A Swiss-designed telescope travelling on board the CHEOPS space satellite has revealed three previously undiscovered planets orbiting a distant star, whose physical composition raises questions about how planetary systems are formed. Previous observ...

Amnesty International has urged the Swiss government to reconsider possible repatriation flights of Ethiopian asylum seekers. The human rights group said it was concerned about reports of a planned deportation operation next Wednesday of several Eth...

Nearly 1,000 cases of infections with a new strain of coronavirus have been found in Switzerland so far. The British variant accounts for just over 470 cases and only 16 cases of infections with the South African strain have been identified to date ...

Lebanon’s foreign minister has held talks with the Swiss ambassador to Beirut after Switzerland started a probe into possible money laundering and embezzlement at the Mideast country’s central bank. Foreign Minister Charbel Wehbi and ambassador ...

More than two-thirds of the Swiss population regularly use more than one language in their everyday lives. Just under 2% regularly use five languages or more. The proportion of polyglots has increased slightly since 2014, according to the Federal St...

Building a sustainable global economy, digitalisation and increasing international cooperation and are among the important issues on the Davos Agenda, said Guy Parmelin in his opening speech at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) online conference. �...

The end of stock exchange equivalence between Switzerland and the European Union has given Europe’s third-largest exchange company a greater share of the market, says Thomas Wellauer, who also predicts benefits for its clients once Swiss shares beg...

Leaders of the six biggest political parties in the country have sent a joint letter to the federal government, urging it to put in place a strict testing and quarantine regime for all travellers, in a bid to limit the spread of the new coronavirus v...

An international research team including experts based in Zurich have suggested a new theory for planet formation and how differences in the chemical composition of planets and meteorites came about. Planets of the inner solar system – Mercury, Ve...

Staff at crèches and after-school care facilities should be among the first to be offered the vaccine, especially since more contagious variants of the coronavirus are circulating, says the Swiss Childcare Association, Kibesuisse. The system of chi...

Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz has been handed a five-year sentence and a CHF50 million (almost $56.5 million) fine over suspected corrupt business practices in Guinea. Steinmetz was alleged to have paid bribes to secure mining rights in the A...

Switzerland is to supply emergency shelters to families left homeless after a strong earthquake in Croatia in December. Thousands of people lost their homes in the 6.4 strength quake, which hit the Sisak-Moslavina region of central Croatia on Decemb...

Of the 459,700 doses of the vaccine from Pfizer and Moderna delivered to Switzerland, 169,783 have been used so far. On Friday, the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) finally shared up-to-date nationwide vaccination numbers. After several postp...

Five environmental activists have been acquitted by a Basel criminal court of charges relating to protest action that blocked access to a UBS bank building in Basel in 2019. For some charges, there was insufficient evidence, the judge said. The prot...

Libya's new political leadership - until the elections in December - will be decided on Swiss soil, it has been announced. Members of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) will meet in Switzerland in early February to elect their interim execu...

Author and dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt will feature on a commemorative silver coin to mark the centenary of his birth. “By issuing the 20-franc silver coin on the occasion of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 100th birthday, Swissmint is honouring this ...

The world’s biggest art fair, Art Basel, has been postponed to the autumn due to the coronavirus. The international art organisation said on Thursday that the Basel show would be moved from June until September this year, “due to the ongoing imp...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she intends to hold discussions with Switzerland on possible controls at their shared border. The aim is to prevent the spread of Covid-19 or its mutations. “We will certainly have to discuss the situation ...

With the help of machine learning, Swiss researchers have found that foreign jobseekers are on average 6.5% less likely to be contacted by recruiters than Swiss people with identical requirements. Most studies on discrimination in recruitment have u...

The coronavirus pandemic left its mark on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in Switzerland last year. The volume of transactions halved, and the number of deals was also down. Overall, the number of transactions with Swiss participation fell from 402 t...

A special public prosecutor has been named in connection with the Crypto spying affair involving manipulated encryption devices which the CIA and the German intelligence agency used to spy on half the world. Peter Marti, a former judge and district ...

A review of 81 judgements in the past 15 years has found that more than two-thirds of gender discrimination appeals were rejected by Switzerland’s highest court. The findings have renewed calls for employees to have better access to justice. The s...

Former Julius Bär CEO Boris Collardi has had his knuckles rapped by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) following an investigation into money laundering. Collardi, who is now a partner at Geneva-based bank Pictet, says he has a...

The British mutation of the coronavirus first appeared in Switzerland in October, two months earlier than previously thought, the federal health office has confirmed. So far 479 infections with mutated coronaviruses have been recorded in Switzerland...

Compulsory and post-compulsory schools in Switzerland should not be closed immediately because of Covid-19, according to the government’s scientific taskforce and the Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education. The conference’s conclusions, w...

The Swiss government wants the state-owned bank to become a full-fledged commercial enterprise. A part of the public Swiss Post group, PostFinance has 2.7 million customers and CHF120 billion ($135 billion) in client assets, making it a “too big ...

Jacques Pitteloud, the Swiss ambassador to the United States, does not foresee an improvement in bilateral relations following the change of power in Washington. The Biden administration will “probably not have much time for Switzerland”, he says...

An air pollution mortality ranking of more than 1,000 European cities shows that urban Switzerland can do better. The ranking – by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health in collaboration with researchers from the Swiss Tropical and Public Heal...

The Swiss attorney general's office has requested legal assistance from Lebanon in the context of a probe into "aggravated money laundering" and possible embezzlement tied to the Lebanese central bank, Reuters reports from Beirut. The probe is looki...

A Syrian woman who suffered a stillbirth on deportation from Switzerland will not receive compensation, authorities have decided. But her lawyer is appealing, the Swiss public broadcaster SRF reports. This Federal Department of Finance decision not...