Cash has lost its appeal among the Swiss population as the coronavirus pandemic led more people to pay by bank card, mobile app or online, a recent survey has found. The survey by financial services website moneyland.ch found that for the first tim...

A prominent Geneva politician, Pierre Maudet, has been found guilty of accepting undue financial advantage linked to visit to Abu Dhabi. A court in Geneva on Monday ordered him pay a fine of CHF120,000 ($133,000) and to refund the costs of the trip,...

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are on the rise in Switzerland as a result of the growing criticism of the government’s policy to halt the spread of the Covid pandemic. A report by the Federation of Jewish communities and the Swiss Federation of ...

Some 1,282 seriously ill people ended their lives using the services of Swiss assisted suicide organisation EXIT last year, which is 68 more people than in 2019. There were no reported assisted suicides due to Covid-19, but the pandemic did force EX...

An alliance of animal rights and environment groups has called for more public funds to promote animal-free alternative experiments. A petition signed by 27 organisations and 13,000 individuals was handed in to parliament on Monday according to the ...

Swiss women continue to be paid less than men, particularly in the public sector. The so-called gender wage gap got marginally worse between 2014 and 2018 despite persistent political efforts to tackle wage packet inequality. On average, women were ...

The feature film "Platzspitzbaby" by Pierre Monnard has been voted the best Swiss film of 2020 by the Swiss Association of Film Journalists. The movie is based on a book by Michelle Halbheer and chronicles a girl's love for her drug-addicted mother ...

A lack of green light from medicines regulator Swissmedic could see 5.3 million doses ordered by Switzerland sent elsewhere. The absence of anti-Covid vaccine AstraZeneca from a delivery plan shared last week by the army has raised questions about ...

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in the city of Wohlen near Zurich on Saturday to protest against anti-coronavirus measures put in place by Swiss authorities. Between 1,500 to 2,000 people participated in a march that was authorised by the regiona...

She is planning a visit to Switzerland in March to ask authorities to launch an investigation into the “hidden assets” of President Alexander Lukashenko. Currently living in exile in Lithuania, Tikhanovskaya intends to make the most of a trip to...

All hotel staff in the Swiss ski resort of Wengen must undergo a coronavirus test on Saturday morning, health authorities say. The reason: several cases of the South African and Brazilian variants in the village. Wengen, in canton Bern, is where the...

New research shows that climate change risks altering the temperature, ice cover and mixing of many Swiss lakes – especially at medium altitudes – with major consequences for lake ecosystems. A simulation study carried out by the Swiss Federal I...

The Swiss hotel sector registered a 40% drop in overnight stays in 2020 compared with 2019. Foreign demand fell by 66% as tourists stayed away due to the pandemic, latest statistics show. “The exceptional context of Covid–19 explains this unprec...

NASA science rover ‘Perseverance’ has landed safely on Mars as part of its search for traces of microbial life on the Red Planet. Swiss technology will help it handle soil samples and control the first Mars helicopter. NASA experts celebrated lo...

Several cantons have called for restaurants to be re-opened a month earlier than the official nationwide plan presented by the government earlier this week. Canton Graubünden wants restaurants to open their terraces from March 1. The canton has don...

The proportion of people living below the Swiss poverty line in 2019 grew to 8.7% of the population, the highest rate seen since 2014, according to a report published on Thursday. The Federal Statistical Office, which released the figures, said pove...

Switzerland has decided to suspend all further payments related to development cooperation in Myanmar following the recent military coup. However, programmes already underway in the Asian country will continue. The objective of the temporary halt o...

Swiss representations abroad will participate in the first ever Romansh week as part of an initiative to shine the spotlight on the country’s plurilingualism. The so-called “Romansh week” begins on Friday and is organised by the Federal Depar...

Switzerland is the best equipped country for online shopping, according to a United Nations comparison of more than 150 states. Last year, 97% of the Swiss population used the Internet, the annual study by the Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and...

State Secretary and Swiss Ambassador to Moscow Yves Rossier has handed in his notice, the foreign ministry has confirmed. Wednesday also saw various ambassadorial positions reassigned around the world. Rossier, 60, left the foreign ministry at his o...

On its 75th birthday, the Swiss Federation for the Deaf is celebrating the changes it has achieved in society. However, it says there is still work to be done, especially in French-speaking Switzerland. The federation was founded on February 17, 194...

The state-run Swiss Innovation Agency, Innosuisse, is to play a bigger role in giving start-up companies a competitive edge. The government said the aim was to facilitate cooperation between science and the market and to promote new small and medium...

Prosecutors in Switzerland have appealed against federal court verdicts that cleared Jérôme Valcke, a former official at world football’s Zurich-based governing body FIFA, of bribery and acquitted Qatari soccer and broadcasting executive Nasser a...

The Swiss aerospace engineering company, Ruag Space, plans to shed up to 100 jobs by the end of the year. The company said the move was part of a reorganisation to focus on the European market as a leading supplier to the space industry and expand t...

Swiss wildlife wardens warn that off-piste skiing and snowshoeing* can put Alpine animals at risk especially at this time of year and people should respect the designated “quiet zones”, reports public broadcaster RTS. In mid-winter, wild animals...

Geneva Airport recorded a loss of CHF129.5 million ($145 million) in 2020, owing to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. This compares with a profit of CHF84.1 million in 2019, the airport said on Tuesday. The loss, which is the first in its ...

Bern actress Liselotte ‘Lilo’ Pulver has been awarded the Swiss cinema ‘prize of honour’ for a career that saw her star in films in France and the US as well as the German-speaking world. Pulver was born in 1929 in Bern, where she attended a...

Residential property prices in Switzerland rose sharply in the final quarter of 2020, and by an average 2.5% for the year as a whole, according to the Federal Statistics Office. This is according to the Swiss Residential Property Price Index publis...

The competition authority suspects the global credit card firm of using its position to prevent the rollout of a new, more uniform, ATM system across Switzerland. COMCO said on Tuesday it had launched an investigation on February 8 after a complaint...

Swiss sociologist and artist Urs Jaeggi died in Berlin on Saturday at the age of 89, his family announced on Monday. With his book Macht und Herrschaft in der BRD (Power and Rule in West Germany), which sold more than 400,000 copies, Jaeggi was cons...