Breaking News, Latest Philippines Headlines, World, Entertainment, Politics, Weather & Video News
By Elodie LE MAOU, Fabrice COFFRINI LAUSANNE, July 12, 2024 (AFP) – At least three people were killed and eight injured on Friday when scaffolding collapsed off a 19-storey building under construction in the western Swiss city of Lausanne, police said. The scaffolding collapsed shortly before 9:30 am (0730 GMT), falling “like a house of cards”, according to one witness. The entire scaffolding structure on one side of the 60-metre (200-foot) tower came down, sending […]
GENEVA, June 30, 2024 (AFP) – Ferocious storms and torrential rains that lashed France, Switzerland and Italy this weekend have left seven people dead, local authorities said on Sunday. Three people in their 70s and 80s died in France’s northeastern Aube region on Saturday when a tree crushed the car they were travelling in during fierce winds, the local authority told AFP. A fourth passenger was in critical care, it added. In neighbouring Switzerland, four […]
GENEVA, June 22, 2024 (AFP) – Swiss authorities in the southeastern canton of Grisons said Saturday that they were searching for three people missing after heavy flooding the previous day in the region. Police said a woman feared to have been swept away had been found alive after being caught in torrential rain and thunderstorms that caused landslides and flooding in the Mesolcina valley and forces dozens of residents to be briefly evacuated. “Intensive searches […]
By Robin MILLARD BURGENSTOCK, Switzerland, June 16, 2024 (AFP) – The international Ukraine peace summit focused Sunday on food security, avoiding a nuclear disaster and returning deported children from Russia as countries outlined building blocks towards ending the war. More than two years after Russia invaded, leaders and top officials from more than 90 states were spending the weekend at a Swiss mountainside resort for a landmark two-day summit dedicated to resolving the largest European […]
By Robin MILLARD with Jake CORDELL in Warsaw BURGENSTOCK, Switzerland, June 15, 2024 (AFP) – President Volodymyr Zelensky said he hoped to find paths to a “just peace” as soon as possible, as a first international summit on pathways to end Russia’s war in Ukraine opened Saturday. More than 50 world leaders were joining Zelensky at the Burgenstock resort in Switzerland for a two-day peace summit — though with Moscow rejecting the event, it only […]
GENEVA, June 13, 2024 (AFP) – Switzerland government websites were hit Thursday by the first of an expected wave of cyberattacks ahead of a weekend summit on peace in Ukraine hosted by Bern. The National Cyber Security Centre said the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which make websites or network resources unavailable by flooding them with malicious traffic, resulted in minor outages. “A first DDoS attack on various federal government websites and organisations involved in the […]
ZURICH (AFP) – Nestle denied Thursday that it was applying any “double standard” after an NGO accused the Swiss food giant of selling baby food with high levels of added sugar in low-income countries but not in wealthier nations. “There is no double standard,” the company said in a statement. “We apply the same nutrition, health and wellness principles everywhere.” In a report published last week, Swiss NGO Public Eye said that “two of the […]
YVERDON-LES-BAINS, Switzerland, Feb 9, 2024 (AFP) – A hostage situation on a train in the west of Switzerland on Thursday night ended with the suspect killed in a police raid and the hostages safely freed, authorities said. The hostage-taker was armed with an axe and a knife, and was speaking Farsi and English, Vaud canton police spokesman Jean-Christophe Sauterel said at a press briefing. “At this stage of the investigation, the motives of the perpetrator […]
By Nina LARSON GENEVA, Dec 24, 2023 (AFP) – A number of flights from Geneva airport were delayed and some were cancelled during the holiday rush Sunday, as dozens of ground staff went on strike over a wage dispute. The workers began their strike at 4:00 am (0300 GMT) to protest conditions provided by their employer, the Dubai National Air Travel Agency (Dnata). Dnata personnel, who handle about a fifth of the traffic through Cointrin […]
PARIS, Nov 30, 2023 (AFP) – Zurich and Singapore are the most expensive cities in the world ahead of New York amid the ever-rising cost of living, according to rankings published Thursday by The Economist magazine. The British weekly estimated that prices have increased an average of 7.4 percent over the past year in 173 major cities, a slight slowdown compared to a record 8.1 percent inflation in 2022. “The cost of living crisis is […]
By Nina LARSON PONTIMIA PASTURE, Switzerland, Aug 22, 2023 (AFP) – Using a powerful torch, Aliki Buhayer-Mach momentarily drenches a nearby mountain top in light, straining to see if wolves are lurking in the shadows. If the predator were to get past the electric wires stretched around this high-altitude pasture in the Swiss Alps, the 57-year-old biologist knows “it would be a massacre”. She and her 60-year-old husband Francois Mach-Buhayer — a leading Swiss cardiologist […]
GENEVA, July 10, 2023 (AFP) – Switzerland said Monday it experienced its hottest year on record in 2022, with its cherished Alpine glaciers melting at three times the rate previously considered extreme. The record heat had a negative effect on the landlocked European nation’s lakes, rivers, forests and agriculture, the environment ministry said in its climate overview for the year. “For Switzerland, 2022 was the hottest year in history,” it said in a statement. “The […]
