Switzerland Today
Greetings from Bern!
Here are the latest news and stories from Switzerland on Tuesday.
In the news: More children were born in Switzerland last year than at any time in the past 50 years. Fewer people died than during the first pandemic year of 2020.
- The pandemic may have had an indirect influence on the number of births, the Federal Statistical Office said today. Life expectancy at birth also rose again, from 81.1 years to 81.7 years for men and from 85.2 years to 85.7 years for women.
- Swiss companies filed almost seven times as many patent applications per million inhabitants last year as companies in the United States. The medical technology sector led the way. The Munich-based the European Patent Office received a total of 188,600 patent applications in 2021, an increase of 4.5% year-on-year, setting a new record. It registered 8,442 patent applications from Switzerland, up 3.9%. Switzerland remains way out in the lead for applications per million inhabitants.
- Reports of violations of international humanitarian law in Ukraine must be urgently investigated, say the Swiss authorities. Ukraine has accused Russia of committing war crimes in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv. Moscow denies the accusations. Switzerland has joined other countries in calling for the killings to be investigated by the International Criminal Court.
Winners of the Swiss Press Photo awards were announced today, with British photographer Mark Henley, whose work has appeared on SWI swissinfo.ch, named as one of the winners.
Henley won first prize in the Daily Life category for his “Phantom Culture” reportage published by SWI in May 2021.
Phantom pain describes the feeling of pain in a part of the body that is no longer physically present, usually as a result of an accident or amputation. It is similar with phantom culture – the culture is there, even if the audience is missing. The Covid-19 pandemic hit the cultural sector hard, with concert halls, opera houses, small theatres, clubs, museums, galleries, cinemas and many other places closed as part of lockdown measures.
Henley wanted to know more about the living conditions of people in the cultural industry who tried to continue practising their profession. He gained access to theatre stages and empty auditoriums, museums and artists’ studios. He was almost always the only spectator.
One of Henley’s more recent projects was following and reflecting on the CHF836 million renovation of the United Nations Office at Geneva.
In just a few weeks a quarter of Ukraine’s population has been displaced. What does this mean for other refugee crises?
In the latest episode of the Inside Geneva podcast, host Imogen Foulkes is joined by Shabia Mantoo, spokesperson for the UN Refugee Agency, analyst Daniel Warner, and Annalisa Conte, director of the World Food Programme’s Geneva Global Office.
“There is a huge outpouring for Ukraine, for the refugees, for the food, medical supplies, but that must mean that in other places in the world, they’re not getting what they should be getting,” Warner says. Indeed, UN emergency appeals for humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and Yemen are underfunded.
What’s more, food prices are rising and aid agencies face difficult decisions.
“We don’t want to find ourselves in a situation in which we need to decide whether to feed a hungry child or a starving child. Both of them need to be assisted,” Conte says.
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