Tribune de Genève. Last Thursday, the driver of a car parked near the intersection of place Bel-Air and rue de la Corraterie received a nasty surprise. The driver, who works in a nearby bank, left her car parked across tram tracks for 40 minutes, according to Tribune de Genève. This single mistake had a knock-on […]
Geneva’s iconic Jet d’eau gets a webcam
If you can’t make it out to see Geneva’s world famous 140m-high squirt of water in person, it can now be viewed around the clock, 365 days a year, via a new recently installed webcam. According to sightsmap.com, the Jet d’eau is Geneva’s second most photographed sight after the Place des Nations, home to the […]
What you call Lake Geneva really does matter, according to a poll
To non-French speakers the notion might seem odd. In English the big blue watery thing in Western Switzerland has only one name: Lake Geneva. And in German it is der Genfersee. Well in French it is not that simple. Lausanne’s student radio station Fréquence Banane, ran a poll on their Facebook page that was picked up by […]
Geneva close to a population of 500,000
Tribune de Genève. According to September data recently published by the canton’s statistics office Ocstat, Geneva had a population of 494,666 by the end of September 2016. Tribune de Genève said the symbolic bar of half a million will without a doubt be reached in the coming months, before qualifying its prediction saying it will […]
Geneva unveils big tax changes
Le Matin. After nearly ten years of European Union opposition to preferential company tax deals, Switzerland’s government agreed in 2014 to do away with such arrangements. Under current rules Swiss cantons can offer preferential tax rates to certain companies, mostly multinationals with most of their activity abroad. In Geneva, these special rates mean certain companies pay tax […]
A pilgrimage to Geneva’s cemetery of Kings, with artist and writer John Berger
British writer and artist John Berger – 90 years-old on 5 November, 2016 – has lived in the nearby French Haute-Savoie since the 1970s and has made a name celebrating the vanishing culture and life of European peasants. But as Peter Hulm points out, Berger is also a surpising fan of bourgeois Geneva, and of […]
Author of false bomb alert at Geneva airport gets huge bill
Le Matin. On 14 October, the author of a false bomb alert was sentenced to six months prison after arriving at Geneva airport the day before, and declaring there was a bomb on board an Aeroflot aircraft he was trying to catch to Moscow. The flight connected to another from Moscow to India, where the man […]
Perpetrator of false bomb alert at Geneva airport gets prison sentence
Tribune de Genève. Last week a man arrived at Geneva airport at 1pm and told staff at the Aeroflot counter there was a bomb on board the plane he was attempting to board. The 39 year old man arrived late and his flight to Moscow was about to take off. Taking the threat seriously, the […]
Something far worse than parking wardens arrives in Geneva
Tribune de Genève. Yesterday, a specially equipped car started sweeping through Geneva’s boulevards photographing and recording car licence plates. The owners of those found to be parked without valid tickets will be sent a fine. The car, adorned with special camera equipment invented by the Dutch firm Arvoo, is faster and more systematic than its human […]
Swiss fact: Zurich has Switzerland’s sixth highest percentage of foreign residents
In 2015, 25.5% of Switzerland’s population were foreign, or one in four. However, foreigners were not spread evenly across the country. The canton with the highest percentage of non-Swiss living within its borders was Geneva, where 42.1% of the population lived without a Swiss passport. Next on the list were the cantons of Basel-City (36.2%), […]
