The American Physical Society (APS), and CERN have agreed that all CERN-authored articles published in the APS journal collection are to be Open Access. CERN Director General Rolf Heuer called the agreement “A very important step towards global Open Access for a global disciplineâ€. Thanks to agreement, articles will be available free of charge for everyone to read while copyright will remain with the authors and permissive Creative Commons CC-BY licences will allow re-use of the information.
Throwing off the yoke: Swiss farm numbers decline
It is hardly news that Swiss peasants have been abandoning farming in recent decades but the phenomenon increased even further in 2013. By the end of last year, there were 2.4% fewer farms than were worked in 2012, particularly smaller farms of between 5 and 20 hectares. On the other hand, the number of farms with more than 30 hectares grew by 2.5%.
According to the latest official figures, “the disappearance of farms has allowed the expansion of those that remain. The average farm size is now 19 hectares compared to 17 hectares in 2005.â€
Swiss farms have traditionally been family-owned, although farm workers increasingly tend to come from outside the family and are often foreign labourers. There has been a general erosion of employment in agriculture with women now numbering nearly one-third of the total workforce and occupying two-thirds of part-time jobs. However, only 5% of farm managers are women.
Livestock farmers continue to switch to poultry in a trend that began in 1990 as pig farming declined. The number of cattle remains stable, but dairy farming, the hallmark of Swiss agriculture, has declined by 2.3%. The one bright spot is bio farming which experienced an above average growth of 12.1% in 2013.
Japan’s collaboration with International Academy of Sports Science and Technology in Lausanne in the fight against doping
Hideki NIWA
Hideki NIWA, the Japanese State Minister of Education and Sports last week visited the International Academy of Sports Science and Technology in Lausanne to discuss further collaboration in the fight against doping; improved governance of sport administration; and the management of emerging technologies in sport.
Franz Weber announces retirement
Franz weber
Doyen of the Swiss environmental movement, Franz Weber has announced his retirement from the foundation bearing his name, which he formed 40 years ago. Weber has been a sometimes controversial force for environmental policy change across the country. His daughter, Vera will take over the running of the foundation.
First possible Ebola patient arrives at Geneva hospital
The first potential ebola sufferer arrived in Switzerland this week under strict quarantine. The nurse who had been working with ebola victims in Sierra Leone has been repatriated to Geneva’s cantonal hospital. He will remain there for three weeks, the incubation period of the disease, until cleared.
Swiss referendum aims to change health insurance
Many of those in favour of the Swiss health insurance changes proposed for the 28 September  2014 referendum believe they will deliver cost savings and reduce average compulsory insurance premiums.  Swiss health care costs were the second highest in the world after the US and 66 percent higher than in the UK, according to a recent analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit.  Often cited reasons for these often high costs are a lack of cost competition between medical practitioners, a system that reimburses the charges of all registered practitioners regardless of price, and the high prices of patented drugs – a 2005 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranking showed Swiss retail pharmaceutical prices to be the most expensive at nearly double the OECD average.
The referendum however is not about addressing these problems. It is focused on whether to replace 67 private health insurers with one national insurer for compulsory health insurance (LAMal). Compulsory health premiums can differ significantly. Just a quick check on bonus.ch revealed that in a typically standard case, the cost of a compulsory insurance premium ranged from CHF 533 to CHF 875 for exactly the same service, under exactly the same conditions.
Importantly, irrespective of the vote’s outcome, private insurers will still be able to compete to insure supplementary care and services not covered by compulsory insurance.
Those in favour of the proposal say that a single national fund would avoid the marketing, administrative and actuarial costs incurred by private health insurers, while opponents argue that a system which has only one insurer lacks competition and will lead to even higher prices.  Although both sides might agree on the problem, they appear to disagree on the solution.
For more information click here.
For more stories like this on Switzerland follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
US mid-terms: What Americans need to know!
With US mid-term elections coming up, expatriate Americans need to be aware of their rights and how to go about voting.
GENEVA An American friend recently recounted how his parents, after many years of living in Switzerland, were surprised to learn that they still had the right to vote in US federal elections. In fact, every American citizen, 18 and over living outside of the United States has the right to vote.
And with the onset of mid-term elections that may be decisive in the balance of power in Washington, D.C. for years to come, exercising that right, this year, is as important as ever.
