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 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 place th...

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 four engines and 100 carriages for a to...

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...

Politicians in Germany have warned of consequences if the Swiss government does not allow the re-export of Swiss-made tank ammunition that Berlin wants to send to Ukraine, it has been reported. “It is completely incomprehensible that Switzerland i...

Sixty people have drowned in Switzerland’s lakes and rivers so far this year, surpassing the annual average of 46. Between January and September 15, 60 people died in fatal water accidents, the Swiss Lifesaving Society (SSS) said on October 28. Th...

The month just ending was the warmest ever October in Switzerland, weather forecasters said on Friday. The feeling of an Indian summer was confirmed by the weather watchers from MeteoSwiss, who said the month had surpassed everything recorded since ...

Over 34,000 people left the Catholic Church in Switzerland last year, the highest ever annual figure. Protestants also dwindled. Across the country, the proportion of members who left the Catholic Church in 2021 was 1.1%, the Swiss Institute for Pas...

A study has estimated the extent to which new solar infrastructure, combined with existing Alpine dams, can help Switzerland avoid a winter energy shortage. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) reported on Friday on a quantitative model by two energy exp...

Giuliano da Empoli has won the French Academy’s prestigious Grand Prix du Roman for “Le Mage du Kremlin” (“The Wizard of the Kremlin”), a novel about the inner workings of Vladimir Putin’s regime. The novel, published in April this year,...

A Munich court has banned a confectionary maker from producing a range of chocolate bunnies that infringe on the patent rights of Swiss company Lindt & Sprüngli. Germany’s Allgäuer Confiserie Heilemann drew protests from Lindt with its chocolate...

Mars is not the geologically dead planet that has been previously assumed, according to studies of seismic activity on the Red Planet. Researchers at Switzerland’s federal technology institute ETH Zurich have found evidence that vulcanism still pl...

British American Tobacco (BAT) says it will shut down a factory in Switzerland and move production to other sites in Europe. The factory in Boncourt, canton Jura in northwestern Switzerland, employs more than 200 people, around half of them cross bo...

An anti-torture commission has criticised the fact that most “indefinitely incarcerated” people in Switzerland – i.e. those who have served their prison sentence but are not yet fit for full release – continue to be held in jail rather than i...

The head of Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) says federal asylum centres around the country are full and that that the current refugee situation is unprecedented since World War II. Christine Schraner Burgener was reacting on Th...

Eight European countries have met in Switzerland to forge a plan of action towards net-zero emissions in passenger and freight transport in the Alps. Meeting in Brig, canton Valais as the “Simplon Alliance” (in reference to an Alpine pass linkin...

Some 40 Afghan writers and their family members have managed to flee to Switzerland since the Taliban takeover, helped by a campaign by Swiss authors. The campaign to help the intellectuals escape was driven by literature professor Sabine Haupt and ...

Switzerland is facing pressure from Germany to review its veto over the re-export of Swiss-made tank ammunition that Berlin wants to send to Ukraine to help protect grain exports, it has been reported. Germany’s defence minister, Christine Lambrec...

Switzerland will not change its policy of political neutrality despite Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the government has confirmed. The seven-member Federal Council agreed that Switzerland’s current approach as defined in 1993 remains valid and sho...