The numbers are clear: with CHF11.7 billion ($11.8 billion) in exports, some CHF80 billion of investments and 194,000 employees, Britain is one of the most important business locations for Swiss firms. What is less clear is how the picture will look if Britain leaves the European Union.

Half of the 185 companies, from both countries, recently surveyed by the British-Swiss Chamber of Commerce (BSCC) believe their economic outlook will be poorer if Britons vote to leave the EU on June 23. Only 13.5% think prospects will improve with a Brexit while just over a third say business will be unaffected.

But the anonymous Idea attached to the survey (see below) highlight the confusion that surrounds the potential split.

Comments from the BSCC survey

“Our ability to passport into the EU through London would need to be clarified in the renegotiation process and although no changes are expected for two years, there will be uncertainty and market volatility and consequently other options may become more attractive bases. However a decision to move from London would also be very complex in that two-year period.”

"My business is a Swiss SARL so I am assuming that business will not be directly affected if the UK leaves the EU."

"I am ruing a Swiss SARL as a 'frontalier'. It is altogether possible that if Britain leaves the EU, this will no longer be possible (t has only been possible since 2004 with the free movement of people bilaterals) and I will have to shut down my company. This will benefit precisely no-one. Already, I will make no additional investment in the period leading up to the referendum. In short, this is only bad for smaller British business."

“My business is strongly focused on the UK and I am very conceed about the immediate, medium and long term consequences of a potential vote for the UK to leave the EU,” states another firm. “I fear that Brexit will present insurmountable challenges for the country and will significantly impact upon its relative attractiveness.”

“Being a European bank, if Britain leaves the EU, we will have to adapt our set up and probably leave many businesses currently run out of London. Overall it will impact costs and changes, so it will be both negative for our firm and negative for Britain as we will have to lay-off many employees.”

The fact is, companies in both countries are frantically trying to work out which way the wind will blow if Britain chooses the Swiss route to EU relations.

Such forthright Idea are made under the cover of anonymity. In Switzerland, bosses are reluctant to break silence for fear of being accused of interfering in foreign politics, angering shareholders or simply because they have not formed a clear enough picture of all possible eventualities.

The few executives who have been enticed into speaking out on Brexit also give mixed opinions. “Every company would be forced to re-evaluate the implications of investing in the UK,” Nestlé chairman Peter Brabeck told Sky News in January.

But Sergio Ermotti, chief executive of UBS bank that employs 5,500 staff in London, gave a more optimistic assessment, albeit couched in caution. "I expect that we would keep a strong presence but that depends on a lot of factors which today are not yet clear,” he told Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung earlier this month.

Lobby groups

The consensus opinion is that it would take Britain two years to prise itself free from the EU. And then it would have to renegotiate relations with the EU and the rest of the world as an independent entity. That has resulted in a lot of question marks conceing the potential future lay of the land.

This is reflected in the contrasting stances of Swiss business lobby groups. “There will be no sudden shock or catastrophe if Britain leaves the EU,” Jan Atteslander of the Swiss Business Federation (economiesuisse) told swissinfo.ch. “The world will still be the same on June 24. What will be different is a high degree of uncertainty regarding the future of the economic integration in Europe of the British economy.”

Furthermore, Atteslander believes that the markets have already priced a potential Brexit into currency exchange rates. In other words, because many investors have already hedged their currency bets in light of a possible split, the pound and euro will not sink too drastically against the franc unless the markets are hit with unexpected news regarding Brexit.

However, Atteslander also thinks that companies will factor in the current economic uncertainty when deciding how much money to invest in Britain in the short-term.

Currency risks

Swissmem, the lobby group for electrical engineering, metals, fine tools and machine building firms, has a more pessimistic stance. Its member firms ship 4% of their goods to Britain.

“In the short-term, a Brexit would increase uncertainty in the EU,” Swissmem said in a written statement to swissinfo.ch. “This could have consequences on the franc-euro exchange rates. We would assume an upward pressure on the franc with subsequent [negative] consequences for the export industry.”

In the long-run, a Brexit would weaken the EU economically, in the view of Swissmem. This would spell further bad news for Swiss companies.

Switzerland Global Enterprise (s-ge), a govement agency that facilitates foreign trade for Swiss firms, told swissinfo.ch that the companies it advises “in most cases don’t plan to react in terms of reviewing their strategy or similar until the situation has become more predictable.”

Swiss-British trade

Last year Swiss firms sent around CHF11.7 billion of exports to Britain and received some CHF6.6 billion of imported goods (without jewels or precious metals). That makes Britain the fifth largest receiver of Swiss goods and the eighth largest provider of imports to Switzerland.

If precious metals and jewellery are included to the statistics, Britain is the second largest supplier of goods to Switzerland.

Switzerland’s record of investing in Britain is even more impressive. At CHF78.7 billion (2013), Britain is the third largest beneficiary of direct foreign investments (buildings and machinery) by Swiss companies. At the end of 2013, Swiss firms employed 193,700 people in Britain – the fourth largest concentration of Swiss paid jobs abroad.

By the end of 2013 British firms had invested an accumulated CHF21.3 billion in Switzerland, creating 26,800 jobs. HSBC, Vodafone, BP and Unilever have the biggest Swiss presence of all British firms, according to the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (Seco).

swissinfo.ch

With audiences of half a million in Switzerland and 2.4 million worldwide, Alain Gsponer’s remake of Heidi has been hailed as the most successful film in the history of Swiss cinema. This claim is hard to verify, due to the lack of long-term statistics. Anyway, what makes a Swiss film?

In a country where cinema is largely subsidised by the govement, one would expect there would be detailed statistics on the success of any given film at the box office, its appearance at festivals and the number of prizes it received. That is not the case.

There aren't many figures available and they basically conce the domestic market. As far as inteational success is conceed, not even Swiss Films, the agency that promotes Swiss cinema, was able to provide complete data. So it caot be said for certain that Heidi is the most watched Swiss film of all time, although the figure of 2.4 million viewers is certainly impressive.

At the national level, the most informative source is the Federal Statistical Office, which has compiled a list of the 500 most successful Swiss films from 1976 to the present.

The verdict of this list is clear: in the past 40 years, the most popular film was the satirical comedy The Swissmakers (1978) with about a million viewers. Ironically, the govement of the day declined to subsidise the film, which humorously depicted the tortuous procedures for naturalisation in Switzerland and questioned matters of national identity.

See in other languages: 9

The success of this film does not surprise Frédéric Maire, who heads Cinémathèque Suisse, the national film archive. “The theme of foreigners and nationality was the focus of political debate at the time. And the main actor, Emil Steinberger, was a star. He was one of the few Swiss-German actors to break through the language barrier.”

Now, what about the new Heidi? With more than 500,000 tickets sold, a film by Alain Gsponer would come fifth in this ranking. Note the “would”. It is hard to determine the nationality of a particular film – the federal statisticians list only films that are 100% Swiss or else mainly Swiss co-productions. This criterion is also used for film statistics throughout Europe. Although it was directed by a Swiss director, Heidi is a majority German co-production. So it doesn’t qualify for the list.

It should be emphasised that the Federal Office of Culture uses less restrictive criteria and considers Heidi a Swiss film. The making of the film was partly supported by the Swiss govement and it is nominated for a Swiss film award.

Hits of the 1940s and 1950s

While govement statistics cover the past 40 years, the origins of Swiss cinema go back far beyond 1976.

Trying to get a more complete picture, swissinfo.ch consulted a history book by Hervé Dumont*, former head of Cinémathèque Suisse. It tus out that some films of the post-war years were even more successful than The Swissmakers, both at home and abroad.

One of these was Marie-Louise (1944), which was seen by more than a million people in Switzerland alone. At the time, Swiss cultural productions were heavily influenced by the govement’s home-front propaganda campaign to bolster supposedly “Swiss” values in opposition to dictatorships abroad.

The film by Leopold Lindtberg fits in with this trend. He creates an idyllic picture of Switzerland through the eyes of a young French refugee. Acclaimed by the New York critics, Marie-Louise was the first European film to appear on American screens following the end of the war, and the first foreign film to win an Oscar for best screenplay.

A year later, Lindtberg retued to the theme of refugees and created another major success for Swiss cinema, Last Hope. The film came out only 18 days after the German surrender and became a worldwide success. In Switzerland it was seen by over a million people, and the New York Times counted it among its top ten films of 1946.

In the film Last Hope (1945), Leopold Lindtberg shows Switzerland as open and welcoming, but also how Jewish refugees were screened at the border. The govement of the day accused the producers of being in the pay of Communists.

Another high-profile director at the time, Franz Schnyder, drew 1.6 million viewers with his peasant drama Uli der Knecht (1954) – and this was at a time when Switzerland had only five million inhabitants! The same year saw the release of Heidi and Peter, also by Schnyder. It was the first Swiss colour film, and it enjoyed inteational success thanks to a major advertising campaign in New York.

*Information in this article comes from the book “Histoire du cinéma suisse – Films de fiction 1896-1965”, by Hervé Dumont, 1987.

You can contact the authors of this article on twitter: Duc-Quang Nguyen and Stefania Summermatter.

Swiss Film Awards

On March 18 the wiers of the “Swiss Oscars” were aounced. Below are some of the nominations; the wiers are in bold:

Best film (each nominee receives CHF25,000)
Amateur Teens (Niklaus Hilber)
Heimatland (Jan Gassma, Jonas Meier, Bey Jaberg, Tobias Nölle, Lionel Rupp, Lisa Blatter, Gregor Frei, Michael Krummenacher, Carmen Jaquier, Mike Scheiwiller)
Köpek (Esen Isik)
La Vanité (Lionel Baier)
Nichts Passiert (Micha Lewinsky)

Best documentary
Above and Below (Nicolas Steiner)
Als Die Soe Vom Himmel Fiel (Aya Domenig)
Dirty Gold War (Daniel Schweizer)
Grozny Blues (Nicola Bellucci)
Imagine Waking Up Tomorrow And All Music Has Disappeared (Stefan Schwietert)

Heidi was nominated only in the category “best actor”, with Bruno Ganz (the prize went to Patrick Lapp for La Vanité). This decision was criticised by several industry figures and film critics.

Translated from Italian by Terence MacNamee, swissinfo.ch

An American street photographer with an eye for the details of human life that aren’t always the prettiest, but which show us for who we really are. The crumpled trousers of a man clutching a woman’s hand in the street. An older gentleman snoozing on the job.

Vivian Maier lived in Chicago for most of her life, although she was a French citizen. She was bo in New York in 1926 to a French mother and Austrian father. After spending some of the first part of her life in France, she worked as a nay in the United States.

She would take the children out for the day, her Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera slung around her neck, and take snaps as she went along. What she created was a vast number of images showing everyday life in America in the second half of the 20^th century. She took pictures of families in her neighbourhood, children playing with tyres on the street, couples eating dier in run-down apartment buildings or young men on their way to work.

Maier stopped working as a nay in the 1990s and died in 2008 after sustaining a head injury from slipping on ice. She had been keeping her collection of negatives in a storage facility, but ran out of money to pay the rent on it two years before her death. The contents ended up at auction.

One of the images caught the eye of John Maloof, a real estate agent who dabbled in work as an amateur historian in his spare time. He got his hands on a vast collection of 30,000 negatives for the mere sum of $400 (CHF399). As he began to sort through the negatives, he came across Maier’s name, searched for her on the inteet and discovered her death notice, published in a newspaper a few days earlier.

Maloof started to post Maier’s images online and was gradually contacted by people interested in photography who told him he had something special on his hands. The fame of the photos grew, and word spread, leading to exhibitions in the US and Europe. Maloof has carried on buying up negatives created by Maier and now has more than 100,000.

Taking the Long Way Home, is the first solo exhibition of the work of Vivian Maier in Switzerland. It runs at the Photobastei in Zurich, from March 3 to April 3. The exhibition has more than 150 prints, focusing on Maier’s time in New York (early 1950s) and in Chicago (1956).

(Text: Jo Fahy, pictures: Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York)

Links

The numbers are clear: with CHF11.7 billion ($11.8 billion) in exports, some CHF80 billion of investments and 194,000 employees, Britain is one of the most important business locations for Swiss firms. What is less clear is how the picture will look if Britain leaves the European Union.

Half of the 185 companies, from both countries, recently surveyed by the British-Swiss Chamber of Commerce (BSCC) believe their economic outlook will be poorer if Britons vote to leave the EU on June 23. Only 13.5% think prospects will improve with a Brexit while just over a third say business will be unaffected.