As reported in Le News recently, both Democrats and Republicans, are working hard to encourage US citizens resident in Switzerland to “go out and voteâ€.
Social events of all kinds, round-tables, conference calls with candidates, phone-banking and non-partisan voter registration are being organized by members of Democrats Abroad to help register all Americans, using votefromabroad.org, the first website ever developed to register overseas Americans. Republicans too are doing their bit.
Having registered before is no longer enough – most US states require citizens to re-register every election cycle. This is critically important for several reasons.
Mid-term elections usually draw smaller turnouts than presidential election years and can be unrepresentative, giving small, motivated groups bigger impact. What’s more, the millions of Americans living overseas – there don’t seem to be accurate figures – play an increasingly important role in elections, and have tipped the balance in a number of election years. This is why our voices are increasingly hard for either party to ignore.
There are many critical issues on the table today that may be decided along party line. First, there is the composition of Congress. In addition to all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 36 seats in the Senate are in play, 21 held by Democrats and 15 by Republicans. Who controls the Senate will have a huge impact on major issues such as immigration reform, infrastructure repair, employment practices, climate and environment, LGBT rights, the budget and other financial issues affecting the livelihoods and the quality of life of Americans living in Switzerland.
For more than 50 years, Democrats Abroad has been advocating in Washington for overseas Americans on these issues of concern, keeping them informed of the candidates and the elections and helping them to register and vote. Some Americans may be concerned that voting can affect state and local tax status. Voting in some state and local elections may potentially do so, but voting in federal elections doesn’t.
As the first state deadline of 4 October approaches, register now to make your voices heard! Registering is easy. Go to: VotefromAbroad.org.
Anne-Shelton Aaron is Chair of the Democrats Abroad Switzerland
FIFA accused of cover-up: Qatar to lose cup?
The refusal by the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA) to release the findings of its 350-page report can only lead to further speculation regarding allegations of corruption over the granting of the World Cup to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. It also suggests that nothing has changed within the powerful Zurich-based organization, which represents 209 member football associations worldwide.
According to the London Sunday Times, German judge Hans Joachim Eckert, who chairs the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA’s ethics committee, plans to keep the report “under lock and key foreverâ€. The Munich-based jurist noted that the findings, which are based on 200,000 pages of evidence, would not even be shared with FIFA’s Swiss President Sepp Blatter, or any of its 27 executive members. Michael Garcia, a former US attorney for New York, who was appointed FIFA ethics investigator, is apparently furious.
Officially, FIFA maintains that it had always argued that the report would be kept confidential as this was part of the guarantee given to all executive council members interviewed. At the same time, FIFA had assured journalists that the results of this self-commissioned report to investigate itself would be made public.
The main question now is whether Qatar used illegal means to sway the FIFA decision in its favour. There are already signs that the report’s content is damning. According to German paper Sport Bild, Theo Zwanziger, a German FIFA Executive Committee member, said that the World Cup will not be held in Qatar because of “scorching temperaturesâ€. For its part, Qatar has denied Zwanziger’s claim – as has FIFA, which argues that this is a “personal opinionâ€.
For years, FIFA has been accused of corruption in the form of “brown envelopes†and other incentives. As claimed earlier this year by the Sunday Times, Mohammed Bin Hammam, an ex-FIFA executive member for Qatar, had allegedly paid USD 5 million in bribes to secure the 2022 World Cup bid. It also asserted that Bin Hamman had made “dozens†of payments to top football bosses as a means of creating a “groundswell†for Qatar’s campaign, and lavished African officials with junkets and cash. Bin Hammam was ousted from the world of football at the end of 2012.
FIFA has suffered from other embarrassing blows, notably revelations that the Brazilians at the last World Cup had distributed 65 gift bags each containing a Parmigiani watch worth CHF 25,000 to FIFA executive committee members and other officials.
According to UEFA president Michel Platini, the former French footballer who now heads the Nyon-based Union of European Football Associations, it is a “mistake†for FIFA not to go public. As the governing body of 56 European football associations, UEFA is considered far more transparent than FIFA, primarily because of higher European governance standards.
