Traffic on A13 motorway to be disrupted for months due to landslide

The landslide that struck in Grubünden over the weekend, claimimg two lives, also destroyed a part of the north-south axis of the A13 motorway.

The collapsed section, between Thusis (GR) and Bellinzona (TI), is an important throughway for both passenger and commercial traffic, as it connects Switzerland with Italy.

According to the Graubünden cantonal police, this section will remain out of service “for months,” including the busy summer holiday period.

Consumer beware: products labelled as ‘local’ may not be

Eggs, vegetables and other foods that Swiss supermarkets label as being ‘regional’ or coming from family farms (and therefore cost quite a bit more than ‘regular’ products)  often are neither, according to Swiss consumer platform K-Tipp.

One example are eggs marked as being from Zurich (and sold in that canton), but which are sometimes  ‘imported’ from Solothurn, Thurgau, and Graubünden.

The same kind of inaccurate labelling concerns foods advertised as originating from small businesses when in fact they are manufactured by large companies.

New deadline to make Swiss train stations accessible to the disabled

In 2017, the Federal Transport Office mandated that all of Switzerland’s train stations must be accessible to people in wheelchairs and others with reduced mobility by the end of 2023.

However, as no works could take place during the Covid pandemic, the deadline is now extended until 2027, the Federal Council said in a press release.

Currently, 1,089 train stations out of a total of 1,800, are already handicap-accessible, with 217 still needing to be transformed.

Around 160 stations will not be transformed, however, because the number of passengers there is very low. 

Russia: ‘Switzerland wants to attack us’

In a claim that is easily among the most outrageous ‘fake news’ in years, Russia’s state-owned  television, RT, reported that “Switzerland wants to bomb Russian cities.” 

The claim was made after the National Council’s Security Commission recently said that countries which had purchased military equipment from Switzerland should be able to transfer it to Ukraine.

Based on this, the RT reported that the Commission’s president, Priska Seiler Graf, “hopes to involve Switzerland as quickly as possible in the conflict in order to demonstrate its military power to Russia.”

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