Workers at plant in Romont alert authorities to mysterious white powder found in sacks of coffee beans
Swiss police have seized more than 500kg of cocaine from a shipment of coffee beans delivered to a Nespresso plant.
Workers at the plant in Romont, in the western Swiss canton of Fribourg, alerted authorities to a mysterious white powder found in sacks of coffee beans, police said.
Continue reading...Timepieces worth millions of dollars were taken by FSB agents in Moscow, according to a Swiss paper
Russian agents seized millions of dollars worth of Audemars Piguet watches in Moscow in an apparent retaliation for Swiss sanctions banning luxury goods exports, Bloomberg reported, citing Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag.
The watches, which can cost more than £700,000 apiece, were seized from the firm’s local premises by agents from Russia’s FSB security service on Tuesday, the newspaper said. It cited independent sources and a confidential Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs memo written for members of parliament that apparently gave details of the raid.
Continue reading...Putin’s forces have bombed an art school sheltering 400 civilians in Mariupol, the city’s council has said
Mariupol’s city council said Russian forces bombed an art school where 400 civilians, including children, were sheltering.
Thousands of residents of Mariupol have been forcibly deported to Russia and then sent by rail to various economically depressed cities where they have to remain, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman claimed.
An estimated 10 million people – more than a quarter of Ukraine’s population – have now fled their homes as a result of Russia’s “devastating” war, the head of the UN refugee agency UNHCR said.
One of Europe’s largest metallurgical factories, the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, has been destroyed by the Russians, said Vadym Denysenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister.
Russia has struck Ukraine with cruise missiles from ships in the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, and launched hypersonic missiles from Crimean airspace, the Russian defence ministry said.
An attack on a barracks in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv on Friday killed more than 40 Marines, according to the New York Times. If confirmed, it would be one of the deadliest known attacks on Ukrainian forces during the war.
The Ukrainian parliament said 115 Ukrainian children have been killed since the start of the Russian invasion. It said at least 140 more had been injured.
Pope Francis described what is happening in Ukraine as “inhumane and sacrilegious”. Addressing tens of thousands of people in St Peter’s Square in Rome for his weekly blessing, he called on leaders to stop “this repugnant war”.
Continue reading...Experts say social support, honesty and generosity key to wellbeing, as Afghanistan and Lebanon struggle in global ranking
Finland has been named the world’s happiest country for the fifth year in a row, in an annual UN-sponsored index that ranked Afghanistan as the unhappiest, closely followed by Lebanon.
The latest list was completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Continue reading...The cheese, made by Michael Spycher of Mountain Dairy Fritzenhaus, comes from a small dairy that works with just 12 farmers
A Gruyère from Switzerland has been named as the top cheese for the second consecutive time at the World Championship Cheese Contest in Wisconsin.
The cheese from Bern, Switzerland, made its maker, Michael Spycher of Mountain Dairy Fritzenhaus, a three-time winner. Spycher also won in 2020 and 2008. The cheese, called Gourmino Le Gruyère AOP, earned a score of 98.423 out of 100.
Continue reading...Measures do not undermine neutrality principle as Switzerland says it is acting in defence of international law
Switzerland, a bastion of neutrality through two world wars, has decided to adopt wholesale swingeing EU sanctions against the Russian central bank, freezing as much as billions of dollars in assets and massively increasing the pressure on the Russian economy.
The government also announced it had banned five oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin from entering the country. Flights from Russia are being banned, although this will not apply to flights carrying diplomats.
Continue reading...Three biggest groups in European parliament support possible move to high-risk list for money laundering
All three of the largest groups in the European parliament are demanding that the EU assess whether Switzerland should be categorised as a high-risk country for money laundering and financial crime, as reaction to the Credit Suisse leak continues to reverberate about the world.
Less than 48 hours after the Guardian and other media published an investigation into the leak as part of the Suisse secrets project, political groups representing the majority of MEPs in the European parliament support the possible blacklisting of Switzerland.
Continue reading...Apparent due diligence failures by Swiss bank prompts centre-right calls for EU to review relationship with Switzerland
The fallout from a huge leak of Credit Suisse banking data threatened to damage Switzerland’s entire financial sector on Monday after the European parliament’s main political grouping raised the prospect of adding the country to a money-laundering blacklist.
The European People’s party (EPP), the largest political grouping of the European parliament, called for the EU to review its relationship with Switzerland and consider whether it should be added to its list of countries associated with a high risk of financial crime.
Continue reading...Flor Bressers, on Belgian and Europol most-wanted lists, has been on the run since 2020
One of Europe’s most-wanted drug lords, a Belgian with a master’s degree in criminology, has been arrested in Switzerland after two years on the run.
Flor Bressers, 35, nicknamed “the finger cutter”, has been sought since 2020 when he was given a four-year jail sentence for kidnapping, slashing with a razor and beating a Dutch florist who failed to smuggle drugs past UK customs.