But the anonymous Idea attached to the survey (see below) highlight the confusion that surrounds the potential split.

Comments from the BSCC survey

“Our ability to passport into the EU through London would need to be clarified in the renegotiation process and although no changes are expected for two years, there will be uncertainty and market volatility and consequently other options may become more attractive bases. However a decision to move from London would also be very complex in that two-year period.”

"My business is a Swiss SARL so I am assuming that business will not be directly affected if the UK leaves the EU."

"I am ruing a Swiss SARL as a 'frontalier'. It is altogether possible that if Britain leaves the EU, this will no longer be possible (t has only been possible since 2004 with the free movement of people bilaterals) and I will have to shut down my company. This will benefit precisely no-one. Already, I will make no additional investment in the period leading up to the referendum. In short, this is only bad for smaller British business."

"Our ability to passport into the EU through London would need to be clarified in the renegotiation process and although no changes are expected for two years, there will be uncertainty and market volatility and consequently other options may become more attractive bases. However as decision to move from London would also be very complex in that two year period."

“My business is strongly focused on the UK and I am very conceed about the immediate, medium and long term consequences of a potential vote for the UK to leave the EU,” states another firm. “I fear that Brexit will present insurmountable challenges for the country and will significantly impact upon its relative attractiveness.”

“Being a European bank, if Britain leaves the EU, we will have to adapt our set up and probably leave many businesses currently run out of London. Overall it will impact costs and changes, so it will be both negative for our firm and negative for Britain as we will have to lay-off many employees.”

The fact is, companies in both countries are frantically trying to work out which way the wind will blow if Britain chooses the Swiss route to EU relations.

Such forthright Idea are made under the cover of anonymity. In Switzerland, bosses are reluctant to break silence for fear of being accused of interfering in foreign politics, angering shareholders or simply because they have not formed a clear enough picture of all possible eventualities.

The few executives who have been enticed into speaking out on Brexit also give mixed opinions. “Every company would be forced to re-evaluate the implications of investing in the UK,” Nestlé chairman Peter Brabeck told Sky News in January.

But Sergio Ermotti, chief executive of UBS bank that employs 5,500 staff in London, gave a more optimistic assessment, albeit couched in caution. "I expect that we would keep a strong presence but that depends on a lot of factors which today are not yet clear,” he told Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung earlier this month.

Lobby groups

The consensus opinion is that it would take Britain two years to prise itself free from the EU. And then it would have to renegotiate relations with the EU and the rest of the world as an independent entity. That has resulted in a lot of question marks conceing the potential future lay of the land.

This is reflected in the contrasting stances of Swiss business lobby groups. “There will be no sudden shock or catastrophe if Britain leaves the EU,” Jan Atteslander of the Swiss Business Federation (economiesuisse) told swissinfo.ch. “The world will still be the same on June 24. What will be different is a high degree of uncertainty regarding the future of the economic integration in Europe of the British economy.”

Furthermore, Atteslander believes that the markets have already priced a potential Brexit into currency exchange rates. In other words, because many investors have already hedged their currency bets in light of a possible split, the pound and euro will not sink too drastically against the franc unless the markets are hit with unexpected news regarding Brexit.

However, Atteslander also thinks that companies will factor in the current economic uncertainty when deciding how much money to invest in Britain in the short-term.

Currency risks

Swissmem, the lobby group for electrical engineering, metals, fine tools and machine building firms, has a more pessimistic stance. Its member firms ship 4% of their goods to Britain.

“In the short-term, a Brexit would increase uncertainty in the EU,” Swissmem said in a written statement to swissinfo.ch. “This could have consequences on the franc-euro exchange rates. We would assume an upward pressure on the franc with subsequent [negative] consequences for the export industry.”

In the long-run, a Brexit would weaken the EU economically, in the view of Swissmem. This would spell further bad news for Swiss companies.

Switzerland Global Enterprise (s-ge), a govement agency that facilitates foreign trade for Swiss firms, told swissinfo.ch that the companies it advises “in most cases don’t plan to react in terms of reviewing their strategy or similar until the situation has become more predictable.”

Swiss-British trade

Last year Swiss firms sent around CHF11.7 billion of exports to Britain and received some CHF6.6 billion of imported goods (without jewels or precious metals). That makes Britain the fifth largest receiver of Swiss goods and the eighth largest provider of imports to Switzerland.

If precious metals and jewellery are included to the statistics, Britain is the second largest supplier of goods to Switzerland.

Switzerland’s record of investing in Britain is even more impressive. At CHF78.7 billion (2013), Britain is the third largest beneficiary of direct foreign investments (buildings and machinery) by Swiss companies. At the end of 2013, Swiss firms employed 193,700 people in Britain – the fourth largest concentration of Swiss paid jobs abroad.

By the end of 2013 British firms had invested an accumulated CHF21.3 billion in Switzerland, creating 26,800 jobs. HSBC, Vodafone, BP and Unilever have the biggest Swiss presence of all British firms, according to the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (Seco).

swissinfo.ch

With audiences of half a million in Switzerland and 2.4 million worldwide, Alain Gsponer’s remake of Heidi has been hailed as the most successful film in the history of Swiss cinema. This claim is hard to verify, due to the lack of long-term statistics. Anyway, what makes a Swiss film?

In a country where cinema is largely subsidised by the govement, one would expect there would be detailed statistics on the success of any given film at the box office, its appearance at festivals and the number of prizes it received. That is not the case.

There aren't many figures available and they basically conce the domestic market. As far as inteational success is conceed, not even Swiss Films, the agency that promotes Swiss cinema, was able to provide complete data. So it caot be said for certain that Heidi is the most watched Swiss film of all time, although the figure of 2.4 million viewers is certainly impressive.

At the national level, the most informative source is the Federal Statistical Office, which has compiled a list of the 500 most successful Swiss films from 1976 to the present.

The verdict of this list is clear: in the past 40 years, the most popular film was the satirical comedy The Swissmakers (1978) with about a million viewers. Ironically, the govement of the day declined to subsidise the film, which humorously depicted the tortuous procedures for naturalisation in Switzerland and questioned matters of national identity.

See in other languages: 9

The success of this film does not surprise Frédéric Maire, who heads Cinémathèque Suisse, the national film archive. “The theme of foreigners and nationality was the focus of political debate at the time. And the main actor, Emil Steinberger, was a star. He was one of the few Swiss-German actors to break through the language barrier.”

Now, what about the new Heidi? With more than 500,000 tickets sold, a film by Alain Gsponer would come fifth in this ranking. Note the “would”. It is hard to determine the nationality of a particular film – the federal statisticians list only films that are 100% Swiss or else mainly Swiss co-productions. This criterion is also used for film statistics throughout Europe. Although it was directed by a Swiss director, Heidi is a majority German co-production. So it doesn’t qualify for the list.

It should be emphasised that the Federal Office of Culture uses less restrictive criteria and considers Heidi a Swiss film. The making of the film was partly supported by the Swiss govement and it is nominated for a Swiss film award.

Hits of the 1940s and 1950s

While govement statistics cover the past 40 years, the origins of Swiss cinema go back far beyond 1976.

Trying to get a more complete picture, swissinfo.ch consulted a history book by Hervé Dumont*, former head of Cinémathèque Suisse. It tus out that some films of the post-war years were even more successful than The Swissmakers, both at home and abroad.

One of these was Marie-Louise (1944), which was seen by more than a million people in Switzerland alone. At the time, Swiss cultural productions were heavily influenced by the govement’s home-front propaganda campaign to bolster supposedly “Swiss” values in opposition to dictatorships abroad.

The film by Leopold Lindtberg fits in with this trend. He creates an idyllic picture of Switzerland through the eyes of a young French refugee. Acclaimed by the New York critics, Marie-Louise was the first European film to appear on American screens following the end of the war, and the first foreign film to win an Oscar for best screenplay.

A year later, Lindtberg retued to the theme of refugees and created another major success for Swiss cinema, Last Hope. The film came out only 18 days after the German surrender and became a worldwide success. In Switzerland it was seen by over a million people, and the New York Times counted it among its top ten films of 1946.

In the film Last Hope (1945), Leopold Lindtberg shows Switzerland as open and welcoming, but also how Jewish refugees were screened at the border. The govement of the day accused the producers of being in the pay of Communists.

Another high-profile director at the time, Franz Schnyder, drew 1.6 million viewers with his peasant drama Uli der Knecht (1954) – and this was at a time when Switzerland had only five million inhabitants! The same year saw the release of Heidi and Peter, also by Schnyder. It was the first Swiss colour film, and it enjoyed inteational success thanks to a major advertising campaign in New York.

*Information in this article comes from the book “Histoire du cinéma suisse – Films de fiction 1896-1965”, by Hervé Dumont, 1987.

You can contact the authors of this article on twitter: Duc-Quang Nguyen and Stefania Summermatter.

Swiss Film Awards

On March 18 the wiers of the “Swiss Oscars” will be aounced. Here are some of the nominations:

Best film (each nominee receives CHF25,000)
Amateur Teens (Niklaus Hilber)
Heimatland (Jan Gassma, Jonas Meier, Bey Jaberg, Tobias Nölle, Lionel Rupp, Lisa Blatter, Gregor Frei, Michael Krummenacher, Carmen Jaquier, Mike Scheiwiller)
Köpek (Esen Isik)
La Vanité (Lionel Baier)
Nichts Passiert (Micha Lewinsky)

Best documentary
Above and Below (Nicolas Steiner)
Als Die Soe Vom Himmel Fiel (Aya Domenig)
Dirty Gold War (Daniel Schweizer)
Grozny Blues (Nicola Bellucci)
Imagine Waking Up Tomorrow And All Music Has Disappeared (Stefan Schwietert)

Heidi was nominated only in the category “best actor”, with Bruno Ganz. This decision was criticised by several industry figures and film critics.

Translated from Italian by Terence MacNamee, swissinfo.ch

As part of an inteational project called "Inside Out" by the French street artist JR, Geneva-based photographer Mark Henley shot 51 portraits of asylum seekers in their homes fuished by the canton of Geneva.

Their faces, shown at ground level, have proven irresistible to passersby. Does the fascination stem from the rejection felt by migrants and refugees or is it a function of how pedestrians come across the portraits?

Only one night after the installation was set up at a roundabout in Plainpalais – a big open space in the center of the city that sports a skate park, and is regularly used for flea and farmer markets, amusement rides, and Switzerland’s leading circus, Knie, at the start of each school year – vandals and rain severely damaged the portraits.

It was a deliberate act of racism, according to Henley, who is based in Geneva and has twice won the Swiss Press Photo Award. Nearly all the portraits feature young men of color. Henley repaired the damage by installing new prints on the ground, but only a few hours later they were again damaged (see gallery).

The project coordinator, who has had the support of the cantonal office for social and financial assistance, says they knew vandalism might result. "We were aware of such a possibility. Once installed, these portraits belong to the people, like everything that JR does,” said Jessica Tabary, an art therapist. Even so, the incidents beg the question whether it is reasonable or respectful to give passersby – and vandals – the chance to walk all over or destroy the portraits of lives already uprooted.

The 51 portraits can be viewed at a subsequent exhibition opening next week at the Galerie La Cave. There will also be selfies shot by the refugees around the city, along with pictures taken by photographer Juliette Russbach of the refugees interacting with various others in the city such as firefighters, police and dancers.

Switzerland has become a commodity trading hub over the past 15 years

Voters last month rejected a proposal to ban speculation in food products but not as overwhelmingly as had been expected. Another people's initiative dubbed “For Responsible Business” is now directly aimed against the commodities sector which has a strong presence in Switzerland and is regularly targeted by civil society organisations.

“The business world has realised how unpopular it is. It will need to work hard to improve its image,” the Le Temps newspaper wrote the day after the Feb 28 vote initiated by the Young Socialists. They had hoped to outlaw financial instruments that allow speculation in food products.

The text may have been rejected but more than 40% of citizens put a “yes” slip into ballot boxes although experts had forecast 25-30% of yes votes at most, given the topic.

“This is a good result for an idealistic, left-wing initiative,” gloated Jo Lang, a leading member of the Green Party. Others have even spoken of “critical success”.

The left had banks and investment funds in their crosshairs but also commodities traders.

Switzerland is home to about 500 companies specialising in this field, all business lines combined, including giants such as Glencore-Xstrata, Cargill, Vitol and Trafigura. They employ about 10,000 people and contribute nearly 4% of the country's GDP. That is more than the tourism industry.

Figures from 2013

(swissinfo.ch)

Multinationals dealing in that much-maligned trade may have cleared one democratic hurdle but they are now bracing themselves for more ballots.

