Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
From UNRWA to Gogol, here are all the latest news and updates from Switzerland on Thursday.
In the news: SNB profits, wages vs. inflation, and bees.
- The Swiss National Bank (SNB) posted record profits of CHF58.8 billion ($64 billion) for the first quarter of 2024, it said today. The positive results were largely due to the weakening of the Swiss franc. They come after two years of heavy losses.
- Nominal wages rose by an average of 1.7% in Switzerland last year, the Federal Statistical Office (FSO), reported today. Yet with an average annual inflation of 2.1%, real wages actually fell by 0.4%, it said. The same situation was observed in 2022.
- Despite high annual losses of bees in winter, the number of colonies in Switzerland grew over the past decade, statistics show. In 2014, some 165,000 colonies were in the country; in 2022 this had risen to 183,000. The number of beekeepers meanwhile slightly sank.
UNRWA: Switzerland still putting off the hard decision.
Cut definitively or release the funds? Earlier this week, there was much speculation about how the Swiss government was going to move forward with its contribution to aid organisation UNRWA. In the end, yesterday, the decision was a damp squib: ministers said they would make the call at a later stage. And so the status quo remains: Switzerland has frozen its CHF20 million contribution for UNRWA in 2024 until the various accusations against the relief organisation can be cleared up.
But can they? The “Colonna Report”, published earlier this week, said Israel had not given proof of a wide-scale Hamas infiltration of UNRWA; on the other hand, UNRWA needs to take measures to boost its neutrality. The audit, while not damning, is unlikely to reassure Israel and big donor US, we wrote yesterday. As for Switzerland, it also seems that many minds are made up: SRF reportsExternal link that a centre-right majority in parliament is still in favour of cutting aid, while left-wingers – and one particularly forceful editorial in the Tages-AnzeigerExternal link – view such a decision as a moral travesty.
Yet as other countries – such as Germany, Sweden and Canada – begin to release their donations for UNRWA again, the Swiss cabinet will keep a close eye on the international situation, SRF says. Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis, despite being a vocal critic of UNRWA, also knows it’s not in Switzerland’s interest to become an outlier on Middle East policy. “It is therefore conceivable,” SRF writes, “that the government could still release the funds to UNRWA in a few months, following in-depth clarifications”.
Literary larceny: police sting catches book thieves.
After a series of heists, four suspected rare book thieves were nabbed by Europol yesterday in Georgia. The criminal bookworms are alleged to have posed as researchers in libraries across Europe – including in Switzerland – in order to gain access to precious first editions from (mainly Russian) masters like Gogol or Pushkin; they then replaced the manuscripts with forged copies and made off with the literary loot, news agencies reported today.
While police managed to recoup some 150 books during the sting, others have apparently already been auctioned off in Moscow and St Petersburg, meaning they’ll be hard to track down. The total value of the stolen books was meanwhile estimated at a hefty €2.5 million (CHF2.4 million). For that money, you could also buy 165,517 copies of a page-turner by top Swiss author Joël Dicker; but whether today’s literary best-sellers will also be worth millions a century from now is unclear.
Dialogue: birds and bees at school.
When this journalist was a young teenager (not so long ago), sex education hour in school was a bit of mild entertainment: 25 youngsters watched a well-meaning and sometimes uncomfortable teacher talk about things that were usually not talked about, they had a bit of a laugh about it, and they went along their merry way. But in the serious world of adults, it seems, sex education is nothing to laugh about. And in Switzerland, how sex is discussed in schools is becoming a moral and political minefield.
Should same-sex relations be talked about, and how? Should gender fluidity and drag propensities be explored? Should the word “clitoris” be used? Conservative-minded parents and progressive-minded politicians are at loggerheads over such questions, while the teachers – as always – are caught in the middle. What’s your view on how (much) sex education should be part of the school curriculum? Have your say in this week’s edition of our Dialogue platform.
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