Switzerland Today

Hello from Switzerland,

Where on Wednesday most of the media was focussed on synthesising, analysing, and criticising yesterday’s news that mandatory health insurance premiums would rise by 6.6% next year. As an antidote to that latest budget-squeeze, this briefing brings news of a benevolent castle prepper, and thousands of buried underpants.

Keystone / Gian Ehrenzeller

In the news: melting glaciers and bank(er)s under attack.

• Switzerland’s glaciers are melting like never before, a study by the Swiss Academy of Sciences said today. Ice volume declined by 6% in a “disastrous” 2022, spurred by low snowfall last winter and then a spike in heat this summer. The shrinkage of ice in Switzerland – which has the greatest volume of glaciers of any country in Europe – topped a previous record from 2003, with some areas losing six metres of ice. The country’s 1,400 glaciers have lost more than half their total volume since the 1930s.
• Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse have each been fined $200 million (CHF199 million) as part of a US investigation into the misuse of electronic communications. Investigators said that from January 2018 to September 2021, the banks’ staff routinely communicated about business deals with colleagues, clients, and other third parties using personal devices and applications like WhatsApp. The majority of the personal chats were then not preserved, violating US rules on keeping records of business communications.
• The governor of the Bank of France, François Villeroy de Galhau, was attacked with a hammer at the end of June in Basel, newspapers from the Tamedia group reported on Wednesday. It’s not clear what the motives behind the attack were; the Tribune de Genève paper wrote today that they could have been ideological or political. A 39-year-old Swiss man is under investigation. Contacted by the AFP news agency, the Bank of France said Villeroy de Galhau is fine.

© Keystone / Gaetan Bally

Castle in the Emmental valley kitted out for disaster.

Beyond rising prices, winter blackouts are still high on the Swiss worry list. But while the population frets about turning off the tumble-dryer, and supermarkets prepare to drop temperatures to a chilly(?) 19°C, one professor – and ex-government crisis manager – has taken things further. SRF reportsExternal link that “lord of the castle” Matthias Steinmann is prepared for a blackout, a pandemic, and even nuclear fallout. His countryside castle near Bern has been kitted out with 100,000 litres(!) of heating oil, a warm-water system, and lead-plated sheets in case of atomic meltdown. But don’t call him a prepper! He is a realist, Steinmann says: “what I do isn’t crazy; what’s crazy is that others don’t do it”. But while the 80-year-old is prepared to keep out the worst of catastrophes, he’s not so good at keeping out the journalists: as well as SRF, he has been visited by local TV station Tele Bärn and regional newspaper Der Bund over the past months…

Keystone / Adrian Reusser

Underground underpants in the name of science.

As for another Last April, 1,000 people across the country buried their underpants in 880 locations across the country, for example their garden, vegetable patch, or a local field. Far from an attempt to dispose humanely of old pants, the effort was part of a large-scale citizen science project to monitor the level of humus in Swiss soils. The principle was simple: the quicker the underpants decompose, the more humus and organic material is present. And today, the federal Agroscope centre announced some results: private gardens – due to the high density of compost used by amateur gardeners – contained 23% more humus than agricultural fields. The researchers added that a high density of humus helps keep soils moist and prevent drought – a problem which affected many Swiss fields this summer. They didn’t say what was to become of the exhumed underpants.