Continue reading...Move comes amid ‘frank and substantive’ talks in Geneva and announcement by Russia of new military exercises
The US has offered to hold a summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin as a last-ditch effort to stop the slide to a new war in Europe, as Russia continued to build up its forces along the Ukraine border and announced new naval exercises in the Black Sea.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said Washington and its allies were also ready to respond in writing next week to Russian demands on the future of Nato and European security, which Moscow has said must be addressed to avoid it taking “military measures”. But, speaking in Geneva where he held talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, Blinken repeated the US and Nato position there could still be no compromise on the central issue of the right of Ukraine and other countries to join Nato in the future.
Continue reading...Swiss skiing holidays in doubt as country joins Spain in tightening travel rules to contain Omicron variant
Tour operators are scrambling to rearrange Swiss skiing holidays after the country joined Spain in tightening travel restrictions amid rising concerns about the spread of the new Omicron Covid variant.
From Saturday night, Switzerland mandated 10 days of quarantine for all new arrivals, in effect wrecking skiing holidays in the Swiss Alps until further notice. Travel firms are also wrestling with Spain’s ban on non-vaccinated arrivals that will affect British holidaymakers from Wednesday 1 December.
Continue reading...After tense campaign, early results show about two-thirds in favour of law giving legal basis for Covid pass
Swiss voters have firmly backed the law behind the country’s Covid pass in a referendum, following a tense campaign that saw unprecedented levels of hostility.
Early results on Sunday showed about two-thirds of voters supported the law, with market researchers GFS Bern projecting 63% backing.
Continue reading...Urgent measures needed to avoid ‘chaos’, warns expert, as Spain, Portugal and Netherlands tighten rules
Germany’s top health officials have raised the prospect of a national lockdown, warning that a rapidly rising number of coronavirus cases and a dramatic increase in the number of patients in intensive care meant contact reduction was the only way of tackling the crisis and avoiding “the road to chaos”.
“We need a massive contact reduction immediately,” said Prof Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s federal disease control agency.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Oxfordshire-based Emergex gets go-ahead for trials in Switzerland for skin patch vaccine
An Oxfordshire-based company will soon start clinical trials of a second-generation vaccine against Covid-19, an easy-to-administer skin patch that uses T-cells to kill infected cells and could offer longer-lasting immunity than current vaccines.
Emergex was set up in Abingdon in 2016 to develop T-cell vaccines, the brainchild of Prof Thomas Rademacher, the firm’s chief executive and professor emeritus of molecular medicine at the University College London medical school.
Continue reading...Andreas Fontana’s debut feature is an unnervingly subtle drama about a Swiss private banker visiting clients in Argentina during the period of the military junta and ‘disappearances’
Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air. Andreas Fontana is a Swiss director making his feature debut with this conspiracy drama-thriller, shot with a kind of desiccated blankness, about the occult world of super-wealth and things not to be talked about. The title is a Swiss banker’s code-word in conversation for “Be silent”.
It is set in 1980 in Argentina, at the time of the junta’s dirty war against leftists and dissidents, and you could set it alongside recent movies including Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo (2018) and Francisco Márquez’s A Common Crime (2020), which intuited the almost supernatural fear among those left behind when people they knew had vanished and joined los desaparecidos, the disappeared ones. But Azor gives a queasy new perspective on the horror of those times, and there is even a nauseous echo of the Swiss banks’ attitude to their German neighbours in the second world war.
Continue reading...After positive clinical trials for antiviral drug Molnupiravir, it joins other medicines that have shown promise
The first clinical trial results showing a positive effect for a pill that can be taken at home has been hailed as a potential gamechanger that could provide a new way to protect the most vulnerable people from the worst effects of Covid-19. Molnupiravir joins a growing list of medicines that have shown promise. Here are some of the main developments in treatments so far.
Continue reading...‘Marriage for All’ proposal backed by 64.1% of voters in nationwide referendum
Swiss voters have decided by a clear margin to allow same-sex couples to marry, in a referendum that brings the Alpine nation into line with many others in western Europe.
Official results showed the measure passed with 64.1% of voters in favour and won a majority in all of Switzerland’s 26 cantons.
Continue reading...Lee “Scratch” Perry, who has died aged 85, was one of Jamaica’s finest and most unpredictable record producers, as well as a much recorded singer. But perhaps his greatest global legacy was the profound effect he had on the king of reggae, Bob Marley.
As a singer in the Wailers with Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston, Marley had experienced a modest degree of success in Jamaica before he came into Perry’s charismatic orbit in 1970. Hooking up with Perry changed the way Marley saw things, pulling him away from the measured harmonies of a trio towards something more heartfelt.
Continue reading...Supercomputer calculation took 108 days and nine hours – 3.5 times as fast as previous record
Swiss researchers have calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8tn figures using a supercomputer.
“The calculation took 108 days and nine hours,” the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences said in a statement.
Continue reading...Swiss court ruling is not the first time plunder of DRC’s mineral wealth has been linked to the killing of Congolese people. Without accountability, it won’t be the last
According to the Swiss federal criminal court last week, the corruption destroying the Democratic Republic of the Congo – where devastating conflicts over minerals used in our electronics have killed more than six million people – is inextricably linked to the UK, Gibraltar and Switzerland.
It was a significant moment exposing corruption that has fuelled not only grinding poverty, famine and unemployment in DRC but also the impunity and violence required to sustain it. Yet, unless there is accountability, it won’t change.
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