Free Republic

Switzerland agreed to buy F-35 jet fighters to park on a remote runway. Then the U.S. zeroed in on the Wangs, who owned the rustic hotel next door. UNTERBACH, — The Hotel Rössli, a century-old lodge in this Alpine valley village, enjoys a spectacular view . ... But it is the view from the back that caught the attention of American intelligence agencies. About 100 yards from the rear of the rustic, wood-paneled inn .. cuts the runway where the Swiss military had agreed to base several F-35s, the world’s most advanced jet fighter. The airstrip, only partly fenced, is...

Italian authorities are on the hunt for a bear that killed a 26-year-old jogger in the north-eastern region of Trentino last week.

Russian scientist Dr. Dmitry Fedyanin seemed to die doing what he loved. German officials say the 34-year-old expert in ultra-violet light and a senior research fellow at the Nanooptics Department of Siegen University in Germany fell to his death Berchtesgadener Alps National Park after following his hiking app over a cliff. Fedyanin’s body was found at the bottom of Hoher Laafeld peak, which sits at about 7,000 feet. Fedyanin was using his hiking app to make his way down the mountain but the route he was taking didn’t have paths and the app “sent him over mountain precipice.” “Our investigators...

Adèle Milloz plummeted to her death along with a friend she was hiking with on Friday. Their bodies were discovered Friday evening, and officials believed they were roped together when they took the fatal plunge. It is unclear why they fell, and authorities have said they are investigating. Some hikes were cancelled in the aftermath of the fatal accident, according to reports. Milloz, who grew up in the Alps, won several European and world titles in ski mountaineering, a sport where players hike up a mountain and ski down, according to The Sun. She was no longer competing at the...

The Trento provincial government said rescue operations were in progress after a large "ice avalanche" involving hikers, adding that there was likely to be a "heavy toll". The avalanche took place on the Marmolada, which at more than 3,300 metres is the highest mountain in the Dolomites, a range in the eastern Italian Alps straddling the regions of Trento and Veneto.

For those who love to catch the fresh falling snow on their tongues, beware, that might actually be plastic falling from the sky! Researchers from Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands estimate that close to 43 trillion miniature plastic particles land in Switzerland every year. The research focused on determining just how much plastic is falling back to Earth from the atmosphere, with study authors concluding certain plastic nanoparticles travel over 1,200 miles through the air on their way to the ground. While study authors are still uncertain about exact numbers, they estimate that as much as 3,000 tons of nano-plastics...

Archaeologists have, for the first time, found traces of a Bronze Age lakeside village under the surface of Lake Lucerne. The find shows that the city of Lucerne area was already populated 3,000 years ago.Traces of a pile dwelling (or stilt house) village came to light while laying a pipeline in the natural harbour area. The remnants were found by underwater archaeologists around four metres below the water surface...Archaeologists had been looking for proof of settlement for some time, but had been hampered by a thick layer of mud at the bottom of the lake. Work on the pipeline however...

The people of the Mondsee Lake settlement were apparently relatively advanced within this cultural group. They had metallurgical skills, which were rare in Europe. They cleverly searched the mountains for copper deposits, melted the crude ore in clay ovens and made refined, shimmering red weapons out of the metal. In dugout canoes... they paddled along the region's river networks and sold their goods in areas of present-day Switzerland and to their relatives on Lake Constance. Even Otzi the Iceman had an axe, made of so-called Mondsee copper. At approximately 3200 B.C., says Binsteiner, the master blacksmiths were struck by a...

In early August, underwater archaeologists excavating at Lake Bracciano, north of Rome (Italy), brought up a nine meter-long dugout canoe hewn from a massive oak trunk. Some 9,000 years old, buried under three meters of mud and eight meters of water, this was the fourth canoe excavated at a Neolithic colony discovered near the shores of Anguillara in 1989. Unique in Neolithic archaeology, no other sites have been discovered in central Italy, and never at the bottom of a lake. It is located in La Marmotta Bay, at the foot of Anguillara's promontory. Discovered under unusual circumstances in 1989, when...

