Switzerland Today

Greetings from Bern,

Where November 1, All Saints’ Day, is unfortunately not a public holiday, unlike in some other (Catholic) cantons of Switzerland. But holiday or not, the news continues: here’s what happened on Tuesday.

Keystone / Ukrainian Military’s Strategic C

In the news: fresh sanctions, fresh passports, and belt-tightening.

• Switzerland today adopted new European Union sanctions against Iran due to the country’s support of the Russian war in Ukraine. The measures are aimed at an Iranian aviation company and three senior Iranian military officers, accused of designing, developing and supplying drones used by Russia in the ongoing conflict. Teheran has repeatedly denied the accusation.
• A new version of the distinctive red Swiss passport was released yesterday, featuring a new visa page dedicated to Swiss citizens living abroad. The extra page for the so-called ‘fifth Switzerland’ (the first ‘four’ Switzerlands refers to the country’s four language groups) comes in addition to pages for Switzerland’s 26 cantons. A new identity card will appear early next year.
• One in ten Swiss companies have scaled back output due to high electricity costs. Half of the firms polled by the Credit Suisse bank also said they were preparing for electricity outages, which they view as a bigger threat than gas shortages. Businesses aren’t alone in tightening their belts: other figures today showed consumer confidence at its lowest level since 1972.

Keystone / Ali Haider

Swiss government has no plans to desert World Cup.

To watch or not, that’s still the question facing some football fans ahead of the World Cup in Qatar. The Swiss government will meanwhile be a front-row viewer, the Tages-Anzeigerreported today: Finance Minister Ueli Maurer will be in the crowd for the game against Brazil on November 28. Calls for a boycott of the tournament, and the cancellation of various public viewing events in Switzerland, don’t seem to have shaken the Federal Council, even if the other six ministers are not planning to travel. But could Maurer yet change his mind? Before the Winter Olympics in Beijing in January, calls for a (diplomatic) boycott went unheeded by Switzerland until the last minute, when it finally declined to send a minister, officially due to the Covid situation. This time around, if the public mood shifts, Maurer could always cite the energy crisis…

© Keystone / Gaetan Bally

Fired: officer loses the run of himself in Geneva.

A police officer in Geneva is facing more than just a hangover after it was reported that he started shooting his gun inside the station last week, while drunk. The “incident”, which happened on Friday, took place in a city centre police station, with the man firing his service revolver seven times in front of colleagues, one of whom took a bullet in the foot and had to be brought to hospital for surgery. The police didn’t give more details of why or how this happened, or of how drunk the officer – a member of the narcotics unit(!) – was. But presumably, in terms of his future career at least, he has shot himself in the foot too.

Reuters / Olivier Asselin

Is life-saving medicine only for wealthy lives, or for all?

Medicine, like money, is plentiful in the modern world; but it’s also grotesquely unequal. While innovative technologies and drugs developed by pharma companies are able to save – and in some cases give – life, this life is skewed in favour of the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries. Can it be made fairer? This is one of the questions my colleague Jessica Davis Plüss asks in a new series which began today, a series which saw Jessica travel to Kenya to talk to doctors and patients struggling to get to grips with diseases which are increasingly treated as standard in the West. Here’s Jessica’s overview of why and how she wrote the articles; and here’s her first feature, on the tricky balance between the high costs and the high impact of life-saving drugs.