Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
What is the safest way to step on a poisonous snake? What happens when you bury a pair of underpants in the garden for two months? The Ig Nobel Prizes for the world’s most bizarre scientific research have been awarded in Switzerland.
Before we get to these curious experiments, however, we look at how the Swiss army has suffered another setback in its procurement of Patriot defence systems.
Enjoy the read!
The delivery of the Patriot systems to Switzerland will face further delays and higher costs. The Swiss government had hoped to secure part of the supplies that the United States intends to allocate to Germany, but negotiations with Berlin and Washington ended without agreement.
The first Patriot systems ordered by Switzerland from the US were due to arrive this year, but last year Washington decided instead to supply them to Germany, which had transferred some of its Patriots to Ukraine and wanted to fill the gap.
In June, the Swiss defence ministry saw a possibility of securing part of the German deliveries because the systems in question do not match the configuration ordered by Berlin. However, the head of Swiss armaments, Urs Loher, confirmed to Swiss public broadcaster SRF that no agreement could be reached.
Had the German solution gone ahead, the bill would have been CHF1 billion ($1.2 billion) higher for Switzerland. The original contract was estimated at CHF2 billion. As things stand, however, expected price increases for systems produced at a later date as well as technical upgrades will costs higher. Loher estimates that the final price could rise by between CHF1.7 billion and CHF4.3 billion.
The Maloja Regional Court has acquitted all five defendants in the trial concerning the fatal Pizzo Cengalo landslide, which struck the village of Bondo, a hamlet of Bregaglia in canton Graubünden, in 2017.
Among those facing multiple manslaughter charges was Anna Giacometti, a parliamentarian and mayor of Bregaglia at the time of the disaster.
The court emphasised said there was no evidence of clear signs of an imminent natural disaster in the weeks leading up to the landslide. It also found that the defendants had not acted negligently by failing to close the footpaths in the danger zone.
Eight hikers – four Germans, two Austrians and two Swiss – lost their lives in the landslide in August 2017. In addition to Giacometti, prosecutors charged two employees of the cantonal office for forests and natural hazards, an employee of the Bregaglia municipal council and an external geologist.
The Senate foreign affairs committee (CPE-S) has expressed clear support for the package of Switzerland–EU agreements. By nine votes to three, with one abstention, it recommended that the Senate approve the “Bilaterals III”, one of the key issues of the autumn parliamentary session, which begins on September 14.
The CPE-S also voted in favour, by five votes to three, with five abstentions, of a proposal by the ‘committee on political institutions’ to introduce an immigration levy on employees, to be collected from employers. The aim is to encourage the recruitment of domestic labour.
Among the other issues linked to the package of agreements with Brussels that are set to spark heated debate in the Senate, which will devote three days to the matter, are the dynamic transposition of European law, wage protection and a safeguard clause in the event of excessive immigration to Switzerland.
There will also be debate over referendums, in particular whether the Bilateral Agreements III should be subject only to an optional referendum or, as several senators are calling for, to a mandatory referendum. Such a vote would require not only a popular majority but also a majority of the cantons, a higher threshold to clear.
During the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, held for the first time in Switzerland, a Swiss research project that had already attracted considerable attention was among the winners.
Since 1991, the Ig Nobel Prizes have recognised the most outlandish scientific research that “first makes you smile, then makes you think”. A partly Swiss study received the prize in the “underground science” category after thousands of identical pairs of underpants were buried in more than 25 countries and dug up two months later.
The research, led by Agroscope and the University of Zurich, had already attracted media attention while it was being carried out in 2021. The results were published last year in the scientific journal Plants People Planet. The data collected made it possible to produce one of the most comprehensive overviews yet of the biological activity in Swiss soils.
Among this year’s other winners, one certainly deserves a mention for its audacity. The biology prize was awarded to Brazilian and Australian researchers for gently stepping on various parts of venomous snakes on multiple occasions, at different times and temperatures, to understand what triggers the animals to bite.
Prior to this year, the Ig Nobel ceremony had always been held in the United States, either at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or Harvard University. Partly because of stricter immigration policies introduced by the Trump administration, which would have prevented many researchers from travelling to the US, organisers decided to move the event to Zurich. The city is set to host the ceremony every two years, alternating with other European cities in odd-numbered years.
Translated from German, sub-edited by Simon Bradley/amva
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