Free Republic

Muslim women can no longer wear the full-body garment in shops, restaurants or public buildings and anyone caught flouting the ban could be struck with a £6,500 fine. The local government of Ticino approved the referendum after the Swiss Parliament ruled that the ban did not violate the country's federal law. Two in three voters in the canton backed the move in an overwhelming result for a referendum, in the wake of heightened terrorist alerts across Europe. The law which MPs voted for only applies to veils which covers the body from head to foot worn by the 40,000 Muslim...

Switzerland has active criminal proceedings against 33 individuals over suspected ties to extremist Islamist groups, but only three people are currently in custody, the attorney general's office said on Sunday. 'Isis cell operating out of Winterthur mosque' (18 Nov 15) Iraqi jailed for posting Isis propaganda online (13 Nov 15) Switzerland extradites French teen jihadist (22 May 15) Some of those cases have been opened in the last two to three months, but the most serious involves a cell of possible Islamist radicals uncovered in the Canton of Schaffhausen last year, said Andry Marty, a spokesman for Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber.  ...

A trove of more than 4,000 bronze and silver coins dating back to ancient Rome, uncovered this summer in the orchard of a fruit and vegetable farmer, has been described as one of the biggest treasures of this kind found in Switzerland. The huge hoard of coins, buried about 1,700 years ago and weighing 15kg (33lb), was discovered in Ueken, in Switzerland’s northern canton of Aargau, after the farmer spotted some shimmering green coins on a molehill in his cherry orchard... On Thursday the archaeological service announced that after months of digs, 4,166 coins had been found at the site,...

US Now Ranks Third For Financial Secrecy And Tax Havens After Switzerland And Hong Kong By Michelle Mark @michelleamark m.mark@ibtimes.com on November 02 2015 4:33 PM EST The U.S. has overtaken Singapore and the Cayman Islands in its ranking for financial secrecy, a new report by the Tax Justice Network in London has found. The government’s refusal to participate in a global information exchange system for bank data was largely responsible for its jump to third place – just behind Switzerland and Hong Kong – in the network’s financial secrecy index, which is released every two years. The Organization for...

MOSCOW/ZURICH/PARIS, Oct 19 (Reuters) - Switzerland's military said one of its fighter jets performed a routine identification check on a Russian plane in Swiss air space on Monday, prompting Moscow to complain the aircraft came "dangerously" close to each other. Russia initially summoned the French ambassador in Moscow to protest, alleging a French military jet had come into "dangerous proximity" with the Tupolev, whose passengers included the Speaker of its lower house en route to Geneva. Moscow, which had threatened not to use France as a venue for international meetings in retaliation, later apologised for the mistake.

The anti-immigration Swiss People's Party (SVP) won the biggest share of the vote in Sunday's national parliamentary election, keeping pressure on Bern to introduce quotas on people moving from the European Union.

Switzerland just elected a new parliament, and a conservative, anti-immigration party, the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) won a record vote, enabling it to form a government with a conservative majority. The political fallout in Europe is just beginning, and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in Germany had better take notice. The BBC reports on the Swiss election: The right-wing, anti-immigration Swiss People's Party (SVP) has won Switzerland's parliamentary election with a record 29.4% of the vote. Its victory translates into 11 extra seats, giving it 65 out of the total 200 in the lower house. Europe's migrant crisis boosted support...

The anti-immigration Swiss People’s Party (SVP) won the biggest share of the vote in Sunday’s national parliamentary election, initial projections showed, keeping pressure on Bern to introduce quotas on people moving from the European Union. The result, based on initial projections by Swiss TV, gives the SVP 65 seats in the 200-member lower house of parliament, the largest number for any Swiss party in at least a century. The SVP’s success, coupled with gains made by the pro-business Liberal Party (FDP), led political commentators to talk of a “Rechtsrutsch” – move to the right – in Swiss politics. Immigration was...

GENEVA – In a cafe lounge at the United Nations complex in Geneva, a Tibetan fugitive was waiting his turn earlier this year to tell diplomats his story of being imprisoned and tortured back home in China. The 43-year-old Buddhist monk, Golog Jigme, had broken out of a Chinese detention center in 2012, eventually fleeing to Switzerland. But his Chinese government pursuers had not given up.

When you think of tech innovation, places like Silicon Valley and Boston spring to mind. But flying under the world's radar is Switzerland, where inventions like a solar plane that just completed the longest solo-flight ever without fuel are born. And while Europe was busy debating bitcoin's future, Switzerland already opened up the region's first bitcoin ATM earlier this year. The country has managed to maintain its No. 1 ranking on the Global Innovation Index for four years in a row. Switzerland's résumé is definitely impressive: The country boasts the second-highest number of patents per person — second to Japan....