In canton Geneva, widely considered a business mecca, the repeal of the special tax status accorded foreign multinationals, which will lead to general corporate tax cuts, will most certainly be challenged in public vote.

A major debate on the contribution these firms make to the common good will take place, and who knows what the outcome will be.

Less radical initiative

At the national level, another initiative, aimed at “responsible business”, is on track. The text was launched in 2015 by more than 70 civil society organisations in a bid to write binding rules into law to ensure that Swiss companies respect human and environment rights in the course of their activities abroad.

The most disputed point of the initiative conces the liability of these companies before Swiss courts for offences committed by their subsidiaries abroad.

This initiative is less radical than the one presented by the Young Socialists but a majority of voters may well fall for it, says Florian Wettstein, a lecturer in corporate ethics at the University of St Gallen and a member of the initiative committee.

“The business community is still putting up resistance to restrictive measures but there is a major shift in the way ordinary people think. Many believe that these multinationals have a duty to respect basic rights wherever they operate in the world.”

The initiative is aimed at all those companies with headquarters in Switzerland, and there are many: the country hosts the highest concentration of multinationals anywhere in the world, making it a prominent player in several sensitive sectors such as pharma and agrochemicals.

Still, the commodities sector, which is over-exposed by the very nature of its activities in developing countries, is the top target of non-govemental organisations (NGOs).

It has tried to be more transparent over the past few years but it remains “very secretive and very opaque, partly because a large number of companies dealing in this trade are small and not listed on an exchange market,” Wettstein says.

New strategy

As for citizens, they have few direct levers for action since these firms never come into contact with end consumers.

Hence the adoption of a new strategy by NGOs: they are no longer content with acting as whistleblowers and now approach the political arena directly through petitions or at a parliamentary level.

If need be also by using direct democracy tools.

Representatives for the industry, which is still little known in Switzerland, have been feeling the heat.

“Our sector is facing worsening general terms as well as uncertainty to do with new legislation and people's initiatives which may affect investments in the country,” says Stéphane Graber, secretary general of the Swiss Trading and Shipping Association (STSA), the sector's umbrella organisation.

The STSA is reluctant to comment on an initiative which is still at the signature collection stage but it has issues with “extraterritorial application of the law, which is not the tradition of Switzerland,” Graber says.

A threat is looming between the lines: delocalisation to less scrupulous places such as Singapore, another booming business hub which has been wooing companies based in Switzerland.

Wettstein finds this particularly irritating.

“These companies say they are not here only to take advantage of tax benefits and nominal regulations but also because of political stability, proximity to major banks and the large qualified manpower they find here. Yet every time we want to put an end to their tax breaks or we demand more restrictive rules, they threaten to leave.”

Translated from French by Beatrice Murail, swissinfo.ch

Links

Staffan de Mistura, the chief negotiator in Syrian peace talks now underway in Geneva, visited Be on Wednesday to thank the Swiss govement for its “discreet” and fundamental role in making the talks possible.

Flanked by the leaders of the House of Representatives and Senate foreign affairs committees, de Mistura praised the Swiss for their “discreet, efficient and creative” approach to diplomacy without which the latest round of peace negotiations would not have been possible.

“There are many moments where you can thank a country for its engagement with a particularly difficult, historic negotiation,” he said. “It’s always easy to say thank you before or after, but not during, when you are busy doing other things.”

Roland Büchel of the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee chose not to elaborate on the Swiss role in the negotiations, telling swissinfo.ch only that “we are not just serving coffee, of that I can assure you”.

It has been reported in the past that the Swiss have helped opposition forces prepare for peace talks by training them in how to negotiate.

De Mistura said of the talks underway that “there is a concerted effort being made here in Switzerland to move forces that have, until now, been considered almost impossible to move. There is enough will to take these negotiations seriously and there exists, for the first time, the support of the inteational community”.

He also suggested that the Russian move to pull back its military from Syria earlier this week may have been made purposefully to coincide with the start of the peace talks.

“I hope this gives diplomacy a chance,” he said.

Govemental model?

When asked whether Switzerland could provide aid in ultimately forming a new Syrian govement, de Mistura cautioned against implementing a strong federalist system as had been done in Iraq and Afghanistan, pointing out that those countries “remain starkly divided”.

However, he did point to Switzerland as a potential democratic role model.

“Syria can lea a lot from how the political formula for co-existence of cultures and languages in Switzerland produced a miracle that we still regard with interest.”

He added that a political division of Syria should be avoided at all costs.

However, speaking in Zurich on Wednesday, French Syria expert Fabrice Balanche expressed a lack of optimism that a unifying solution could be found in the near future. He sees major divisions forming in the country, especially along religious lines, “fueled by regional powers who want to expand their influence in the region”.

Where things stand

A ceasefire in the Syrian conflict, overseen by Russia and the US, came into effect on February 27. Weste govements say this has considerably reduced the intensity of the fighting. However, ceasefire violations are regularly reported and fighting persists in some places.

On Wednesday, de Mistura also highlighted the progress, though “still insufficient”, being made on gaining access for humanitarian aid groups.

Jan Egeland, de Mistura’s adviser on humanitarian aid, has said that since the ceasefire accord, UN and partners have delivered aid to ten besieged areas, but six important besieged areas, including Daraya and Douma, have not been reached. Opposition groups continue to say not enough aid is getting through.

The fragile ceasefire has offered some hope to ending a war that has cost over 250,000 lives, driven 13.5 million people from their homes and given an opening to radical groups like the Islamic State and Syria’s al-Qaeda branch, the Nusra Front, to seize land. Those groups are not part of the diplomatic efforts.

With input from John Heilprin, swissinfo.ch

Damien G. posted this photo to Twitter showing a Swiss passport next to a belt bag, apparently filled with explosives

(SRF/10vor10)

At least four jihadist fighters with coections to Switzerland have been uncovered in Islamic State persoel files that have been obtained by the media.

The huge haul of papers documenting 22,000 IS recruits was first seen by German reporters before being handed to Swiss public television SRF and the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper. They give real names, the fighting pseudonyms of individuals, their religious experience, family details, where they are from and have lived and whether they have volunteered as fighters or suicide bombers.

Joualists are convinced that the persoel files are real having tested some of the details, such as telephone numbers. Independent experts have also said the files appear to be genuine. The documents date from between August 2013 and March 2014.

Two of the Swiss-based individuals were previously known to the authorities, as SRF’s 10vor10 programme showed.

The two previously unknown fighters are a 45-year-old man, originally from Egypt, who also lived in the Lake Geneva area before volunteering as an IS fighter.

The file also list a 39-year-old married man with two children who lived for 11 months in Switzerland before being recruited to IS.

Apart from the fighter who is serving community service in Switzerland, the current location of the others is unknown.

The four are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Swiss jihadists fighting abroad. Last November the Swiss intelligence services said they were monitoring around 70 people who had either travelled abroad to take part in conflicts for the jihadist cause or were engaging in other suspicious activity.

In addition, Swiss intelligence said last summer that it believed that 15 jihadists with Swiss links were believed to have been killed in fighting.

While there has been some media suspicion that a handful of jihadists may have been radicalised at a minority of Swiss mosques, experts believe that the most common source of recruitment is the inteet.

A recent Zurich University of Applied Sciences study into the radicalisation of Swiss youngsters looked at 66 cases recorded between 2001 and July 2015.

The team of 11 researchers found that 16 out of 66 cases were aged below 25. Most were aged 23-35. Only three women were reported, below European averages of 10%.

The majority of cases were bo Muslims from former Yugoslavia and Somalia. Twelve were recently converted, half of Swiss origin. Twenty cases were radicalised via the inteet, 13 claimed to have been influenced by war experiences, particularly in the Balkans, while 13 pointed to Salafist propaganda.

Many shops sell second-hand watches in the US, like the Toueau shop in Manhattan

Destocking new watches and selling them through alteative chaels is a taboo subject in the Swiss watchmaking industry. It’s a growing phenomenon spurred on by the business slowdown in some regions of the world and the fact that retailers are drowning in unsold goods.

In watchmaking circles, they call him Momo the Cleaner. Maurice Goldberger, founder and manager of Canadian company Chiron Inc. specialises in the sale of unsold goods manufactured by the most prestigious brands. His business is booming. In 2015, he bought up around the world more than €500 million (CHF541 million) worth of new luxury items which could not be sold through official chaels, including nearly CHF150 million worth of watches and jewels.

“2016 got off to a flying start and the market is still expected to grow over the next few years,” he gloats in a telephone interview with swissinfo.ch.

Goldberger often travels to Switzerland to negotiate with watchmakers. Very discreetly.

The brands may seek his services but they are very careful not pose for pictures next to him. He won't reveal anything either about the identity of his Swiss suppliers or his clients. Also, he never wears any timepiece on his wrist in order to avoid it being misrepresented. His inteet site has a grand total of three addresses - in Malta, the United States and Canada - and an email address (he answers emails almost simultaneously).

All watchmakers are eager to cultivate the concept of exclusivity associated with their products and they are aware of the danger that such practices entail for their image.

“The ambiance, the experience and the service provided in an official store are very important for the prestige of the brand. There is a real danger that control may be lost when new watches are sold by alteative chaels at knock-down prices,” says François Courvoisier, professor of watchmaking marketing at the University of Applied Sciences of the Jura region.

In North America mostly

Yet Goldberger believes he is an essential cog in the wheel of fine mechanics by which the watch trade operates. “Unsold goods are a fact of life, no company can avoid this. When stocks accumulate, they mobilise important capital which caot be used for investments in new equipment or new models, for instance.”

Goldberger's trade has always been around. But with new collections being launched ever more often, the inteet sales boom and the increasingly industrialised production of high-range watches, the phenomenon has grown. So much so that, according to estimates, one Swiss mechanical watch in four is sold through alteative chaels at a reduced price.

These structural changes are compounded by a cyclical factor. Watchmaking has faced an unprecedented slowdown since the 2008 financial crisis. A number of reasons have been given for this: sluggish growth in China, war in Ukraine and in the Middle East, plummeting oil prices, the strong Swiss franc.

“Many dealers did not see these geopolitical changes coming. They find themselves burdened with large stocks of unsold items which are less attractive as time goes by. This is a problem for brands because retailers do not have the cash or space to buy new collections,” Goldberger says.

At a time when stocks are overflowing in Hong Kong or China, many timepieces are heading for outlets which have stores in the United States or Canada. “

Our growth is particularly strong in North America, where buying a second-hand watch at a cheaper price is seen as a smart thing to do. Things are more difficult in Europe and Asia because people are reluctant to admit that they caot afford new items at full price,” he says.

Distinguishing genuines from fakes

In Biel, one of the country's main watchmaking towns, the Swiss Watchmaking Industry Federation says it has “next to no information” about this growing phenomenon.

“Officially, there is no such thing as destocking. Some companies go as far as to get their official distributors to sign a contractual prohibition. But we can see that the reality is quite different,” says Michel Aoux, the head of the federation’s anti-counterfeiting department.

For lovers of beautiful watches who may not have a sizeable bank account, acquiring a prestigious timepiece with a 30, 40 or 50% discount, if not more, can, on the face of it, be a real bargain.

But Aoux has a word of caution: “Counterfeits and genuine products are mixed together in second-hand shops and outlets. This is a fact. This makes the situation very complicated for customers, even if they have in-depth knowledge of watch products. The same applies to stolen watches which systematically end up for sale through these alteative chaels.”

On the inteet, where Swiss watch sale sites abound, the danger is even greater, was Michel Aoux: He says many sell watches which they describe as second-hand products or from the ‘grey market’ (not the originally intended market) , “when in fact they are sheer counterfeits.”

Maurice Goldberger, for his part, says all his products are sold on through proper chaels – outlets, ad hoc private sales, etc. - and in the geographical areas selected by brands.

“I do not fuel the grey market,” he says. And what about the inteet? “There are thousands – dozens of thousands even – of e-commerce websites but only a hundred of them have a good reputation. I only work with these people.”

Need for transparency

You could be forgiven, however, for getting lost in the jungle of sales chaels offering Swiss watches at a reduced price on the grey market, through dealers who are not official but tolerated by brands, whether they are (not quite) second-hand watches or counterfeits which look increasingly like the genuine article.

“When one compares for instance with the car market, watchmakers are fighting yesterday's battles when it comes to the sale of second-hand products on alteative chaels, on the web in particular,” says Courvoisier.

