Switzerland’s overbursting rivers, swollen by excessive rainfall, have resulted in some hydroelectric power plants having to reduce operations. Nearly 60% of Switzerland’s electricity production is derived from hydropower, with 677 plants dotted...

Switzerland has reserved 3,000 doses of the GlaxoSmithKline monoclonal sotrovimab drug to treat patients infected with Covid-19. This adds to the 3,000 doses of a similar medicine, RegN-Cov 2, developed by Switzerland’s Roche and US biotech compan...

Swiss voters are to get a fresh chance to decide on reforming their increasingly underfinanced state pension system under a proposal that would raise both men’s and women’s retirement ages from 65 to 66 and then be linked to life expectancy. Age...

Guy Lachappelle, chairman of the Swiss Raiffeisen banking group, has become the latest high-ranking executive to lose his job at the company as a result of a scandal. A tearful Lachappelle announced his resignation on Thursday evening, admitting tha...

Almost one in six people in Europe is affected by persistent anxiety. Researchers in Switzerland have now localised micro-circuits in the brain whose malfunctions promote anxiety – a discovery that could transform the therapy of anxiety disorders. ...

Switzerland has sent 15 respirators and 60 oxygen concentrators to Tunisia, the fifth humanitarian aid shipment sent to various countries in recent weeks to help tackle the Covid-19 crisis. The shipment from Swiss Humanitarian Aid, worth nearly CHF...

Swiss Justice Minister Karin Keller-Sutter has demanded a rapid reform of the Schengen/Dublin agreements, which govern free movement and asylum issues. Speaking in Slovenia on Thursday at an informal meeting of EU interior ministers, Keller-Sutter s...

Fans of Pablo Picasso will soon be able to own a share in one of his paintings for less than $6,000 (CHF5,500) – although that won’t actually buy them the right to see the work, which will be stored under lock and key in Switzerland. Fillette au...

Last week’s ransomware attack on Swiss price comparison website Comparis resulted in a data breach and client data was most probably stolen, say Zurich police. Last Wednesday Comparis.ch, which has 80 million visits a year, was shut down by rans...

Ann Demeester is the new director of the Kunsthaus Zurich. The current director of the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands, will take up her post on January 1, 2023, succeeding Christoph Becker. “Ann Demeester is a highly regarded ambass...

The number of asylum requests in Switzerland this year is due to surpass the pre-Covid level, the authorities say. Further increases are expected in the coming years. Last year, asylum requests fell by almost a quarter to 11,041 owing to the pandemi...

Rackets, T-shirts, sports shoes and other historic tennis equipment belonging to Roger Federer have raised £3.4 million (CHF4.3 million) at auction. The money will go towards his charity. The combined proceeds of the Christie’s auction raised thr...

New research has enabled scientists to identify the most dangerous cancer cells found in Ewing’s sarcoma, an aggressive form of bone cancer. Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) have developed a technique to identify which...

Switzerland remains far from its target of shifting away from non-renewable fuel sources, despite a record-breaking increase in the number of solar panels installed last year. Almost 50% more solar panels were put up in Switzerland in 2020 than in 2...

Switzerland has been locked out of the European Union's flagship Horizon Europe research and innovation funding programme until further notice. The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation said it had been informed by the European Co...

As Switzerland faces deforestation, monocultures and overfishing, the environmental organisation WWF Switzerland is calling on the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and the financial watchdog FINMA to take action. “A growing number of central banks have b...

The CEO of Switzerland’s state-controlled telecoms company has apologised for the massive outage of the country’s emergency service lines last week. “I apologise to the firefighters and everyone involved. The failure shook me a lot. That is ab...

Switzerland has announced more flood warnings after high winds and heavy rain battered the country between Monday night and Tuesday morning. The storms caused sections of the A2 motorway to temporarily close on Tuesday. Rain, hail and winds of up to...

The Swiss government’s Covid-19 advisory panel has warned about the recent increase in new infections due to the more contagious Delta variant. The science task force said the dominance of the Delta variant would likely result in an increasing num...

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has appointed Zurich Insurance Chief Investment Officer Urban Angehrn as its new boss. Angehrn, 56, worked for 14 years at Zurich Insurance. He previously held positions at Winterthur Insuranc...

The glider and small light aircraft that crashed in high mountains in south-eastern Switzerland last month, resulting in five deaths, collided mid-air, an investigation has revealed. On Tuesday, the Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board (S...

The Swiss and Saudi stock exchanges have signed a memorandum of understanding on future cooperation at a high-level meeting in Switzerland. The SIX and Tadawul stock exchanges signed the agreement at the third “financial dialogue” between the tw...

Swiss Humanitarian Aid has sent 40 respirators and 45 oxygen concentrators to the Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar, with a total value of around CHF850,000 ($930,000). “In view of the public health situation in Mongolia and in response to a request ...

The number of Swiss start-ups launched has risen significantly in the first six months of 2021 while the number of companies filing for bankruptcy has decreased, studies have shown. In the first half of 2021 over 26,000 new companies were added to S...

Efforts to improve plastic recycling in Switzerland have shown a mixed bag of results among cities and towns, ranging from “exemplary” to “no significant effort”. Greenpeace Switzerland conducted a study on single-use packaging and other dis...

Thousands of Italian football fans celebrated their team’s victory at Euro 2020 on Sunday night by singing, chanting and honking their way through Swiss cities. Italians are the largest group of foreign residents in Switzerland, making up about 15...

Areas of the Swiss capital Bern and some Alpine region lakes are still on alert for possible flooding after Switzerland after more heavy rainfall. More rain is expected during the coming week. Central Switzerland was also hit by strong storms late S...

Swiss health authorities want to encourage more migrants and young people to get vaccinated against Covid-19, the SonntagsBlick newspaper says. The move comes as vaccination rates stall across the country, despite there being plenty of vaccines avai...

Climate change is causing extreme weather, also in Switzerland. A climate taskforce – like the Covid 19 science task force – makes sense, a leading Swiss climate scientist says. Humankind should get used to heatwaves, fires, torrential rain, lan...

The Swiss Gian Franco Kasper, recently retired after 23 years as president of the International Ski Federation (FIS), has died, the governing body said on Saturday. He was 77. The cause of Kasper’s death was not given. He had not taken part in the...