Switzerland Today
The English musician Sting recorded the song Moon over Bourbon Street more than 25 years ago. Two night ago there was a full moon in Switzerland. How time flies. Here are the latest news and stories from Switzerland on Monday.
In the news: Parliament’s autumn session, laser physics and biotherapeutics
- The Swiss parliament has opened its regular autumn session in the capital Bern on Monday. Among the issues under discussion in both chambers are the price hikes expected to hit consumers. The purchase of the F-35 fighter jet for the Swiss air force, electricity, environmental and health policies are also high on the agenda over the next three weeks.
- Physicist Ursula Keller is to receive this year’s Marcel Benoist prize and the Latsis prize for young researchers is to go to Kerstin Noëlle Vokinger. Keller was praised for pushing the boundaries of ultrafast laser physics. The Marcel Benoist prize, worth CHF250,000 ($260,200), is considered to be the Swiss equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
- Swiss pharmaceutical companyNovartis is investing $300 million ($288 million) in biotherapeutics development, which includes a new $100 million biologics hub at its home base in Basel. A further $170 million will be spent on research and production in Slovenia and Austria. Biotherapeutics is a growing class of medicaments which are extracted or synthesized from biological material to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Mixed reaction about storage site for nuclear waste
The decision came after a 15-year search for a suitable site caused protest among some while others breathed a sigh of relief.
The Swiss technical competence centre in the field of deep geological disposal of radioactive waste chose a region, some 25km north of the city of Zurich and close to the border with neighbouring Germany.
The decision, which was leaked on Saturday to the media, is the latest step in an attempt to find a permanent underground storage site for nuclear waste, 50 years after the first commercial Swiss nuclear power plant began operations.
The announcement by an expert panel of a site for a deep geological repository and the necessary fuel conditioning facility is yet another chapter of a long-running saga. The government, parliament and most likely also voters will have a say, before construction work is due to start in 2045.
Opposition by the municipalities directly affected has been relatively mild so far. The German environment ministry called for financial compensation payments to nearby German municipalities.
Several Swiss NGOs criticised the decision as premature. They say there are too many open questions, notably a strategy which could be used in case of unforeseen geological issues or a lack of expertise about the underground storage.
Pioneering Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner bows out
One of Switzerland’s best-known film directors Alain Tanner has died on Sunday, aged 92. Influenced by the social and political upheavals in France in the late 1960s, he’s seen as a major innovator of the Swiss cinema together with Claude Goretta, Michel Soutter in the 1970s.
The Le Temps newspaper describes Tanner as a poet of Swiss cinema, a rebel and a humanist at the same time. An obituary in The Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper focuses on Tanner’s position as an outsider in his own country and his slow artistic decline.
The Tages-Anzeiger and its sister papers newspaper pay tribute to him as a champion of story-telling imbedded in the bigger social context and as a film director who knew to put women at the centre of his films.
His oeuvre included films such as Charles mort ou vif (1969) and La Salamandre (1971) and Light Years Away which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival in 1981.
Tanner is probably best-known for his Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000, Messidor (a film with a plot anticipating Ridley Scott’s female road movie Thelma and Louise) and Dans la ville blanche.
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