The first batch of dogs capable of detecting African swine fever (ASF) in farmed pigs will be operational by autumn. The specialist hounds are currently being trained in the northeastern Swiss canton of Thurgau that borders Germany. Outbreaks of the...

Authorities have announced that they will consider the financial situation of Ukrainian refugees with Status S when evaluating requests for social assistance. This brings requirements in line with those for other temporarily admitted persons in Switz...

Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis has met the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, in Ticino, southern Switzerland. The working lunch on the Brissago Islands in Lake Maggiore focused on the eco...

A large alpine solar power plant is to be installed on the dam wall of Lake Lei near Ferrera in southeastern Switzerland. The 1,800 square-metre plant is being built by the Zurich Electricity Company. Located at an altitude of 1,930 metres, the plan...

Pink Cross, the Swiss association for gay and bisexual men, has stepped up calls for testing, vaccines and treatment for monkeypox to be made available in Switzerland. No vaccine against monkeypox has been approved for use or procured by Swiss autho...

Credit Suisse Group applied to the English High Court last week to initiate formal legal proceedings against Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp over a $440 million (CHF414 million) dispute, according to the Financial Times. The claims are related to Cred...

Swiss Finance Minister Ueli Maurer has held talks in New Delhi with India’s finance and foreign ministers. On the agenda were bilateral trade issues and India’s upcoming G20 presidency. With his Indian counterparts Nirmala Sitharaman and Subrahm...

Celebrations have been launched to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the first time-tabled railway route in Switzerland. Transport Minister Simonetta Sommaruga and a delegation of dignitaries travelled the 23km stretch of railway line from the to...

A burial site from the Bronze Age has been discovered in a mountain village near the town of Sion in south-western Switzerland. At least 18 graves, containing human bones and burial objects in stone-built coffin-like boxes from 2000 BC were unearthe...

The number of wolves in the Swiss Alps will continue to grow even if hunting regulations were to be eased, according to experts. The Wolf Switzerland group said more than 250 wolf packs were living in Europe’s Alpine environment last year, while t...

The teachers’ association has warned of a decline in teaching quality at Swiss schools due to a lack of certified staff. An increasing number of primary schools have had to resort to personnel who lack a professional qualification as a teacher, as...

Two bodies have been found in recent weeks in the high mountains, discovered as glaciers recede under summer temperatures. Alpinists found human bones last Wednesday on the Chessjen glacier in the southern canton of Valais, the Blick newspaper repor...

The Swiss Post’s e-vote system is opening itself to attacks by ethical hackers in an effort to weed out security flaws. The window for the test runs until September 2, during which time hackers will be able to launch attacks on the source code und...

Swiss Air-Rescue (Rega) flew a record number of rescue missions in July. This is not a statistical outlier but the reflection of a trend, according to Rega head Ernst Kohler. The organisation flew a total of 2,120 helicopter missions in July, Kohler...

Several hundred people in Switzerland have changed their official gender since the introduction of a simplified registry process at the beginning of the year. In the big cities alone, 350 people have done so. Eighty people changed their gender in Zu...

Switzerland needs to move closer to Europe, the Alpine nation’s “obvious partner”, says Simonetta Sommaruga. “Now there is war in Europe, we have been asking ourselves for weeks whether our foreign policy compass is right,” she said on Sat...

Economic relief packages due to the looming energy crisis are not planned in Switzerland. Measures such as tax relief are currently neither “necessary nor helpful”, says the government’s chief economist. The Swiss economy is developing well ev...

Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas have met in Bellinzona, southern Switzerland, where topics of discussion included the war in Ukraine and the use of new technologies in foreign policy. Cassis and Kallas p...

The Swiss sugar industry is expecting significantly higher yields this year as a result of favourable weather conditions in sugar beet cultivation. The measured beet yields of around 59 and 55 tonnes per hectare in the western and eastern sample plo...

Michael Koch's 'Drii Winter' will be Switzerland’s official entry with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood for the category 'Best International Film'. The decision was announced by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture on Fr...

Wreckage of a plane that crashed in 1968 has been found on the Aletsch glacier by a mountain guide. The parts were discovered on Thursday by a mountain guide between Jungfraufirn glacier and Konkordiaplatz glacier confluence that fall under the Fies...

A mine-launching shell from the First World War has been pulled out of Lake Zurich. Divers from the Zurich municipal police and the army recovered the shell from the lake bed on Friday morning. The projectile was first spotted on Tuesday by a recrea...

Hotels recorded big increases in guests in the first half of 2022, although numbers are still below pre-pandemic levels. A total of 16.9 million overnight stays were made in Swiss hotels between January and June, an increase of 47.3% on the same per...

A total of 9.4% of adults in possession of a special “S” permit are in work, with most employed in the restaurant sector. Overall, 3,130 Ukrainian refugees have found employment thanks to the special S protection status that allows them to live ...

The recently dismissed Ukrainian prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova has been proposed as her country’s new ambassador to Bern. “Yes, I signed the application for Ms. Venediktova’s appointment as our Ambassador to Switzerland,” said Ukrain...

Despite high fuel costs and staffing issues, Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS) has posted a profit for the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The airline posted an operating profit of CHF67 million ($69.9 million) for the first...

Several people have been infected with diphtheria at a centre for asylum seekers – the first known cases of the bacterial infection in Switzerland in nearly 40 years. Up to eight people living in a centre in the capital, Bern, contracted the disea...

Switzerland, a major global hub for gold, has followed the EU in banning imports of Russian gold as part of new sanctions due to the war in Ukraine. “The new measures primarily concern a ban on buying, importing or transporting gold and gold produ...

After a pilot project in 2021, authorities now want to systematically draw on the skills of “ethical hackers” to find flaws in government IT systems. “Often, standardised security tests are no longer sufficient to uncover hidden loopholes” i...

Swiss President Ignazio Cassis has called for common efforts to reduce nuclear risks worldwide and avert humanitarian and environmental disasters. “Nuclear risks are higher than ever before since the end of the Cold War. We should agree on measure...