Gerry's News Digest is for more advanced users of English (at level B2 and above). The English is not simplified in any way. In his News Digest Gerry takes a personal look at some of the stories that have been filling the newspapers and the TV screens in Britain, Switzerland and elsewhere. How have the British been adjusting to the ban on smoking in their pubs, for example? Will the Swiss react the same way? What's happening in Liverpool in its year as European Capital of Culture?

Gerry is a pseudonym used by Gareth Hughes for the character he has created for his podcasts. Gareth, like Gerry, is from Wales and he came to Switzerland more than 20 years ago with his wife and three children. In summer 2008 he and his wife moved back to Wales. Gareth's job and his life have been bound up with languages: the learning and teaching of them to adults from many different backgrounds. Languages are inextricably bound up with culture, and it's the strange and amusing contacts between languages and cultures that he experiences on a daily basis in Switzerland, in Britain and on his travels through Europe that form the basis for his podcasts.