One international football insider added that FIFA is seeking to continue with “business as usual and that nothing has changedâ€. Given that 75% of FIFA’s revenues come from TV rights and sponsorship, a lot has to do with money. But the real issue, he added, is about governance and transparency. This cannot happen with FIFA, a despotic organization, pretending to support two self-proclaimed “independent†investigative and adjudicating ethics commissions, which, in the end, it controls.
“I doubt this will affect grassroots football, but eventually there will be a tipping point,†he said. At the same time, he noted, it is possible to turn an organisation around successfully as happened with the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne which had been riddled with scandal.
Contacted by telephone, FIFA officials were reluctant to comment other than to refer to an online link on their website to the ethics committee. When asked to elaborate on concerns that without appropriate transparency, FIFA – as a Swiss foundation – could lose its tax-exempt status, a press spokesman said that he would have to check with the legal team, but they never comment in public anyway.
Edward Girardet
Swiss jihadists – foreign fighters recruited by extremists over the internet
Are Swiss Jihadists a danger? The silence of Switzerland’s moderate Muslims was broken last week following the arrest in Kosovo of two imams who had travelled to Switzerland to recruit for Syria and Iraq. Four days later, the Albanian Islamic Centre of Lausanne denounced what it called “the brain washers†whose actions “daily shock the world and which have nothing to do with Islamâ€. One of those arrested is the imam of the Grand Mosque in Pristina, Shefqet Krasniqi, who visited Switzerland on his Schengen visa. The police found a considerable sum of Swiss francs when searching his home, according to Albinfo.ch, the Lausanne-based website for Albanian-speakers. Swiss-born Muslim convert Nicolas Blancho, known for his extremist views, including a bid to create a caliphate, had invited Krasniqi to address local mosques. The official view from Bern is that there is little risk of jihadist attacks against Swiss citizens and that ISIS activities here consist mainly of enrolling fighters via the internet and attempting to hack into banks to finance its holy war. The Swiss Intelligence service (SRC) has not updated its May 2014 estimate that there are 40 jihadists from Switzerland now in Syria and Iraq. Terrorism experts are also monitoring the online activities of 60 others on Swiss territory.
A francophone network was recently uncovered, involving several Swiss jihadists. According to a French television (TF1) report on 12 September, Switzerland has become a target of French intelligence following the arrest of an alleged terrorist from Thonon-les-Bains, who was part of a recruitment network led by an unnamed Swiss from Orbe.
“This is a war being managed online, on Twitter, Facebook or through blogs,†said Christina Schori Liang, a security expert with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP). “This has caught the international community flat-footed. It is the first digital war the world has seen and we don’t know how to fight it. They are basically friends talking to each other online. What happens is that one of them leaves and then helps to recruit others. ISIS is not allowing them to return because it is training them to become martyrs for suicide missions.â€
Other experts say that while Westerners are beheaded when ransom money is not paid, it is moderate Muslims who have more to fear because they oppose a caliphate. Schori Liang and others believe one effective weapon against ISIS is counter-propaganda. The US Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications recently posted a video showing ISIS sympathizers blowing up mosques with Muslims inside and executing others. It ends with a note to would-be martyrs: “Travel is inexpensive because you won’t need a return ticket!†It then shows a body being thrown off a cliff.
Meanwhile, the Savatan Police Academy in St Maurice is planning a forum on 10 October to discuss the return of religious wars and how to use the internet to combat jihadist recruitment. Lorenzo Vidino, a security expert at the Federal Institute for Technology (ETH) in Zurich, agrees with the official view that the primary jihadist activity in Switzerland is using the internet to recruit martyrs and hack into banks. He also believes the jihadist threat to Switzerland is small because “the Swiss policy of neutrality does not provide a source of political grievanceâ€.
Pamela Taylor
Ebola nurse arrives in Geneva from Sierra Leone
According to the Swiss Federal Department of Home Affairs, a foreign nurse who was working for an international organisation in Ebola affected Sierra Leone, arrived in Geneva yesterday suffering from a bite inflicted by a child suffering from the Ebola virus. The communiqué stated that this is the first person to land in Switzerland from a region affected by the virus. Initial examinations show no signs of the virus, however the nurse will be kept under close surveillance for three weeks - the incubation time of the virus, at Geneva University Hospital (HUG).