An idea would be to list retail outlets licensed by brands or to set up a kind of watchmaking version of the travel review website TripAdvisor. Consumers would then be able to give ratings to their dealers on the basis of product quality or after-sales service.

“We are still a long way away,” says Courvoisier. “Swiss watchmaking is a world with a culture of discretion, secrecy even. But it should be more transparent.”

Translated from French by Beatrice Murail, swissinfo.ch

In canton Geneva, red kites are being poisoned by a pesticide that was baed years ago. The Swiss have been trying hard to protect the birds. (RTS/swissinfo.ch)

Carbofuran is a chemical used against pests that attack co, tuips, onions and mushrooms. It was withdrawn in Switzerland in 2011 and the deadline for farmers to stop using it was in 2013.

But at the centre for bird rehabilitation in Genthod, several red kites have been brought in that were almost killed by the poison. Officials at the centre believe that it is still being used illegally by farmers in the vicinity.

Over the last few decades, efforts to protect the species in Switzerland have been successful. Numbers began to increase, while in many other parts of Europe they were declining. The red kite, the third largest bird species in Switzerland, is protected under EU guidelines and federal laws.

Apart from the risk of being poisoned, it is threatened by loss of habitat, wind generators, power lines, hunting, disturbances to nesting sites through tourism and forestry work.

Around 200 people gathered early Monday moing for the launch of the campaign for an unconditional basic income

(Keystone)

The organisers of a public initiative that’s captured the imagination of people around the world staged a pricey publicity stunt in Zurich’s main station on Monday. CHF10 ($10) notes were handed out to crowds of eager commuters during moing rush hour.

The initiative's founders would like to see an unconditional basic income of CHF2,500 per month for all legal residents of Switzerland, and CHF625 for each child, although the initiative text does not specify an amount. The aim is to allow people to choose how they want to live their own lives, without making choices based on financial necessities.

Swiss Public Television, SRF filmed the scene at the railway station as people reached out their hands for the free money. The notes had all been stamped with the name of the initiative and the date of the vote, June 5, 2016.

You can see how the crowd reacted at the begiing of this German-language report.

Some passers-by were understandably cautious at first.

“Hello, would you like a flyer for the unconditional basic income?”

But it didn’t take long for a crowd to gather as a total of CHF10,000 was given away.

“A mammoth crush!”

The daily freesheet 20 Minuten explained the giveaway had been financed by “large and small one-off donations”. They asked a few of the recipients what they thought about the publicity stunt. A student, Daniel S. commented, “I think it’s a great thing to do. It’s the first time I’ve been given free money.” Plumber Roy Gerber, told the newspaper “I couldn’t believe it at first, I didn’t think it was real money.”

Although the initiative campaign was launched on Monday, it’s not the first time the people behind the idea have courted publicity. In October 2013, when the signatures were first handed in to parliament to secure a public vote, a mass of CHF5 coins were dumped onto the square in front of Switzerland’s parliament building in Be.

The German-language Blick newspaper spoke to a retired designer who tued down the handout on Monday, “you should work for your money”, 64-year-old Kurt Schmidt told the paper. Admittedly, CHF10 doesn’t go too far in Switzerland, but the people Blick met at the station said they would use it for anything from “buying cigarettes and an energy drink” to “putting it towards lunch”.

The paper also raised the question with passers-by of whether they had any problem with taking money “for nothing”. One young woman answered that she was happy to take money from her parents without any strings attached, but that once she had a job it might prove "difficult to motivate" herself to work if she already had a guaranteed income.

The Tages-Anzeiger newspaper reported that most of the money was gone within 15 minutes, after the stunt began at 7.30am.

The paper spoke to one of the campaign’s founders, Daniel Häni, asking him what he thought their chances of success were when the issue goes to the public vote. “I have a lot of confidence,” he replied. “There will be a broad debate. But it would be naïve to think that a vote which hinges on such a large question of principle could be won right away.”

swissinfo.ch

It is estimated that between 300,000 to 500,000 military and paramilitary soldiers are deployed in Kashmir, mainly along the border with Pakistan

(Keystone)

Lured by virgin snow, adventurous skiers are ignoring travel advisories to stay away from the conflict prone Kashmir valley in northe India. Could this be the ski world’s best kept secret?

Hans Solmssen is living the good life. The Hawaii native, who looks at least ten years younger than his 58 years, is a ski guide in the upmarket Swiss ski resort of Verbier. He’s just back from guiding clients on a heli-skiing trip to Valgrisenche in Italy’s Aosta valley. Solmssen specialises in off-piste skiing trips for clients who want to get away from the madding crowd, something that is getting harder every year.

“The challenge now is to find more quiet places,” he told swissinfo.ch. “It has made guiding more interesting because you're looking further afield and offering ski safari trips.”

Solmssen in no stranger to offbeat destinations. Almost two decades ago, his taste for adventure and quest for new experiences took him to India. After indulging in a couple of climbing expeditions in the Himalayas, he visited the northe Indian state of Kashmir after a friend and fellow guide recommended the place to him. He’s been guiding groups on aual ski tours to Kashmir for 15 years now.

“Kashmir has become much more popular since I first started guiding clients there, he says. “All sorts of people go there from ski bums to people who own chalets in Verbier and want to experience something new.”

Back in business

In 2000, former US president Bill Clinton called Kashmir “the most dangerous place on earth”. Armed insurgency broke out against India in the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley in 1989 which has claimed over 90,000 lives so far. Tensions between India and Pakistan reached boiling point in 1999 leading to the Kargil war, and Kashmir was transformed from a holiday idyll to a battleground.

Pine-fringed Gulmarg, a Himalayan outpost deep in the Kashmir valley, was badly affected. Tourists from across the world would come here to soak up the Himalayan vistas - as seen from the world’s highest-altitude gondola-serviced ski runs. The daily violence kept tourists away from the valley for the better part of the last two decades.

Even today, the Swiss travel advisory cautions against visiting the region.

“It is not recommended to travel to Jammu and Kashmir, including the Kashmir valley,” it states pointing to violence during protests and the military’s free reign to use force.

The situation has eased in the last few years. Tourists have retued and are eager to soak up the famed tranquillity of Kashmir, which is often dubbed a “mini Switzerland” because of its beautiful landscape and topography.

In 2014, over a million tourists visited the state of Jammu & Kashmir, of which around 50,000 were from countries like Germany, Britain, Switzerland and Australia. Many come to ski and it is estimated that 3,000 to 4,000 foreign skiers, mostly from European countries make the jouey to enjoy Kashmir’s ski slopes.

“It is probably one of the safest places in the world to go skiing because you are surrounded by a lot of Indian military,” says Solmssen. “There are some problems in Srinagar [the state capital] in summer but it is very quiet in winter when we go.”

The Verbier-based ski guide added that he'd be more frightened in New York City than in Kashmir.

The revival of skiing is good news for local ski guides who ea between $40 to 100 (CHF40 to 100) a day and those working for ski companies or foreign ski tours ea between $600 to1000 a month.

Snow and culture

Ski snobs love Gulmarg because it gets some of the heaviest snowfalls in the Himalayas. The high altitude snow remains cold, crisp and light for days on end.

“Skiing-wise the route from the birch trees above the mid-station to Gulmarg is great after a half a day of snowing,” says Solmssen. “When people talk about bottomless powder, it doesn't happen much these days and Kashmir offers you that.”

Gulmarg is also fairly easy to get to compared with other places in the weste Himalayas.

“It is just one and a half hours by plane from Delhi to Srinagar and a one hour drive to Gulmarg from Srinagar,” says Mehmood Ahmad Shah, director of Kashmir’s tourism department and an avid skier himself. According to him, Gulmarg is the cheapest ski destination available anywhere in Asia.

The Gulmarg Gondola is one of the highest ropeways in the world. The first section takes skiers to Kongdori at 2,600m and the second section drops them off at Apharwat mountain at 4,000m from where one can enjoy 5km of downhill ski runs.

Safety measures have improved after a Swiss skier was killed in 2014 by an avalanche during back country skiing outside the resort’s boundaries. Fully-fledged ski patrol teams monitor avalanche risks and medical staff equipped with snowmobiles are on standby in case of emergencies.

But Solmssen is not too keen on attempts to make Gulmarg into an Indian version of Verbier or Aspen. He enjoys the “Indiaess” of the Kashmiri ski experience which he thinks is its unique selling point. The ski guide particularly relishes the region’s colonial-era hotels, traditional houseboats on Lake Dal and hearty curries.

“I am always wary of improvements because it often changes the character of the place,” he says. “I think it is really nice the way it is.”

European touch

The ski resort of Gulmarg, around 50km from Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Administered Kashmir, first came on the ski map of the world in 1927 when two British Army Officers, Major Headow and Major Metcarp established the Ski Club of India here. It soon became popular with British Army officers and civil servants posted in colonial India.

The introduction of heli-Skiing has given a boost to skiing in Kashmir. The original father of extreme skiing, Swiss bo Sylvain Sudan, used to bring skiers from around the world to Kashmir even during peak militancy years. He had a narrow escape in Kashmir after his helicopter crashed in a mountain range in 2007.

swissinfo.ch

A child injured in an unidentified bombing at Douma, north-east of Damascus, Syria on 10 March 2016

(Keystone)

United Nations-brokered talks aimed at ending Syria’s five-year civil war are getting underway in Geneva on Monday. Here is a short guide to the latest resumption in the so-called Geneva 3 negotiations.

Who is in Geneva for the talks?

Delegations from the Syrian govement and the opposition, represented in part by the Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee (HNC). Staffan de Mistura, a Swedish-Italian diplomat who is the UN special envoy to Syria, is the referee.

Russia had urged for Syrian Kurds to take part. De Mistura told Le Temps newspaper on Saturday that while they would not take part, they should be given a chance to express their views.

What are they talking about?

According to De Mistura, an agenda has been set, based on UN Security Council resolution 2254. It will focus on the formation of a new transitional govement, goveance issues, a fresh constitution and UN-monitored presidential and parliamentary elections within 18 months. One of the ideas reportedly receiving serious attention by major powers close to the talks is a possible federal division of Syria.

Separate working groups will also be meeting to discuss progress on the cessation of hostilities and disputes over access to humanitarian aid.

What’s the timetable?

The organisers are aiming for three rounds of indirect “proximity” talks - the parties in separate rooms as the envoy shuttles between them. This first round is not expected to run beyond March 24. After, there will be a break of a week or 10 days to allow them to take stock before they resume.

What are the chances of success?

De Mistura says he expects "substantive, deeper" talks. “Spoilers will try to upset the talks,” he told reporters in Geneva on Monday. “But this is the moment of truth.”

But both sides are showing little sign of compromise over one of the main sticking points: the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Weste and Gulf Arab govements insist he must go at the end of a transition period. Assad's backers, Russia and Iran, say Syrians themselves must decide.

Over the weekend, a HNC spokesman said the opposition would discuss the establishment of a transitional goveing body in which Assad and his associates would have no role. But Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallam said any talk of removing Assad during the transitional period was "a red line," and he would not talk to anyone wanting to discuss the presidency. US Secretary of State John Kerry said Moallam's Idea "clearly tried to disrupt the process" of negotiations.

De Mistura said if the two sides show no willingness to negotiate, Russia, the US and the UN Security Council will again be asked to get involved. “As far as I know the only Plan B is a retu to war, and a much worse war than before”.

I’m slightly confused. Didn’t these Geneva 3 talks recently collapse?

The first round was suspended on February 3, 2016 after only two days while still in the ‘preparatory phase’ with both sides blaming each other. It came as govement forces, backed by Russian air strikes, launched a major offensive on opposition-controlled areas around the northe city of Aleppo.

De Mistura called for a ‘pause’ and urged countries in the Inteational Syria Support Group, a group of 18 countries and organizations that includes the US and Russia, as well as Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to do more preparatory work before coming back to the table.

These are the Geneva 3 talks. What went wrong at Geneva 1 and 2?

Geneva 1 talks were held on June 30, 2012. They were initiated by the UN and Arab League Syria envoy Kofi Aan, and attended by the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, a representative of China and British Foreign Secretary William Hague.

The talks produced the "Geneva Communiqué", which set out the steps needed to stop the fighting and usher in a political transition, but left the question of Assad's future role unresolved.

Aan resigned after six months after his attempts to broker a ceasefire failed. He accused the UN Security Council of failing to unite behind efforts to end the fighting.

UN-Arab League mediator Lakhdar Brahimi took over on August 2012. He brought the sides together for two rounds of "Geneva 2" talks in February 2014. But the process fell apart within weeks after they disagreed on an agenda and which issue to tackle first: Damascus wanted a focus on fighting terrorism - the term it uses for the rebellion - while the opposition wanted talks on transitional govement. Brahimi resigned in May 2014, frustrated by inteational deadlock.