Swiss authorities said on Friday they had temporarily banned the sale of new Volkswagen brand diesel-engine models potentially equipped with software capable of tricking environmental tests. Some 180,000 vehicles made by Volkswagen's Audi, Seat, Skoda and VW brands between 2009 and 2014 could be affected by the scandal, the Federal Roads Office said in a statement. Models equipped with diesel engines of the type 1,2TDI, 1,6TDI and 2.0TDI may be fitted with software capable of tricking environmental tests, the government agency said. It stressed that only cars designed to meet Eur05 emission standards were affected and not the Eur06 engines....

The election of Jorge Bergoglio was the fruit of secret meetings that cardinals and bishops, organized by Carlo Maria Martini, held for years at St. Gall in Switzerland. This is what is claimed by Jürgen Mettepenningen and Karim Schelkens, the authors of a just published biography of the Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who refer to the group of cardinals and bishops as the “Mafia-club”. Danneels, according to the authors, had worked for years in preparation for the election of Pope Francis, which happened in 2013. He himself, however, in a video recorded during the presentation of the book admits that...

Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker, author of the treasonous Corker – Cardin bill to facilitate President Obama’s nuclear weapons treaty with Islamist Iran, has made another inexplicable betrayal of American military superiority and indeed the future of America itself. The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which Corker authored, requires the Administration transmit to Congress all documents related to the JCPOA —including side agreements—prior to a 60-day review period and subsequent vote. There’s no doubt that Obama has not complied with the terms of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, indeed Senator Corker said “there’s no question that two of the...

Chinese tourists are being given separate train services to travel to the top of a picturesque Swiss mountain after they were accused of poor behaviour. Locals and other visitors to Mount Rigi have complained to the railway operator, accusing Asian tourists of crowding train corridors to snap photos and even spitting inside the carriages. Tensions between tourists from Asia and visitors from Switzerland have worsened as the mountain, near Lucerne, has become a massive draw for Chinese holidaymakers, a newspaper claimed.

VANCOUVER -- Austrian businessmen Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and Otto Pick transferred ownership of their sugar refinery to a Swiss bank for safekeeping shortly before fleeing the Nazis in March, 1938. Months later, the bank actively co-operated in the sale of the Jewish businessmen's shares in the sugar refinery to a Nazi purchaser at a small fraction of their value and without the businessmen's consent. After 67 years, the theft of the sugar refinery, which provided 20 per cent of Austria's sugar before the war, had become a piece of family folklore only vaguely remembered by some of the descendants. But in...

The State Department (which Hillary Clinton used to run and where she still holds significant influence) has been very clear about one thing. There is no relationship between donations to the Clinton Foundation and actions taken by the Secretary of State during her tenure there. Period. Full stop. End of discussion. Perish the thought. You’re all just a bunch of Clinton haters who are trying to stop the ongoing charity work of these wonderful people. And yet for some strange reason we keep seeing stories like this. Hillary hadn’t even finished unpacking her things in her new office at...

The Swiss ambassador to Iran's display of a cartoon depicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being defecated upon by two doves was condemned as "an ugly act" by the Foreign Ministry late Friday. Switzerland expressed regret earlier Friday after Ambassador Giulio Haas showed the cartoon at an event promoting Iranian business opportunities. Haas spoke to hundreds of Swiss and Iranian business people at a Zurich hotel on Thursday. The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) said the "questionable cartoon" was used without its knowledge. "The FDFA regrets the use of this cartoon and considers it tasteless," it said in a...

In the politically charged language of the present, Bishop Vitus Huonder is a “conservative” if not an “extremist.” In fact, he is simply a faithful Catholic Christian. And for that he’s being threatened with three years in jail. It’s happening in Switzerland, but the conflict epitomizes a wider phenomenon of anti-Christian secularists on both sides of the Atlantic using the courts to target Christians for simply standing up for biblical truth.In 2011, Huonder, the Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Chur in Switzerland, supported parents being able to opt out of having children as young as four subjected to...

A domestic pig on an organic farm in Solothurn, Switzerland. Image: Wikimedia Commons --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stories of people waiting for organ transplants that could save their lives are well known. The numbers, though, are not encouraging. The US Department of Health and Human Services has some data: 122,407 people need a lifesaving organ transplant (total waiting list of candidates). The agency said that the gap between supply and demand continues to widen. The total number of donors from January through May this year was 5,975. On average, 22 people die each day while waiting for a transplant. Here is another statistic:...

Under heavy public pressure, a Swiss Catholic bishop has issued a public apology for a statement in which he referred to homosexual activity as an abomination and cited Old Testament passages saying that offenders should be put to death. Bishop Vitus Huonder of Chur sent a 3-page letter to clerics in which he said it had been a “mistake” to make his comments—which he had delivered at a forum in Germany—“on a theological and academic level.” He said that he should have shown a draft of his talk to colleagues, who would have warned him on the likely outcry. The...