Administrators clearing up a CHF800 million ($877 million) collapsed pyramid scheme have managed to recover just CHF12.7 million from one of Switzerland’s largest fraud cases. Financier Dieter Behring ripped off 1,700 investors between 1998 and 20...

The Earth may be losing its internal heat at a faster rate than previously estimated, according to scientists at the federal technology institute ETH Zurich. Researchers devised a laboratory experiment for measuring the amount of heat being radiated...

Fresh criticism has been leveled at the inclusion of Chinese company Alibaba in a future cloud storage system for Swiss government data. The Tages Anzeiger newspaper has uncovered documents that detail the concerns of Swiss Data Protection Commissio...

Swiss President Ignazio Cassis has announced plans for an intergovernmental committee to strengthen decades-old cooperation between regions around Lake Constance. This came as he attended a meeting on Friday on Mount Säntis, northeast Switzerland, ...

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer on Friday postponed a planned visit to Brian “K”, Switzerland’s most famous prisoner, after the government promised to improve his conditions. “I welcome the decision of the Swiss authorities to e...

Several American diplomats in Geneva and Paris were reportedly struck with suspected “Havana Syndrome” last year – a mysterious ailment that has affected up to 200 US officials in diplomatic posts worldwide. The Wall Street Journal reported on...

Even if Omicron is less virulent than previous Covid-19 variants, its infectiousness will likely bring more hospital admissions and intensive care patients in coming weeks, Swiss health minister Alain Berset said on Friday. Switzerland should prepar...

Natallia Hersche, the Swiss-Belarusian dual national held in Belarus for taking part in anti-government protests, has been visited by a senior Swiss foreign ministry official, who reports she is in good health. “Natallia is feeling well and sends ...

Swiss prosecutors have dropped a case against one of two men suspected of participating in the November 2020 terrorist attack in Vienna. The man, who was 24 years old at the time, visited the attacker in Vienna and stayed a night with him a few mont...

The Swiss government has pledged to implement from 2024 the minimum tax rate for large multinational companies under a global tax deal. Under a timetable presented by Finance Minister Ueli Maurer on Thursday, a temporary regulation will ensure the m...

Swiss President Ignazio Cassis has held talks in neighbouring Austria about strained ties with the European Union and the situation in Ukraine. He met the Austrian president, Alexander Van der Bellen, as well as members of the government and parliam...

Meyrin, home to the European nuclear research centre CERN, had the long-term vision to prioritise social cohesion and biodiversity in its plans to accommodate an exploding population, the Swiss Heritage Society said on Thursday. The Society praised ...

The Swiss government wants to boost an exchange of specialists from the education and the medical sector with Canada’s largest province of Quebec. The deal foresees the mutual recognition of diplomas for social workers, as well as experts in denta...

A member of the Swiss government will in all likelihood travel to Beijing next month for the opening of the Winter Olympics. The pandemic, not international calls for a boycott, would be the only stumbling block. At its meeting on Wednesday, the sev...

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced that Swiss-based researchers who were recently awarded Horizon Europe research grants will need to do their work outside Switzerland in the absence of an agreement with the EU. “We are now starting...

Federal statistics show that the number of international students heading to Swiss universities continues to rise despite the health crisis and associated travel restrictions. However, fewer are coming from outside Europe. At the start of the 2020...

A court in the United States has ruled that cheese does not have to come from the Gruyère region of Switzerland to be sold under this name. A consortium of Swiss and French cheesemakers from the region around the town of Gruyères in western Switze...

Swiss health experts say they expect the number of Covid infections to peak within the next two weeks and recommend reviewing the quarantine policy. “We could get to the peak within one to three weeks if contacts among people stay on the same leve...

Former Swiss politician Pierre Maudet has been cleared of accepting undue financial advantages when he was a member of the government of canton Geneva. An appeals court overturned a conviction handed down last year to pay a fine and refund the costs...

Mental health problems are prevalent among children and teenagers due to Covid-19, with boys tending to repress problems while girls are prone to depression, the president of the association of youth psychiatrists in Switzerland says. Oliver Bilke-H...

Talks between Russia and the United States in Geneva have failed to resolve differences between the two countries over increasing tensions in Ukraine. US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov h...

The former director-general of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), François Carrard, passed away in Lausanne on Sunday at the age of 83. The Swiss lawyer, who was a specialist in sports law, was IOC director-general from 1989 to 2003. Prior ...

Dozens of people have applied to change their gender in the Swiss civil register after the law was eased on January 1 this year, reports the NZZ am Sonntag. The majority of applications were from people under the age of 30, the paper writes. One per...

In Switzerland, suspected criminals are held in pre-trial detention more often than in other countries, and these prisoners are more likely to commit suicide, reports the SonntagsBlick newspaper. A study carried out for the paper by the National Cen...

Calls are mounting for the Swiss federal government to cut quarantine and isolation periods, lest rising Omicron cases paralyse the country through lack of staff. Cantonal health directors in eastern Switzerland have written to the government callin...

The Omicron variant is posing new problems for Switzerland and vaccination alone is not enough, a health official said on Saturday. This came as more than a thousand people took to the streets of Zurich protesting against current anti-Covid measures....

An international research team led by the University of Bern has discovered a new exoplanet smaller than Neptune (“sub-Neptune”) orbiting around a red dwarf star, the University said on Friday. This exoplanet, a planet that orbits a star outside...

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) expects to post a profit of CHF26 billion ($28 billion) for 2021, a windfall made exclusively from its growing foreign currency holdings. The central bank will likely distribute CHF6 billion to the confederation and can...

The Swiss employment market remained stable in 2021 in the face of fresh Covid-19 waves, with the jobless rate sinking as the year progressed. The latest figures from the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (Seco) show the annual unemployment rat...

The latest cantonal ruling on the US ride-hailing firm comes as a national framework to determine the status of gig economy workers in Switzerland is still lacking. The ruling by the Zurich social insurance court, published on Thursday, says that th...