requiring the SNB to stick with its policy of negative rates and occasional interventions, President Thomas Jordan said earlier this week.
Switzerland’s KOF Economic Institute downgraded its growth projection for this year because of weak performance in the first half.
In the Autumn Economic Forecast, released Thursday, the institute lowered growth outlook for 2017 to 0.8 percent from 1.3 percent. The think tank said prospects for GDP growth were much gloomier than it had appeared in June.
Switzerland has the highest gun ownership rates per capita among its neighbors and other Western countries, but mass shootings are rare, local media reported Thursday.
This was highlighted in Swissinfo, the website of the Swiss national broadcaster, after the mass shooting in Las Vegas in Nevada, the United States claimed the lives of 59 people and wounded hundreds of others this week.
The Swiss financial regulatory board, Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), has increased its investigations into ICOs in Switzerland, according to a press release last week. The move comes after a substantial uptick in the number of ICOs based in the country, according to the document.
After noticing a marked increase in the number of initial coin offerings (ICOs) made in the country, Switzerland’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has decided to take a closer look at this new, cryptocurrency-powered fundraising method.
