The Swiss government is sticking to its hard line and says it will not provide financial aid this winter to companies and households hit hard by surging energy prices. Neither the economic situation nor inflation justify extraordinary relief measure...

Swiss drugs regulator Swissmedic says it is examining potential risks in connection with bubbles that appeared in vials of Covid-19 vaccine boosters retooled to target the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. Swissmedic said in a statement on Wednesd...

The Swiss government has come out against a bid to host the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31) in 2026. One of the reasons given for the withdrawal is that Australia has already expressed an interest in hosting COP31 in collaborat...

The government says it has no plans to ban the Islamist militant Hezbollah group in Switzerland as it posed no major terrorist threat. The Lebanon-based group is not very active in Switzerland and no fundraising or other financial activities are kn...

The Swiss government has promised CHF100 million ($100 million) in aid to Ukraine to help residents access drinking water and to repair energy infrastructure damaged by the war. The government on Wednesday adopted a “winter aid action plan” for ...

Switzerland has adopted European Union sanctions against an Iranian firm and three top army members for supporting the Russian war against Ukraine. The measures, against the company Shahed Aviation Industries and three senior military officers, wer...

A court in Zurich has rejected an appeal by the renowned Swiss art collector and financier Urs Schwarzenbach in two cases of tax evasion in connection with the import of works of art. The court also decided to increase from CHF8.5 million ($8.5 mill...

A top agriculture official says the risk of food shortages, while not currently pressing, is underestimated in wealthy Switzerland. Switzerland, which imports 50% of its food, is still in good shape despite international food shortages and rising pr...

Swiss healthcare insurers estimate that some CHF20 million ($20.02 million) could have been gleaned to date by scams involving fake bills for Covid tests. Swiss public television RTS reported Wednesday on numerous cases of people who noticed that th...

Five per cent of the Swiss population aged 14 and over don't eat meat and the trend is continuing, a new survey shows. The latest figures about people living vegetarian or vegan show an increase of 14% over the previous year and for the fifth time i...

Several hundred construction workers have staged a protest in the Swiss city of Basel to call for improvements to their working conditions. The crowd gathered before lunchtime near the city's main railway station on Tuesday, accusing the master buil...

Halloween night was generally quiet in Switzerland. However, there was some minor damage to property in various places, according to a survey of police operations centres. Police in Switzerland's largest city, Zurich, had more to do on Halloween nig...

Just over half of Swiss firms told a survey that they plan to boost their cyber security budgets for 2023, in the expectation that more attacks are heading their way. The 51% of Swiss firms which expect a rise in ransomware and other attacks next ye...

One in ten companies in Switzerland have scaled back output because of high electricity prices before possible winter energy shortages. Industrial producers are more worried about a deficit of electricity than natural gas, a survey published Tuesday...

Finance Minister Ueli Maurer will travel to Qatar at the end of November to watch the World Cup football match between Brazil and Switzerland. Maurer is also planning to hold talks with his Qatari counterpart, Ali bin Ahmed Al Kuwari, during his vis...

Justice Minister Karin Keller-Sutter has rejected suggestions that Swiss authorities are simply “waving migrants through” on the asylum route. On Sunday, the deputy leader of Germany’s CDU/CSU parliamentary group told the NZZ am Sonntag paper ...

Swiss politicians and NGOs have been reacting to the presidential election victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil. Switzerland’s foreign minister and current president, Ignazio Cassis, congratulated Lula in a written letter, the foreign m...

The latest version of the distinctive red Swiss passport has been released, featuring a new page for visas dedicated to Swiss citizens who live abroad. The extra page for the so-called ‘fifth Switzerland’ on the biometric passport comes in addit...

The United Nations has set Switzerland the challenge of implementing 70 measures to combat gender discrimination, including a new definition of sexual consent relating to rape. The UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination again...

Switzerland should devote more energies to reducing the carbon footprint of agriculture than genome editing science, said an influential political ethics body. The Federal Ethics Commission for Non-Human Biotechnology said techniques like CRISPR-Cas...

Tests to determine the viability of geothermal energy projects in Switzerland have been hit by delays in getting the necessary planning permits. A large-scale operation in cantons Bern and Jura in northwest Switzerland was supposed to have taken pla...

Three-quarters of Swiss believe their country has a plastic problem, with a quarter seeing the problem as “massive”. They are particularly concerned about plastic pollution in the oceans and on beaches. This is the result of a survey published ...

The mercury hit 25.4°C in Chur, in eastern Switzerland, on Sunday – the latest day ever recorded in the country with a summer temperature of more than 25°C. The MeteoNews weather service said this was due to warm air brought to the Alpine region...

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) has reported a loss of CHF142.4 billion ($142.6 billion) for the first nine months of 2022 as turmoil in global currency markets took a toll on the value of its foreign-exchange portfolio. The central bank’s foreign-c...

Swiss hotels and holiday apartments are raising their prices by around 5% this winter, largely due to higher energy prices. Ski passes are also likely to go up by a similar amount, a newspaper reports. According to a survey by the Hotelleriesuisse a...

German authorities have criticised Switzerland for allowing migrants to transit to neighbouring countries instead of sending them back as demanded by European accords. Every week, about a thousand migrants reach Switzerland’s eastern border at Buc...

Russia’s embassy in Switzerland has officially protested to the Swiss foreign ministry over the vandalism of a Russian Orthodox church in Geneva last week. “In the early hours of October 28, 2022, unidentified offenders committed an act of vanda...

The embattled Swiss bank Credit Suisse plans to shed 540 jobs in Switzerland by the end of the year, Chief Executive Officer Ulrich Körner told the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper. In the interview he gave more details on last week’s restructuring announ...

Switzerland’s largest private railway operator has set a new world record for the longest passenger train on a spectacular narrow gauge track through the Swiss Alps. The Rhaetian Railway train – comprising 100 carriages for a total length of 1,9...

While Switzerland still faces an acute energy crunch, it should be able to get through winter with enough power, a new study reportedly shows. The Schweiz am Wochenende newspaper reported on Saturday that a study by the Federal Office of Energy, the...