What’s the situation on the ground in Syria?

A cessation of hostilities, overseen by Russia and the US, came into effect on February 27. Weste govements say this has considerably reduced the intensity of the fighting. However, ceasefire violations are regularly reported and fighting persists in some places.

Jan Egeland, de Mistura's adviser on humanitarian aid, said that since the ceasefire accord, UN and partners have delivered aid to 10 besieged areas, but six important besieged areas, including Daraya and Douma, have not been reached. Opposition groups say not enough aid is getting through.

The fragile ceasefire has offered some hope to ending a war that has cost over 250,000 lives, driven 13.5 million people from their homes, and given an opening to radical groups like the Islamic State and Syria's al-Qaida branch, the Nusra Front, to seize land. Those groups are not part of the diplomatic efforts.

About 4.7 million Syrians have fled to neighbouring countries (Turkey: 2.7 million; Lebanon: 1 million+; Jordan: 630,000; Iraq: 225,000 and Egypt: 137,000). The UN says about 500,000 people are living under siege in Syria, out of 4.6 million who are in areas hard to reach with aid.

swissinfo.ch

Researchers hope that the pictures from the trip to Mars will reveal more about the planet's surface, including the location of liquid water.

On Monday, a rocket will take off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in the direction of Mars. One of the instruments on board will be CaSSIS (Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System) – a Swiss-made device for taking high-resolution, 3D colour photos of the Red Planet’s surface.

What is CaSSIS?

CaSSIS is, essentially, a camera. It is also a powerful telescope, which will allow researchers to take high-resolution, colour pictures of the surface and topography of Mars in 3D.

CaSSIS will be attached to the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), and launched using a PROTON rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 10:31 (CET) on Monday, March 14, 2016.

Who made CaSSIS?

CaSSIS was designed and built in just 23 months by a team of scientists and engineers from all over the world, led by Dr. Nicolas Thomas of the University of Be Space Research and Planetary Sciences Division. Switzerland’s contribution includes engineering expertise from the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Zurich and Lausae, and key construction elements from Swiss industry.

How much did CaSSIS cost to build?

Approximately EUR 18 million (equivalent to about $20 million or CHF 19.7 million).

How does CaSSIS work?

CaSSIS will take a picture of the Martian surface, and then rotate its camera 180 degrees to take a second image. This dual-image system will capture stereoscopic, or 3D pictures in a maer similar to human eyes. The images will be taken from 400 km away at a high resolution of 5 metres per pixel.

Why was CaSSIS developed?

In addition to shedding light on the topography of Mars, CaSSIS’s high-resolution images will complement data on the Martian atmosphere gathered by the TGO and by other Mars orbiters. CaSSIS’s pictures will also help the ESA Mars rover, scheduled to land in 2018, to chart its jouey across the planet’s surface.

How long will the trip to Mars take?

After launching on March 14, the jouey is expected to take seven months, with the TGO arriving in Mars’s orbit in October 2016. On April 7, the CaSSIS team will tu the camera on for the first time to ensure all systems are working properly.

swissinfo.ch

Links

Here are the stories we will be watching the week of March 14:

Monday

Switzerland’s divorce rate is pretty average, but a (sub)urban-rural divide hints that country life is more conducive to wedded bliss. Or is it? Find out the answer when we map out the rates.

The European Space Agency (ESA) launches the first of its two missions to Mars. Switzerland contributes a research instrument and other technologies. Check out our explainer.

Wednesday

In a preview of Baselworld, the world’s biggest trade fair for watches, we look at a taboo subject in the Swiss watchmaking industry: Destocking new watches and selling them through alteative chaels – a growing phenomenon. The trade fair kicks off a day later.

Thursday

What happens when Olympic athletes end their sports careers and go on to find a job? Virginie Faivre, the 33-year-old Swiss freestyle skier and world half-pipe champion, tells us about it.

Switzerland’s central bank aounces its latest thinking on monetary policy, namely whether to change interest rates, a week after the European Central Bank’s surprise stimulus measures.

Friday

Amid tight security, a verdict is expected in Bellinzona in the trial of four Swiss-based Iraqis accused of forming an Islamic State (IS) terrorist cell in Switzerland. The four deny allegations of belonging to a criminal group, disseminating hate videos, smuggling, and illegal residency and plotting a terrorist attack.

Weekend

The lights go down as we tu our attention to the big screen and Swiss cinema. We crunch the numbers to reveal the most popular Swiss films of all time, and, on Saturday, we celebrate the 80^th birthday of Ursula Andress, the Swiss film and television actress best known for her role as Honey Ryder – the original Bond girl – in the first James Bond film, Dr. No.

What you may have missed:

swissinfo.ch

The founders of two Swiss startups making technologies for driverless cars explain their vision for the future of transport and predict how soon we'll be letting robots take the wheel.

Tens of thousands of people left canton Ticino at the end of the 19^th century and the begiing of the 20^th century for a better life in the United States. The photographer Flavia Leuenberger managed to track down some of their descendants, some of whom still speak dialect or hoist the Swiss flag on August 1, Swiss National Day.

The project began with simple letters. Leuenberger said she was moved when she read the tales of Ticinese emigrants in Califoia, published by the historian Giorgio Cheda in the 1980s. She then decided to try to track them down.

This wasn’t easy, given the distance and the lack of information. “I made a list of suames mentioned in Cheda’s books and other documents and tried to find them in phone books in the US. I sent at least 60 letters, but only a few replied,” said the 31-year-old wier of the Swiss Press Photo 2015 in the portrait category.

But most of the people whom Leuenberger did meet had strong ties to Ticino, starting with the language. “It’s bizarre hearing them speak with a dialect from the valleys but with an English accent,” she told swissinfo.ch.

It’s estimated that between the end of the 19th century and the begiing of the 20th century some 27,000 people left Ticino for Califoia alone, to work as cow milkers or ranchers. Many then became landowners, as Leuenberger’s photographs show.

The portraits, on display at the Casa Pessina museum, are the fruit of two trips to the United States, in 2013 and 2015.

(Text: Stefania Summermatter, swissinfo.ch; images: Flavia Leuenberger)

Links

A healthy pale grass blue (left). A mutated specimen (right) has short wings and an additional antea

(Keystone)

The consequences of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima five years ago surfaced in a terrible way in serious mutations in butterflies. This discovery is owing to the tireless work of the Japanese researcher Chiyo Nohara, who died a few months ago.

The Japanese editorial team at swissinfo.ch met her at a conference in Switzerland in 2014.

“I had nothing to do with Fukushima before that,” Nohara recalled in the below interview, which took place at a symposium on “Effects of Radiation on Genetics” in Geneva, when she was already seriously ill.

“After the nuclear accident, I worried about it constantly, as if my daughter were living there. I wanted to go straight to Fukushima to see with my own eyes what happened there.”

That desire was the catalyst for her decision to devote herself to researching butterflies.

Nohara had little to do with sciences originally. At Aichi University, a few hundred kilometres south of Tokyo, she was a professor teaching public administration auditing. Later she switched to environmental studies and moved to the southe island of Okinawa, where she taught at the Ryukyu University.

On March 11, 2011, the triple disaster of an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear accident hit Fukushima. Nohara immediately urged the university to research changes in butterflies.

See in other languages: 9

As Professor Joji Otaki was already researching gossamer-winged butterflies, it made sense to choose this variety. The pale grass blue, a sub-species of gossamer-winged butterflies, is the most common butterfly in Japan.

In May 2011 the researchers collected male butterflies which had suffered radioactive contamination in the towns of Fukushima and Motomiya, about 60 kilometres northwest and west respectively from the nuclear power station. They could ascertain on the spot that their wings were smaller than those of the same species in places farther away.

Back in Okinawa, they bred a first generation of contaminated butterflies in the laboratory.

They noted delays in development in pupation and hatching and a high rate of abnormalities. The closer to the nuclear power station the fathers had been found, the more likely it was that their offspring would show abnormalities.

The second-generation young showed not only similar mutations to their parents, but also had completely abnormal body parts, such as a forked antea.

Additionally, the team researched the effects of radiation by artificially contaminating healthy butterflies from Okinawa and feeding them with radioactive creeping wood sorrel to contaminate them inteally.

Here too they identified falling survival rates, a reduction in the wing size and physical abnormalities.

“With this we were able to confirm the findings from the butterflies we had collected in the laboratory,” Nohara said. She published her research in 2012 in the specialist magazine Nature.

The interview was done on November 29, 2014

swissinfo.ch: Why did you travel to Fukushima two months after the nuclear accident to collect samples?

Chiyo Nohara: Actually, there was still a danger of further accidents at the nuclear power station, from aftershocks for example. But I was absolutely determined to collect contaminated butterflies that had wintered as larvae in Fukushima.

In Cheobyl, an investigation of organisms didn’t take place until five years after the accident. I wanted to avoid that.

At the end of May, I visited various places with Professor Otaki and two other researchers. We wanted to compare our samples against those from Tokyo and other cities.

swissinfo.ch: You used to conduct audits for public administration organisations. Now you are counting mutated butterflies and looking for physical abnormalities. Is this a completely different world?

C.N.: I was not in a position to reflect on the change in my situation. Day-to-day life was extremely demanding and time was very short.

Every ten days, I visited the district of Fukushima and collected radioactive creeping wood sorrel. I fed this to the butterflies in order to contaminate their inteal organs.

I flew from Okinawa to Tokyo, drove by car from there on to Fukushima, looked for creeping wood sorrel and at the same time for a courier service which could fly the fresh sorrel three or four times a day to Okinawa.

I spent three nights there each visit. On retuing to Okinawa in the evening, I went straight to the laboratory to feed the butterflies the whole night through.

I wanted to relieve the researchers who had been doing this task while I was away. We worked like that for a year and a half.

swissinfo.ch: Which experiment made the greatest impression on you?

C.N.: The experiment conceing inteal radiation. We fed some with the contaminated sorrel and we fed the control group with uncontaminated sorrel from weste Japan.

We could see that all the incubated butterflies which ate sorrel from Fukushima moved much more slowly than those in the control group.

That was a huge shock for me.

I thought – this is the illness that became known colloquially as “Genbaku Bura-Bura” after the nuclear attack on Hiroshima (Genbaku = Nuclear bomb attack, bura-bura = protracted.)

swissinfo.ch: What are your newest findings?

C.N.: Our recently published observation results on inteal radiation are very interesting, and for me they are a ray of light in the dark.

We divided the larvae from the first laboratory generation, all the offspring of the contaminated butterflies from Fukushima, into two groups. One of them ate contaminated sorrel; the other ate sorrel from Okinawa. As we expected, the death rate and rate of abnormalities in the first group were higher than in the Okinawa group.

But already by the second generation, it looked different: The survival rates of the contaminated group which were fed on Okinawa sorrel were just as high as those of the Okinawa group which had been fed on uncontaminated sorrel since the first generation. There is a certain probability that this also applies to people.

So the survival rates in successive generations will no longer be adversely affected as long as they always eat uncontaminated food. So in that sense the results gave me hope.

swissinfo.ch: This experiment received a lot of attention at this high-profile symposium in Geneva…

C.N.: That is true. The interest was big, because the survival and normality rates improved again in the second laboratory generation.

But I would like to mention two more points: First, the death and abnormality rate among the first-generation butterflies which received contaminated sorrel remained just as high.

Secondly, we caot rule out genetic damage to the second generation, even if the survival and normality rates increased thanks to the healthy food from Okinawa.

One participant in the symposium applied our results to people, and said it is problematic that the children of contaminated parents in Cheobyl stay there and continue to eat contaminated food.

It is true that we often hear of children in Cheobyl suffering from various physical and mental problems and even committing suicide, or that fathers caot bear the burden of their children and leave their families. The people who came from Fukushima to Okinawa also suffer a variety of symptoms.

These victims of radioactive contamination must be looked after by their societies. We also need support centres with appropriate therapies and counselling on offer.

We must lea from the experiences of Cheobyl and it is imperative to set up centres for information exchange so they are not alone.

Alongside my research, I am working with some people who came to Okinawa from Fukushima to look for ways to set up such centres.

Chiyo Nohara (1955-2015)

Chiyo Nohara was a member of the research team, led by Joji Otaki of Ryukyu University, that published the first scientific evidence of harm to a living organism from radioactive contamination due to the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Previously she taught public administration auditing at Aichi University. Nohara did part of her PhD in marine and environmental studies at the Graduate School of Engineering and Science at Ryukyu University.

