The federal government spends CHF4 million (around $4.4 million) a year to minimise the damage caused by predators like wolves and lynx. Of this amount some three million Swiss francs are being invested in the protection of herds and flocks, the gov...

While the overall number of foreigners in the country increased in 2020, the number of new arrivals fell. The coronavirus crisis has had an impact on annual immigration figures, according to figures released by the State Secretariat for Migration (...

The Swiss Teachers’ Association is demanding coronavirus tests be extended to schools across the whole of Switzerland. The federal government has rejected the idea, saying cantons have sovereignty regarding education. Cantons Basel Country, Zug an...

The money, worth CHF240 million, is part of illicit kickbacks on the sale of six French-made Lafayette warships to Taiwan in 1991. The decision of the Taiwanese Supreme Court at the end of 2019 confirming the illegal origin of the funds held in Swi...

The humanitarian charity Swiss Solidarity collected more than CHF43 million ($47.7 million) in donations last year for victims of the coronavirus pandemic in Switzerland. This is the largest amount since the CHF50 million collected after a devastatin...

Marmosets perceive interactions with fellow marmosets as contextualised conversations, according to Zurich researchers writing in the journal Science Advances. The small monkeys also draw conclusions from this, for example when choosing cooperative p...

The World Economic Forum’s special annual meeting – exceptionally being held in Singapore this year – has been pushed back by three months. The WEF conference will now convene from August 17-20. The coronavirus pandemic forced WEF to relocate ...

Interior Minister Alain Berset says Switzerland is unlikely to ease its anti-Covid restrictions before the end of February amid fears of new strains of the virus. He also said it was not realistic to expect that the measures, in place since mid-Janu...

The Swiss government has agreed to grant parliament a say on a controversial United Nations migration pact. “Assent to the Global Compact for Migration is in Switzerland’s interest,” said a statement published on Wednesday. Initially the gove...

The Swiss finance ministry has removed Britain from a list of countries requiring authorisation for its securities trading platforms. This decision follows the recognition of the equivalence of Swiss stock exchange regulations by the British parliam...

An 89-year-old passenger ship, out of commission owing to the coronavirus pandemic, has been re-purposed as a Covid-19 vaccination centre for thousands of residents from towns on Lake Constance. The 500-passenger MS Thurgau normally carries tourists...

Switzerland has joined international protests following a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny by a court in Russia on Tuesday. “We call on Russia to uphold its international obligations and principles of the rul...

American pharmaceutical firm Bristol Myers Squibb is selling one of its Swiss medicine production facilities to the Chinese company WuXi STA. The Couvet factory in western Switzerland employs 100 staff manufacturing medicines in capsule and tablet f...

Swiss cheese continues to sell well abroad with exports increasing by 1.6% in 2020. The pandemic has not made a dent in the global appetite for cheese from the Alpine nation. A total of 77,124 tonnes was exported last year with a value of CHF693....

Switzerland is re-opening a mothballed facility to house disruptive asylum seekers. The high security Les Verrières centre in the western canton of Neuchâtel was first opened in December 2019 but was shut down six months later to save costs as the...

A new European Union regulation will no longer recognise medical device quality certificates obtained in Switzerland. It is feared that some Swiss manufacturers of medical devices will face additional barriers to export their products to the EU from ...

The United Nations special envoy to Myanmar, Christine Schraner Burgener, says the country risks sliding back into prolonged military dictatorship, international isolation and suppression of human rights. On Monday, the Swiss diplomat told Swiss pub...

Swiss International Air Lines is scaling back its Geneva flight operations to an "absolute minimum" until the end of February, citing coronavirus travel restrictions. Cuts are also being made at Zurich Airport. “Swiss International Air Lines (SWIS...

The risk of catching coronavirus on a 12-minute gondola ride is 100 times less than during a normal working day in a small two-person office, according to a Swiss study. Scientists at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technolo...

The number of asylum requests in Switzerland fell by almost a quarter (23%) to 11,041 people last year, annual statistics reported on Monday have revealed. The State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) said the decline was due to the coronavirus pandemi...

The Swiss foreign ministry has urged Myanmar’s military, which seized power on Monday in a coup, to “immediately suspend its actions”. It also called for the release of all government officials and civil society leaders. “The Swiss foreign m...

The Swiss government appears more concerned about the human rights situation in China according to Swiss media reports, but it has no plans to distance itself from the country. Instead, it wants to mediate more dialogue. According to a draft of Swit...

A correspondent for Swiss public television SRF was released after being briefly arrested in the Belarus capital of Minsk amid anti-government protests in Russia. SRF Russia correspondent, Luzia Tschirky, was in Belarus with a valid accreditation re...

An internal investigation has been launched into the Swiss army pharmacy’s purchases of masks, including some 700,000 of poor quality according to some Swiss media reports. Earlier this week, an army spokesperson confirmed to Swiss news agency Tam...

Delivery delays from vaccine manufacturers mean half as many people in Switzerland will be vaccinated as planned in February. However, Interior Minister Alain Berset remains confident that the goal of vaccinating everyone who wants to by the summer c...

In a study of some 25,000 people, researchers at the University of Zurich have found that genes and brain anatomy influence whether someone is a risk-taker. There is widespread evidence that people can be predisposed to take risks. However, there ha...

The fifth round of talks at the United Nations in Geneva to draft a new Syrian constitution and pave the way to peace in the war-torn country have ended without progress. UN special envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen expressed frustration over the lack o...

Using topography data and computer simulations, researchers in Switzerland have put forward a plausible explanation for the mysterious deaths of nine hikers in Russia’s Ural Mountains in 1959: an unexpected avalanche. The scientists, from the coun...

The Swiss National Bank looks set to increase its payout to the Swiss government and cantons. It could reach up to CHF6 billion ($6.74 billion) a year. The new profit distribution agreement between the bank and the Federal Department of Finance (FDF...

Switzerland is among the countries exempt from the European Union’s vaccine export controls, the European Commission said on Friday. The plan has been drawn up to ensure that the EU has enough supplies of Covid-19 vaccine. EU trade commissioner Va...