Farm animals and apiaries in Switzerland should receive better protection from bears, the government said on Wednesday in a report on how to deal with bears. The previous practice in dealing with wild brown bears corresponded to pan-European guideli...

The Swiss government has decided to adapt its Covid testing and quarantine policy and has earmarked extra funds to soften the impact of restrictions imposed on companies. People coming from high-risk countries will have to present a negative coronav...

Swiss film director Andrea Štaka has won the main prize at the Solothurn Film Festival with Mare, “a feature film that looks like a documentary or reality itself”, according to the jury. In her third feature film, the Zurich-based filmmaker tel...

Britain and Switzerland will press on with plans to strike a trade deal for their vast financial services industries, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday ahead of talks with his Swiss counterpart. The Treasury said the virtu...

Guy Parmelin, who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year, has warned of extremism and “unhealthy instincts” in times of crisis and instability. In a message marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, Parmelin called for...

The diaries of Bruno Manser, a Swiss environmental and human rights activist, have been donated to the Museum der Kulturen in Basel. The ethnologist became known far beyond the borders of Basel for his passionate but also perilous commitment to the ...

The number of residents without a religious faith has leapt over the past 20 years. In 2019, almost one-third (29.5%) of those over 15 did not belong to any religion, compared to 11.4% in 2000. The percentage of non-believers in Switzerland in 2019 ...

The falling numbers of Covid-19 infections and deaths is giving some grounds for optimism in Switzerland, but health officials warn that people cannot afford to relax with variant strains in the country. The number of infections has been gradually y...

More than CHF2 billion of venture capital flowed into young Swiss companies for the second year in a row, a sustained rate of funding that defied the economic destruction wreaked by the pandemic last year. Investors poured more money into fledging c...

Millions of children around the world can’t go to school, but a Swiss-based platform has set out to change that. The Geneva Global Hub for Education in Emergencies aims to help the 127 million children who do without schooling because of humanitar...

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...