She died in Okinawa on October 28, 2015 following a long illness.

Translated by Catherine Hickley , swissinfo.ch

Swiss food giant Nestlé is marking its 150th birthday this year. Reason to celebrate? The Nestlé baby milk scandal has over the decades kept the multinational in the negative spotlight. (SRF/swissinfo.ch)

Nestlé's infant formula was developed in the 1800s and went on to become a huge success. But in the 1970s it was the reason the company came under attack.

The formula was said to cause infant illness, even death. An inteational campaign to boycott Nestlé was launched.

A Swiss group joined the campaign, going even further by accusing Nestlé directly of killing babies. A Swiss court found that this was libelous, but the damage to Nestlés reputation had been done, and the boycotts spread.

Homegrown jihadism “is coming” to Switzerland, argues a former Islamic extremist – unless new ideologies are presented to young Muslims.

Young people in the country have vanished from their homes and gone to join jihadi movements. And a Winterthur mosque has been pinpointed as a potential source of extremist ideologies. But what’s really at the root of the problem?

That was the key question examined at a Zurich Salon debate between Adam Deen, a former member of the jihadist group Al-Muhajiroun who now works at Britain’s Quilliam Foundation, terror group researcher Prem Mahadevan of Zurich’s Center for Security Studies and sociologist and author Frank Furedi. Here’s what they had to say.

Left to right: Deen, Mahadevan, debate moderator Michael McKay, and Furedi

(swissinfo.ch)

What’s attractive about joining radical terror groups for a young person from a country like Switzerland?

One of the few elements of the debate the panelists agreed on was that there are no easy answers. Furedi argued that despite their best efforts at solving the radicalisation issue, European govements haven’t figured out how to relate to their Muslim populations.

“After 9/11, everyone was saying that the [radicalisation] situation in European countries like Britain and France would be totally different because France has an assimilationist philosophy and Britain has a multiculturalist philosophy,” he pointed out. But, in reality, the dynamic in those places today is “very similar”.

That’s because even while attempting to be inclusive and accommodating, Weste societies – largely inadvertently – pigeonhole young Muslims and make them feel victimised, thereby creating an environment ripe for jihadist propaganda.

However, Mahadevan argues that home-grown jihadism is “definitely less of a problem in Switzerland than in other Weste European countries,” which he attributes in part to Switzerland being “much more practical and utilitarian” about its immigration policies. Here, he says being attracted to jihad is about “independent life experiences” such as a marriage gone wrong or a failed business acting as a catalyst to become attracted to extremist narratives and lash out against society.

That may be, says Deen, and Switzerland may be “30 years behind” other European countries when it comes to the prevalence of extremism. But the particular danger he sees in countries like Switzerland is a vacuum – a lack of Muslim leadership which means a lot of knowledge is obtained through the inteet.

“My conce for this part of the world is that it is virgin territory for extremists and that the radicalisation process will be accelerated,” he says.

So he has no doubt that “it’s coming” – and much faster than when he was a young man because the leaflets he was handed have been replaced by a massive social media onslaught from extremist groups.

What effects do moves like baing headscarves and minarets - heated political topics in Switzerland - have on young Muslims?

“People who make these policies see them in isolation,” Deen says. “But extremists take those events and operate with a background of an ‘us versus them’ scenario.”

That’s why he argues such bans can have “a tremendous impact on the psyche of the young Muslim.”

“When these kinds of laws come up, this exacerbates the situation and almost confirms this simplistic outlook of the world of Islam versus the West,” he says.

Are mosques or particular imams to blame?

No, argues Deen, saying that “radicalisation doesn’t happen in the mosque”. As a young man in London, he was uninspired by and uninterested in the “dry” brand of Islam being taught at his local mosque and was searching for something else. That came in the form of a leaflet handed to him on the street, calling for the formation of an Islamic state and a new caliphate.

“Suddenly Islam came alive for me,” Deen said.

Mahadevan has observed that in certain countries – including Switzerland – the Islamic community based around mosques can come out so strongly against radicalisation that jihadi recruitment activities are driven underground. That has both benefits and drawbacks.

“The radicals don't gather in mosques so they go really under the radar and it's harder to track them,” he says. “Personally I still prefer this system, because if you start mainstreaming radicalism and providing a platform, at some point each listener who is emotionally vulnerable enough can start to find the logic seductive.”

So what’s the solution?

The world urgently needs a strong counter-narrative to the reading of Islam that encourages radicalisation, argues Deen.

“To really strike at the heart of extremism, what really needs to happen is a reform of Islamic scripture and the reading, an enlightenment movement. The way in which we understand and interpret Islam has to change.”

He adds that these reformed readings must be taught at an early age, since prime recruiting age for some terror groups is as young as 14. It amounts to using new ideas to “inoculate” young people against the effects extremist readings of Islamic scripture could have on them.

What’s unclear, however, is where this Islamic enlightenment movement should come from. Deen and the Quilliam Foundation are working on their version of a counter-narrative in Britain and plan to expand their efforts to countries like France, Belgium, the United States and Australia.

Participants at the Zurich Salon agreed that a new, humanistic reading of Islamic scripture has to, of course, come from Muslims. But should they be Muslims living in Weste societies, or those from primarily Islamic cultures? Deen calls for the former.

“We need to develop a kind of Euro-centric Islam that is relevant to our society and doesn’t cast Muslims as somehow alien to our society. Once we understand that Islam is not some kind of war-monger entity that eats up everything around it, that it’s something that complements society, then things are going to get a lot better.”

Terror recruitment – dilemmas facing govements

Mahadevan sees three main problems:

1) Radicalist leaders don’t care how the public – including other Muslims – views what they are doing. For every ten sympathisers lost because of their extreme and brutal tactics, they gain one very militant fighter. That leads to a “parallel reality” where violence and brutality are celebrated.

2) There is no clear answer to the integration question, which govements often view as an antidote to radicalisation. But Mahadevan thinks it can have the opposite effect. That’s because radical jihadi groups are made up of four “types”, he says: entrepreneurs, protégés, misfits and drifters. The former two groups, the most ideologically committed, are generally very well integrated into European society, whereas the latter two groups of recruits tend not to be and often join because of some personal crisis. That means integration measures won’t always pay off.

3) Does repression work? Security forces often threaten militants with jail or harassment, which can work on misfits and drifters because they are not ideologically motivated. But against protégés and entrepreneurs, those tactics backfire because they only cement the narrative that the West is indeed at war with Islam.

“We are facing a multi-faceted threat,” Mahadevan points out. “No one approach or tactic is going to work.”

Contact the author on Twitter: @vdevore

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The newest incaation of the United Nations’ top human rights body is marking its ten year aiversary, and while the 47-nation Human Rights Council is an improvement on its predecessor, that has not put an end to violations that recur across the globe including the most advanced democracies.

Since its creation in 2006 with strong backing from Swiss diplomacy, the UN Human Rights Council has made significant progress toward institutionalising mandatory human rights reviews of each of the UN’s 193 member nations – the latest addition being South Sudan in 2011.

Yet the Geneva-based Council also has not remained immune from the double standards and politicisation that plagued its predecessor.

The Council was created in March 2006 to replace the UN Commission on Human Rights, which was often criticised as easily manipulated by nations with poor human rights records. The United States was one of the few nations that voted against creating the Council, arguing that it also lacked safeguards against hypocrisy.

No binding authority

The Council, whose purpose is to address human rights violations, lacks any binding authority. Instead, what power it has derives from being a forum for airing grievances, and for naming and shaming. And while the legal architecture for enforcing human rights has strengthened in recent years, the situation on the ground has deteriorated, a paradox noted by Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter in a speech to mark the Council’s aiversary.

“Have we made progress in respect for human rights? The real answer can be read in the eyes of children who are ten years old,” said Burkhalter.

“For many children, it is still far away in 2016,” he said. “Today, as we meet here in Geneva, in this city of peace, many crises are raging around the world. Our world is experiencing many difficulties in resolving these crises, which uproot millions of people and that give too many children nightmares, night and day.”

Amnesty Inteational drove home much the same point ahead of the Council’s main aual session, which is being held this month. The group reported that many govements had brazenly broken inteational law in 2015, including 19 nations where war crimes or other such violations were being committed; 122 nations that resorted to torture; and 30 or more that illegally forced refugees to retu home where they would be in danger.

“The very systems put in place to protect human rights are under unprecedented strain, with catastrophic consequences for those who suffer at the hands of govements and armed groups,” Amnesty’s secretary general, Salil Shetty, said.

‛Growing and serious violations’

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein of Jordan, also sounded the alarm in his address at the opening of the Council session.

“Human rights violations are like a signal, the sharp zig-zag lines of a seismograph flashing out waings of a coming earthquake,” he said.

But at a Swiss-organised meeting held on the sidelines of the formal proceedings this month, a number of speakers argued that the Council has become more effective in several ways. Not only does it meet more frequently than its predecessor, but it also has been scrutinising countries’ human rights records more thoroughly through the introduction of a tool called the Universal Periodic Review. Each UN-member nation must submit itself to a review once every four years.

A less political Council?

At the start, the Council was billed as a way to depoliticise human rights, which had long been subjugated to the foreign policies of nations. Critics said there was a tendency among nations on the former UN commission to keep quiet about violations by an allied country or friendly major power, and to denounce a lack of respect for rights by an economic rival or geopolitical adversary.

On that score not much has changed, according to Adrien-Claude Zoller, director of Geneva for Human Rights, an advocacy group that provides training about human rights.

“Ten years on, we can say that the Human Rights Council is just as politicised as the old Commission on Human Rights,” said Zoller, citing a concentration of politicians who he says are not human rights defenders.

Zoller said most of the Council’s member nations continue to violate human rights and only want a seat on the Council to prevent their nation from being targeted by a Council resolution.

Shetty also described the Council as “a political body” that must eliminate the “double standards that allow powerful states and their allies to escape scrutiny”.

To shake things up, Shetty is calling for more rigorous election procedures that result in more contested seats, for the UN General Assembly to suspend Council members if necessary.

Switzerland's priorities at the Human Rights Council

Switzerland, which has a three-year seat on the Human Rights Council, says these are its priorities for this year:

Protection for human rights during peaceful protests.

Promotion of a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a basic human right.

Support for human rights education and training.

Participation in a roundtable discussion in June on the Human Rights Council’s work over the past decade.

swissinfo.ch

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“The Swissmakers” is one of the most successful Swiss films of all time. A satire on immigration, writer-director Rolf Lyssy talks about why it was so popular and why it stands the test of time. (Carlo Pisani, swissinfo.ch)

It is estimated that when “The Swissmakers” came in cinemas in 1978 one in every five Swiss watched it, making it one of the most successful Swiss films ever in terms of number of viewers.

Lyssy, who tued 80 at the end of February, spoke to swissinfo.ch from his home in Zurich. He looks back at how the fictional film poked fun at the way authorities treated foreign nationals who were trying their luck at naturalisation, and says the film is still topical in the present dilemmas posed by immigration.

Inspired by a practice that still holds true to this day, the film follows two plain-clothes police as they investigate the everyday lives of foreigners who have applied for Swiss citizenship. The foreigners being shadowed and questioned include a German psychiatrist, a charming Yugoslavian dancer and an Italian pastry maker.

The two policemen are the uncompromising Max Bodmer and his young, new sidekick Moritz Fischer.

Lyssy’s own mother was a Russian Jew who escaped Nazi Germany by marrying a Swiss. He sees in Bodmer and Fischer the two enduring, opposing world views on migration. On one side, there are the Bodmers who assume the worse about each person and have rigid ideas on what a person needs in order to fit in. On the other hand, the Fischers who are more open to change.

Although Lyssy believes the two characters still are valid today, he says the people who are seeking refuge in Switzerland today have changed, with cultural differences posing new challenges to Swiss society.

Contact the author of this story on twitter @carlopisani

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The driverless Navia shuttle, debuted at Lausae's Federal Technology Institute EPFL in 2012, was the first of its kind in the world and inspired startups like BestMile.

(Keystone)

For Claude Florin, the idea of an autonomous car started tragically, when his father was struck and killed by a driver in Geneva. Now his is one of several Swiss start-ups working on the early days of the technology, at a time when the world is still figuring out how vehicles that can drive themselves will evolve.

Back in Geneva on a winter evening, 20 years after that devastating accident, Florin stands in front of an overflowing room, pitching his idea to investors and iovators. They’re gathered for the Swiss launch of MassChallenge, an organisation designed to help start-ups find the money and support to make their ideas reality.

