Cleaning up streets, castles and FIFA
Here are the top stories we’re following the week of September 7:
Monday
Politicians head for Bern for the start of the three-week autumn parliamentary session. Debates on what to do with Zurich-based FIFA (Tuesday and Thursday) and asylum-seekers (Wednesday and Thursday) are expected to get the headlines.
Tuesday
Nano, nano! Scientists are engineering tiny particles at the nano-scale to deliver medicine to specific cells in the human body. Nanomedicine allows much greater precision than is possible with traditional drugs, and Switzerland has recently joined an unprecedented scientific collaboration between Europe and the United States to speed up the development of nano-based treatments.
Wednesday
The chances are you can’t get through the day without reading a typeface that has been designed in Switzerland. But while Helvetica and Univers conquered the world in the 1950s, how are Swiss typographers expressing their creativity in the 21st century?
Thursday
“Furnished home for sale.” Easy to overlook that advert. But when the home is a 30-room castle high above Lake Geneva with terraced vineyards and when the furnishings include more than 1,500 objects of historical and cultural significance, people take note. swissinfo.ch speaks to the seller of the chateau, which has been in the family for 11 generations.
Friday
Switzerland’s pristine streets and squares don’t clean themselves. The country’s reputation for tidiness depends on the hard work of people – mostly foreigners – who generally go unnoticed. swissinfo.ch set the alarm for a shockingly early hour and joined a cleaner as he went about his job in Bern.
What you may have missed last week:
More
Nude in the city: undressing taboos in Switzerland
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.