Switzerland is the most innovative country in the world, ahead of the US and Sweden, said the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on Thursday. It’s the 12th year in a row that Switzerland has topped WIPO’s Global Innovation Index, wh...

In April last year 1,000 volunteers across Switzerland buried 2,000 pairs of cotton pants in gardens, meadows, croplands and fields to measure the quality of Swiss soil. The undies have now been dug up and examined. The aim of the “Proof by Underp...

The Council of Europe says the Swiss authorities should adopt, as a priority, cantonal and/or local legislation on the use of French and German in public life in the municipalities where they are non-official minority or majority languages. In a rep...

Switzerland has made up ground internationally in terms of digital competitiveness, climbing one place – to fifth – in the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking. Denmark took the top spot, while the US had to settle for second place for the...

Switzerland’s glaciers are melting like never before, an academic study released on Wednesday shows, with their ice volume declining by 6% in a “disastrous” 2022 amid rising concerns about global warming and a summer heatwave that swept across ...

A survey by the Tamedia media group shows which things Swiss people would be most willing to sacrifice in the case of a serious energy shortage. If reductions in household energy-usage were to be enforced rather than recommended (as they are current...

The Swiss government has approved the 2022 International Coffee and Cocoa Agreements but decided to withdraw from the International Cotton Advisory Committee. It said it is focusing on sectors that are “particularly important” for Switzerland. D...

Not one hacker managed to penetrate the Swiss Post’s e-voting system during a security test, according to Swiss Post. The system withstood 60,000 attacks. Some 3,400 hackers probed the system to find security gaps, Swiss Post said on Wednesday. No...

The governor of the Bank of France, François Villeroy de Galhau, was attacked with a hammer at the end of June in Basel, Swiss media reported on Wednesday. Contacted by the AFP news agency, the Bank of France confirmed an “isolated incident” bu...

The biggest two Swiss Banks have each been fined $200 million (CHF199 million) as part of a large-scale US investigation into the failure to preserve electronic communications. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures T...

Authorities have penned contracts to outsource the storage of certain data to cloud servers managed by Alibaba, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. The deals are worth CHF110 million ($111) and limited to five years, the government wrote on Tuesday....

The cost of compulsory health insurance in Switzerland is to increase by an average of 6.6% in 2023 – the biggest annual rise since 2010. Health authorities said on Tuesday that the “considerable” increase would raise average monthly premiums ...

A popular tourist ski area on a 3,000 metre high Swiss glacier is set to reopen in November following a fire that devastated a mountain top restaurant. On September 19, a fire broke out at the high-altitude Botta restaurant situated above Glacier 30...

Pensions in Switzerland should in future be topped up to fully account for the rising cost of consumer goods, parliament has agreed. Parliament on Monday voted to modify the way payment adjustments are calculated from 2023. Currently, top ups take ...

The Swiss state spends around CHF500,000 ($506,000) a year keeping track of the growing wolf population in the Alpine country. The money is part of a CHF1.1 million annual funding package used to monitor all large carnivores in Switzerland, includin...

Troubled Swiss bank Credit Suisse has sought to quieten rampant speculation about its upcoming strategic revamp following leaks to the media and concerns of its staff. The bank is due to announce restructuring details when it announces its third qua...

Several hundred people gathered in the Swiss capital, Bern, to protest the verdict of a nationwide vote to raise the age of retirement for women. A slim majority of voters on Sunday backed a proposal for women to retire at 65 rather than 64. The mea...

A Swiss geothermal energy project, designed to generate electricity for 900 homes and heat thermal baths, has been suspended because it doesn't have enough hot water to pump. The site in Lavey-les-Bains in western Switzerland was earmarked as a rene...

A special edition gold coin, called “Timemachine”, is being produced to pay homage to Switzerland’s watchmaking industry. The coin, which features a clock face, cogs of a watch movement and a globe, will celebrate the importance of the industr...

Swiss International Air Lines has agreed to offer travel agents CHF10 ($10) “thankyou” payments for flights cancelled from its schedule this summer. SWISS was forced to scrap around 2% of its scheduled flights in the summer months because it did...

Switzerland’s population is becoming increasingly educated. At the same time, younger women are more likely than men to have a higher education or university degree. Among people aged 65 and over, 16.6% of women and 37.1% of men in Switzerland las...

The Swiss air force guided a small propeller aircraft without radio communication to Italian airspace on Sunday. A flight without radio contact is always a potential danger for the public, the army said. At 10.53am the aircraft, which had taken off ...

Voters have thrown out a decision by parliament to scrap withholding tax on interest from Swiss bonds. Final results show 52% of voters coming out against the reform, which was aimed at boosting investment in Switzerland as well as strengthening the...

Voters in Switzerland’s biggest canton have overwhelmingly approved a new article to promote a cleaner and more efficient use of resources. Just under 90% of Zurich citizens on Sunday said yes to the idea, which the cantonal government proposed as...

Voters in canton Bern have given short shrift to a proposal aimed at lowering the legal voting age to 16. It is the latest in a series of setbacks for promoters of youth suffrage in Switzerland. More than half of the country’s 26 cantons have reje...

Voters in canton Lucerne have roundly dismissed a financial contribution to a renovation of the barracks of Swiss Guards at the Vatican. Official results show 71.5% of voters on Sunday coming out against the funding. The anti-clerical Freethinkers ...

The president of Axpo’s board of directors Thomas Sieber says the Swiss energy company is determined to try to get through the liquidity crisis on its own steam. Faced by skyrocketing costs on international energy markets, Axpo was granted a CHF4 ...

The doses are to be jettisoned after expiring earlier this week, health authorities said on Saturday. New jabs are on the way for this autumn’s vaccination efforts. Of the 10.3 million doses, all made by the Moderna manufacturer, 2.5 million are c...

The European Union (EU) is not at fault for the current stalled talks with Switzerland on bilateral relations, the bloc’s ambassador in Bern has said. In the latest round of the tit-for-tat blame game, Petros Mavromichalis told the Tribune de Gen�...

The Swiss government said on Friday it had found “no overriding reasons” to block the export of 6,000 pieces of ammunition to Qatar. “In its evaluation of the situation, the Federal Council considered all the assessment criteria foreseen by th...