Florin only has a few minutes to make his case, and the presenter cuts him off just before he gets to the story about his father. But the crowd has heard the main idea behind his start-up: making highly sensitive 3D cameras that can see obstacles ahead, at a much lower price point than those currently available.

“You need to give credit to the first companies that proved it was possible, like the Google car,” Florin told swissinfo.ch. “The next evolution was to ask, could you put it in a very cheap car with a cheap device?”

Not so fast

Florin’s start-up, called Fastree3D, is one of several out of Switzerland whose technologies are designed for use in autonomous vehicles. But he and his fellow entrepreneurs say the driverless car won’t be the main way their inventions are used, at least at first.

“We believe that autonomous cars will come somewhat later,” Florin says. “Our short-term focus is automatic guided vehicles in industrial settings - forklifts, supply chains, personal service robots.”

And he’s focusing on using his technology for important developments along the way to a fully self-driving car, like automatic braking, that will help make roads safer and could have saved his father’s life.

Headquartered at the same campus as Fastree3D – Lausae’s federal technology institute EPFL – Rafael Gindrat’s start-up BestMile makes software to monitor fleets of driverless cars. Before his technology is applied to smaller personal vehicles, it will be used for public transport: specifically small, autonomous post buses that will drive around the town of Sion starting this spring.

He also thinks it will be a while before we’re riding in the backseat of our car reading the newspaper while it drives us to our destination.

“In ten years I think we will have a lot of autonomous vehicles, at least for public transport, taxi and car sharing services,” Gindrat predicts. “But I don't know if private citizens will be able to buy one because they will be quite expensive, at least at the begiing.”

From Switzerland to the world

Both Gindrat and Florin see Switzerland and its federal technology institutes as fertile ground for launching projects related to driverless cars, which require lots of support and testing. Out of the 15 Swiss start-ups making pitches at the MassChallenge launch, theirs are both focused on technologies related to driverless cars, and another is working on autonomous vehicles in the agriculture industry. But when it comes to finding a larger market – and investors – for their technologies, the entrepreneurs expect to eventually look elsewhere.

“We are really proud to be based at EPFL and be a Swiss company, but our market is not a Swiss market,” Gindrat says. “It’s not a secret that there’s a lot of money in Switzerland, but we don't have really large venture capital funds to put money in start-ups. Maybe we'll have to move the headquarters to America to be closer to our future investors.”

For now, though, Switzerland and Europe are good places for Gindrat to implement his fleet management technology, which is ideal for public transport. Autonomous vehicle tests on this side of the Atlantic have mostly been focused on public transport instead of private cars, as the map below shows.

Although Switzerland already has a well-networked public transport system, Gindrat thinks driverless vehicles could help with late-night access and underserved remote areas.

What’s allowed?

In the United States, where driverless vehicle tests have been more focused on private cars, the country’s main transport and highway safety authority issued a letter in February stating that it would treat driverless systems as legal drivers in future. Though not formal legislation, the move paves the way for wider use of driverless vehicles like the ones Google has been testing in Califoia. But Google’s tests haven’t been without incident – most recently, one of its autonomous cars was at fault in a minor accident with a city bus in February.

Switzerland’s laws don’t allow fully driverless cars to operate on public roads, since “a human driver must be in control at all times”, according to Thomas Rohrbach of the federal roads office. Special permission can be granted for carrying out tests like Swisscom’s experiment with a driverless car last year, or the autonomous post bus in Sion.

Rohrbach says Switzerland can’t act alone in changing its laws – European countries will have to eventually agree on inteational driverless car standards similar to those goveing what vehicles can be on the roads today. He thinks that truck transport will be the first large-scale industry to force govements to confront fully driverless technology, because highways are the easiest road situations to navigate.

“The pressure is already on to do something,” Rohrbach says. “Technically anything is possible, that's no question. Now it's about making common standards for that technology – like phone chargers, which used to be different for every phone.”

But for now, it’s tech companies leading the charge on driverless cars. Switzerland isn’t in the business of manufacturing the vehicles themselves, with start-ups in France and Germany leading Europe on that front. But Swiss expertise could open doors for entrepreneurs when it comes to providing the surrounding technologies.

“In Switzerland we are really good at setting up and operating transport systems,” Gindrat points out. “So it's also important to have some start-ups and companies taking part in this new industry and providing what we can do best.”

Driverless cars and the Geneva Auto Show

Major auto industry players like Volkwagen, Ford and Audi have been conducting autonomous vehicle tests for years, and several top executives have promised fully self-driving cars by 2020. Recently, Tesla’s Elon Musk made headlines by saying the company would debut a fully autonomous car in the next two years.

The Geneva Auto Show, underway through March 13, has debuted several cars with self-driving elements, such as models where the car can drive itself – still with a person behind the wheel – on motorways. And the Italian company Ed Design unveiled a prototype of a fully autonomous race car in Geneva which they hope will take part in a major race by 2025.

However, in the run-up to the Geneva Auto Show, Dave Guilford of the publication Automotive News pointed out that although automakers tout 2020 as a magic year by which cars will be fully autonomous, reality doesn’t support that narrative.

“In terms of automotive product cycles, 2020 is tomorrow,” he wrote.

swissinfo.ch

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Conservationists have welcomed the decision to have palm oil in products declared, but more is needed to preserve dwindling orangutan habitat in Sumatra and Boeo. The battle to save orangutans has brought together Zurich Zoo, NGOs and major retailers.

A group of orangutans in the zoo’s ape enclosure are just starting their moing activities. This involves looking for food and materials, such as cardboard boxes and straw, to make nests. In the wild, orangutans build new nests every day as they move around the rainforests in Sumatra and Boeo, the only two places they still survive. Profits from palm oil plantations have led to the cutting down of large swaths of their rainforest habitat.

From cosmetics and detergents to food stuffs – even sometimes chocolate – palm oil, cheap and versatile, is used everywhere. It used to be labelled as a “vegetable oil” but since January 2016, it must be declared as palm oil on packaging.

“It’s the only way that the consumer knows what he is eating or using it in products,” said Robert Zingg, a senior curator at Zurich Zoo.

Zurich Zoo was part of a 2010 European-wide campaign that gaered two million signatures calling for better protection of the threatened orangutan, which was a factor in the European Union introducing a palm oil declaration duty in December 2014. The zoo’s 10 orangutans are part of a Europe-wide endangered species breeding programme.

In Indonesia, life does not look so good for orangutans, Zingg explained. “The rainforest is cut down at a high rate in big surfaces every year, in some cases there were developments of 11,000 km² of rainforest cut down and replaced by palm oil monocultures.”

“Orangutans can only live in intact rainforests so with each plantation they lose a part of their habitat. Both species, the Sumatran and Boean Orangutans are under threat so their population is estimated in Sumatra at 6,500 and in Boeo at 40,000-50,000,” Zingg told swissinfo.ch.

An aerial view of a cleared forest area under development for palm oil plantations in Indonesia

Demand for palm oil has skyrocketed from one million toes worldwide at the begiing of the 1960s to 60 million toes last year.

First-hand experience

Swiss biologist Regina Frey has first-hand experience of rainforest destruction in Sumatra. She is the founder of the PanEco foundation, which takes in homeless orangutans and reintroduces them into protected rainforest habitats. It has saved more than 200 apes this way.

She welcomes the declaration duty, saying it should help consumers in Switzerland shop in a conscious way. “We can’t do enough to avert this rainforest destruction catastrophe,” she said.

Direct action in Indonesia itself is quite difficult, she says. When swissinfo.ch spoke to her in early February, PanEco and other NGOs had just participated in and won a local court case against a palm oil company accused of buing down forests, illegal under Indonesian law. This is the second court case they have won in the past two years, Frey said.

The NGO has also been looking into how palm oil can be grown sustainably, also through a pilot project (listen to the audio).

On a global scale, there has been some progress here. The Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil, (RSPO), was founded in 2004, and includes NGOs like PanEco, the industry and the global supply chain. In Switzerland, for example, big supermarkets Coop and Migros (also a founding member) take part. Global food giant Nestlé and Lindt & Sprungli, which uses palm oil in some fillings - not its solid chocolate - have also signed up.

The non-profit RSPO certifies sustainable palm oil, with strict guidelines including no virgin rainforests being cut down for palm oil plantations. Around 20% of the world’s palm oil supply is now considered sustainable.

For Matthias Diemer, head of the inteational project unit at the NGO WWF Switzerland, the main problem with the declaration duty is that it doesn’t tell you whether the palm oil was “certified by a standard such as RSPO or produced on recently deforested primary forest”. Consumers need the information to make informed choices, he argues.

Some companies are already voluntarily declaring RSPO palm oil on their products, he said.

“What needs to happen and we have been promoting this, is that companies should make a commitment for their entire procurement of palm oil so there is an assurance that if you buy a certain product from that manufacturer or retailer, palm oil has been produced in a responsible way,” he said.

In 2013 WWF Switzerland published a palm oil buyers’ scorecard looking at 43 Swiss-based companies’ RSPO participation and compliance found 60% used RSPO palm oil. Migros and Coop, for example, both scored highly.

The NGO will carry out a further check of inteational companies, including some Swiss ones, this year.

Companies at the forefront

For their part, Migros and Coop told swissinfo.ch they had already switched to declaring palm oil content in the products ahead of the 2016 deadline.

“Migros has overall been implementing consistent measures for the sustainable production of palm oil for almost 20 years and has had a pioneering role in this respect worldwide,” said the company in an email.

It uses up to 98% physically sustainable palm oil in its products. The oil comes from plantations known to it, which are RSPO certified and subject to extensive environmental requirements. “So there is no fire clearing and no planting on peat and no pesticides as set out in the Rotterdam and Stockholm agreements,” said the statement. These plantations are regularly checked by RSPO and the independent The Forest Trust.

Coop is already using up to 92.7% of physically sustainable palm oil in its own brand food (2015) and in non-food, switched a palm oil commodity in its subsidiary company, Swiss Steinfels, to a sustainable RSPO standard in 2013, “as the first retailer ever”, said spokesman Urs Meier. Migros, too, uses RSPO-certified palm oil in its non-food products.

The WWF and PanEco, as well as the companies, all agree that the RSPO standards should be tightened up further. But so far it is the only standard there is that can be used on a broad scale, and this is progress, Coop’s Meier said. The other advantage was that it was developed by all parties involved, he said.

Physically sustainable palm oil

Physically sustainable palm oil is defined as palm oil that complies with the RSPO Standard Identity Preserved, the RSPO Segregated or Bio-Suisse.

Identity preserved: Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO) is segregated and a batch of certified palm oil can be traced from farm to factory to retailer.

Segregated: certified palm oil is kept segregated from non-certified palm oil, but is blended with other batches of CSPO and caot be traced back to a specific plantation.

Another supply chain model involves certificates: certified palm oil is not kept apart. Instead producers ea certificates, which they then sell to users (retailers, manufacturers) so that claimed volumes are matched. WWF Switzerland is expecting that, in general, more retailers will move from this method to physically sustainable palm oil.

Mass balance: Certified palm oil is mixed with conventional palm oil, but quantities are monitored administratively so that claimed volumes are matced.

In addition to the RSPO, there is also the Palm Oil Iovation Group (POIG). It aims to support the RSPO by building on and going beyond RSPO standards and commitments. The POIG Charter for Retailers and Manufacturers was released in November 2015. Migros, WWF and Greenpeace were involved in its development.

(Source: Coop, RSPO, WWF Switzerland, Migros)

What is palm oil?

The oil palm fruit produces two oils: palm oil from the fruit pulp and palm keel oil from the seed or keel. Palm oil is used mostly in food products: cooking, margarine, milk fat and cocoa butter substitutes. Palm keel oil is used for things like soap, detergent, toiletries and cosmetics. New uses have emerged as well: such as a feedstock for biodiesel. Its yield can be up to tenfold higher than, for example, soya, rape and sunflower. It is cultivated in humid tropical regions: Indonesia and Malaysia account for 86% of world production. But the oil palm actually originated in West Africa and is still cultivated there. Around 80% of palm oil produced is used in the food industry globally.

(Source: European Food Information Council, RSPO)

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Wages for similarly qualified men and women vary greatly across economic sectors, with women on the losing end. Though progress has been made in addressing inequalities, they remain significant as the world marks Inteational Women’s Day on March 8.

In Switzerland, women ea on average 16.5% less than their male colleagues, according to 2012 figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The differences can be explained in part by the person’s individual profile (their age, education level, and years of employment), the type of job within the company and the field.

One aspect, however, remains unexplained. In the private sector, wage gaps have stagnated and even risen, from 39.6% in 2008 to 37.6% in 2010 and 40.9% in 2012. Significant differences emerge by separating economic branches, as illustrated by the graphic below.

The graphic also shows that wage gaps are greater for higher-level jobs, such as in the financial services or insurance industries.

That tendency is not specific to Switzerland and has also been observed by the OECD. A recent report shows that “on average in OECD countries, women eaing the highest salaries ea 19.7% less than their male counterparts, while the difference in median wages is 15.2%.” And Switzerland doesn’t set a good example when it comes to wage equality compared to its European neighbours.

You can contact the authors of this article on twitter: Katy Romy @KatyRomy and Duc-Quang Nguyen @duc_qn.

Translated from the German by Veronica DeVore, swissinfo.ch

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The driverless Navia shuttle, debuted at Lausae's Federal Technology Institute EPFL in 2012, was the first of its kind in the world and inspired startups like BestMile.

(Keystone)

For Claude Florin, the idea of an autonomous car started tragically, when his father was struck and killed by a driver in Geneva. Now his is one of several Swiss start-ups working on the early days of the technology, at a time when the world is still figuring out how vehicles that can drive themselves will evolve.

Back in Geneva on a winter evening, 20 years after that devastating accident, Florin stands in front of an overflowing room, pitching his idea to investors and iovators. They’re gathered for the Swiss launch of MassChallenge, an organisation designed to help start-ups find the money and support to make their ideas reality.

Florin only has a few minutes to make his case, and the presenter cuts him off just before he gets to the story about his father. But the crowd has heard the main idea behind his start-up: making highly sensitive 3D cameras that can see obstacles ahead, at a much lower price point than those currently available.

“You need to give credit to the first companies that proved it was possible, like the Google car,” Florin told swissinfo.ch. “The next evolution was to ask, could you put it in a very cheap car with a cheap device?”

Not so fast

Florin’s start-up, called Fastree3D, is one of several out of Switzerland whose technologies are designed for use in autonomous vehicles. But he and his fellow entrepreneurs say the driverless car won’t be the main way their inventions are used, at least at first.

“We believe that autonomous cars will come somewhat later,” Florin says. “Our short-term focus is automatic guided vehicles in industrial settings - forklifts, supply chains, personal service robots.”

And he’s focusing on using his technology for important developments along the way to a fully self-driving car, like automatic braking, that will help make roads safer and could have saved his father’s life.

Headquartered at the same campus as Fastree3D – Lausae’s federal technology institute EPFL – Rafael Gindrat’s start-up BestMile makes software to monitor fleets of driverless cars. Before his technology is applied to smaller personal vehicles, it will be used for public transport: specifically small, autonomous post buses that will drive around the town of Sion starting this spring.

He also thinks it will be a while before we’re riding in the backseat of our car reading the newspaper while it drives us to our destination.

“In ten years I think we will have a lot of autonomous vehicles, at least for public transport, taxi and car sharing services,” Gindrat predicts. “But I don't know if private citizens will be able to buy one because they will be quite expensive, at least at the begiing.”

From Switzerland to the world

Both Gindrat and Florin see Switzerland and its federal technology institutes as fertile ground for launching projects related to driverless cars, which require lots of support and testing. Out of the 15 Swiss start-ups making pitches at the MassChallenge launch, theirs are both focused on technologies related to driverless cars, and another is working on autonomous vehicles in the agriculture industry. But when it comes to finding a larger market – and investors – for their technologies, the entrepreneurs expect to eventually look elsewhere.

“We are really proud to be based at EPFL and be a Swiss company, but our market is not a Swiss market,” Gindrat says. “It’s not a secret that there’s a lot of money in Switzerland, but we don't have really large venture capital funds to put money in start-ups. Maybe we'll have to move the headquarters to America to be closer to our future investors.”

For now, though, Switzerland and Europe are good places for Gindrat to implement his fleet management technology, which is ideal for public transport. Autonomous vehicle tests on this side of the Atlantic have mostly been focused on public transport instead of private cars, as the map below shows.

Although Switzerland already has a well-networked public transport system, Gindrat thinks driverless vehicles could help with late-night access and underserved remote areas.

What’s allowed?

In the United States, where driverless vehicle tests have been more focused on private cars, the country’s main transport and highway safety authority issued a letter in February stating that it would treat driverless systems as legal drivers in future. Though not formal legislation, the move paves the way for wider use of driverless vehicles like the ones Google has been testing in Califoia. But Google’s tests haven’t been without incident – most recently, one of its autonomous cars was at fault in a minor accident with a city bus in February.

Switzerland’s laws don’t allow fully driverless cars to operate on public roads, since “a human driver must be in control at all times”, according to Thomas Rohrbach of the federal roads office. Special permission can be granted for carrying out tests like Swisscom’s experiment with a driverless car last year, or the autonomous post bus in Sion.

Rohrbach says Switzerland can’t act alone in changing its laws – European countries will have to eventually agree on inteational driverless car standards similar to those goveing what vehicles can be on the roads today. He thinks that truck transport will be the first large-scale industry to force govements to confront fully driverless technology, because highways are the easiest road situations to navigate.

“The pressure is already on to do something,” Rohrbach says. “Technically anything is possible, that's no question. Now it's about making common standards for that technology – like phone chargers, which used to be different for every phone.”

But for now, it’s tech companies leading the charge on driverless cars. Switzerland isn’t in the business of manufacturing the vehicles themselves, with start-ups in France and Germany leading Europe on that front. But Swiss expertise could open doors for entrepreneurs when it comes to providing the surrounding technologies.

“In Switzerland we are really good at setting up and operating transport systems,” Gindrat points out. “So it's also important to have some start-ups and companies taking part in this new industry and providing what we can do best.”

Driverless cars and the Geneva Auto Show

Major auto industry players like Volkwagen, Ford and Audi have been conducting autonomous vehicle tests for years, and several top executives have promised fully self-driving cars by 2020. Recently, Tesla’s Elon Musk made headlines by saying the company would debut a fully autonomous car in the next two years.

The Geneva Auto Show, underway through March 13, has debuted several cars with self-driving elements, such as models where the car can drive itself – still with a person behind the wheel – on motorways. And the Italian company Ed Design unveiled a prototype of a fully autonomous race car in Geneva which they hope will take part in a major race by 2025.

However, in the run-up to the Geneva Auto Show, Dave Guilford of the publication Automotive News pointed out that although automakers tout 2020 as a magic year by which cars will be fully autonomous, reality doesn’t support that narrative.

“In terms of automotive product cycles, 2020 is tomorrow,” he wrote.

swissinfo.ch

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Adam Deen and Prem Mahadevan know what they’re talking about when it comes to jihadi terror networks. One used to be an Islamist extremist, and the other advises govements on the ier workings of groups like ISIS. Here’s what they think works – and doesn’t – to stop terror recruitment.

Worshipers gather for Friday prayers at a mosque in south London. Britain is one of many Weste European countries searching for ways to address Islamic extremism, with the Quilliam Foundation working to provide young Muslims a counter narrative to extremist ideologies

(swissinfo.ch)

Integration: no magic bullet

Late last year, the head of Switzerland’s Federal Office of Police argued that young people at risk of joining terror groups “must be accompanied, watched and socially integrated” to stop the threat.

But “integration is not the answer,” says Deen, who has since left the Al-Muhajiroun terror group of which he was a part until 2003. He now works for the UK-based Quilliam Foundation, which bills itself as “the world’s first counter-extremism organisation”.

He bases his argument largely on his own experience as “a pretty normal, standard kid” who was, by all accounts, well-integrated into British society. His family comes from Turkey but he speaks perfect English, and he went to school with and lived near people outside the Muslim community.

Mahadevan, a senior researcher with the Global Security Team at the Zurich’s Center for Security Studies, is also sceptical of the argument that integrating young Muslims into European societies will keep them from joining terror groups.

“I don't think integration is necessarily a barrier against terrorism, I think it can be a facilitator,” he argues.

“The vast majority of people who have gone on to participate in terror plots in Europe were pretty well integrated into European society by any standard.”

All it takes, he argues, is a catalyst – a failed marriage, a failed business – for young men in particular to become attracted to extremist ideologies at a vulnerable point in their lives.

“When their world seems to be crumbling around them, the level of security they had previously is now gone. That is when they become susceptible to jihadist propaganda”.

Changing the narrative

What’s to be done? In Deen’s case, it wasn’t a crisis that led to his decision to join Al-Muhajiroun – it was opportunity, curiosity and a search for identity. So he argues that counter-ideology is the best way forward.

“In my day, I didn’t have a counter-narrative, a strong alteative view to the things I was being taught,” he says. “It's really important that young Muslims are given alteative readings that are more tolerant, pluralistic, and more encompassing than the ones causing all the problems.”

When he was recruited in the late 1990s, the Inteet was not a yet a tool being used by jihadist groups. But today it’s the key recruitment battleground and “full of conspiracy theories”, as Mahadavan puts it, that vulnerable young Muslims can direct their anger towards.

So Deen and the Quilliam Foundation are going where the battle is – to social media platforms and comment threads – to try and win the war.

Mahadavan, for his part, argues answers will only come if countries treat the fight against terror networks as a multi-generational, multi-faceted one – not just a sweeping conflict between “civilisation and barbarism”.

“I think there is a greater need for candor among European govements to say, look, when you enthusiastically support regime change in the Arab world, you do make yourself very vulnerable to the blowback.”

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Only 870 refugees from Greece and Italy have been resettled to other countries – and none to Switzerland – despite the European Union’s pledge to distribute some 160,000 refugees in a show of solidarity last year.

Swiss Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga confirmed a first group of 1,500 refugees will arrive in Switzerland starting this month. Here’s how the resettlement has gone so far.

(swissinfo.ch)

While EU member countries meet in Brussels as part of their latest summit on the refugee crisis – largely an outgrowth of the five-year-old war in Syria that has killed a quarter million people, displaced half the population and destroyed towns and villages – their resettlement plan hatched last autumn seems to have failed.

Their efforts barely cover two thirds of the contingent of 160,000 refugees that was agreed upon. Some 60,000 still need to be resettled even as 133,000 more arrived in Europe via the Mediterranean Sea since the begiing of the year.

More than 1 million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe last year, fueling the crisis and conflict within the EU over how best to resettle all the people.

More and more countries, not just those in Easte Europe, are pulling back on their commitments. The show of solidarity has been replaced by unilateral wheeling and dealing, such as in the symbolic closing of borders, laying of blame and threats of exclusion towards Greece, which has increasingly been left to fend for itself.

Most of the arrivals have been by sea, but some also make their way by land mainly through Turkey and Albania. Refugees and migrants headed for Europe also have fled other violent conflicts such as those in Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iraq.

The situation has also been largely blocked in Switzerland so far. Most recently, a spokesperson for the State Secretariat for Migration SEM told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper that “Switzerland will likely take 600 refugees from Greece and 900 from Italy.” Sommaruga, the Swiss justice minister, says they should begin arriving this month.

In October, the Swiss govement promised to take 1,500 asylum seekers registered in Italy or Greece – a conflicting show of solidarity considering that number was subtracted from the 3,000 Syrians that should have been sent to Switzerland under another agreement with the United Nations’ refugee agency, known as UNHCR, in Geneva.

The following graphic shows the promises that various European countries have made compared with the number of asylum seekers they have accepted so far. It should be noted that the redistribution figures refer only to refugees fleeing conflict and who have good prospects of being able to stay in Europe – at least a 75% chance, according to figures from Eurostat. Most of those refugees come from Syria, Eritrea and Iraq.

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One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Swiss-based Novartis, is in robust health at the age of 20. But it went through a painful birth on March 7, 1996. (SRF/swissinfo.ch)

The company formed when Ciba Geigy and Sandoz merged and analysts say it’s a big success. The merger cost around 10,000 jobs but in the long-run more were created.

The current CEO concedes that the merger also meant the loss of the Ciba corporate identity.

Novartis’ profits shrank by a third in 2015, partly because of the strong dollar. Even so, the company still managed to make net gains of CHF7 billion ($7 billion).

The pharma giant is not a stranger to controversy. When chairman Daniel Vasella said he was quitting in 2013, he came under fire for the huge pay-out he was offered to stop him working for competitors. It resulted in the settlement being ditched.

Novartis has been accused of charging too much for its products. In 2013, British health authorities said they would not recommend Jakavi, a drug for treating a rare form of blood cancer, as it was too expensive.

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