<p>Parts of Switzerland, Austria and Germany were surprised by unseasonably early snowfall overnight, after a sharp drop in temperatures and heavy precipitation.</p> <p>The Swiss meteorological agency said Saturday that the town of Montana, in the southern canton (state) of Valais, experienced 10 inches of snowfall — a new record for this time of year.</p>

Five people from Britain, including one child, are hospitalized in France with the new virus from China after contracting it during a holiday in the Alps. Saturday’s announcement by the French health minister is the latest example of how the tentacles of the virus can spread across multiple borders. The five British citizens were staying in a chalet in the Alpine resort of Contamines-Montjoie, and were in close contact with another Briton who apparently contracted the virus in Singapore, traveled to the French Alps and then tested positive for the virus upon return to Britain, French Health Minister Agnes Buzyn...

Paleontologists have excavated a mighty meat-eating, four-fingered dinosaur from an unexpected spot: the Italian Alps. The newly identified beast — dubbed Saltriovenator zanellai — lived about 200 million years ago, and it's the first-known Jurassic dinosaur discovered in Italy, the researchers said. It's also the oldest-known ceratosaurian, as well as the largest (it weighed 1 ton), predatory dinosaur known from the earliest part of the Jurassic. S. zanellai's journey to fossilization and discovery thrilled scientists, who deduced that the dinosaur's body ended up in the sea, where marine critters nibbled on its bones before it was buried. Then, it was...

All mines need regular reinforcement against collapse, and Hallstatt, the world's oldest salt mine perched in the Austrian Alps, is no exception. But Hallstatt isn't like other mines. Exploited for 7,000 years, the mine has yielded not only a steady supply of salt but also archaeological discoveries attesting to the existence of a rich civilisation dating back to the early part of the first millennium BC. So far less than two percent of the prehistoric tunnel network is thought to have been explored, with the new round of reinforcement work, which began this month, protecting the dig's achievements, according to...

All 20 passengers and crew onboard a vintage plane that crashed in the Swiss Alps on Saturday were killed, police have confirmed. The authorities also confirmed that the aircraft involved was a JU-52 HB-HOT aircraft, which was flying from Locarno, near Switzerland’s southern border, to the airline’s base in Dübendorf, a suburb of Zurich. Local media and aviation sites had earlier reported that the plane, which seated 17 passengers along with two pilots and a flight attendant, was fully booked. “The JU-Air team is deeply saddened and is thinking of the passengers, the crew and families and friends of the...

Talk about a paleo diet. Scientists have uncovered the last meal of a frozen hunter who died 5,300 years ago in the Alps. The stomach contents of the corpse, widely known as Oetzi the Iceman, offer a snapshot of what ancient Europeans ate more than five millennia ago, researchers said. On the menu, described Thursday in the journal Current Biology, were the fat and meat of a wild goat, meat of a red deer and whole wheat seeds, which Oetzi ate shortly before his death. Traces of fern leaves and spores were also discovered in Oetzi's stomach. Scientists think he...

How Hannibal's crossing of the Alps with 30,000 soldiers was even harder than first thought as researchers find he took a perilous route on a narrow bridle path 9,500ft above sea level ****** Soil containing traces of horse manure has been carbon dated to 218BC, the time of HannibalÂ’s crossing, and shows that he took the Col de la Traversette, a narrow bridle path 9,500ft above sea level that links the Guil Valley in France with the Po Valley in Italy. Previous speculation that he took this direct route had been discounted because of its sheer difficulty, with gradients as...

A couple that disappeared in the Alps 75 years ago has been found preserved in a receding glacier, ending decades of uncertainty for their seven children, Swiss media reported Tuesday. The bodies were found lying near each other in the Diablerets massif in southern Switzerland, along with backpacks, a bottle, a book and a watch, according to Le Matin daily. The head of the Glacier 3000 ski resort, Bernard Tschannen, told Le Matin that the bodies were found last Thursday. “It was a man and a woman wearing clothes from the last (world) war”, Tschannen was quoted as saying. “The...

The world's longest railway tunnel is set to open in just over a week - after some 17 years of construction. Measuring 35.4-miles in length, the Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT) is 7,545 feet below the Gotthard massif, cutting through the Swiss Alps. The tunnel was first conceived in sketch-form in 1947 but construction began 17 years ago. It consists of two single-track tunnels connecting Erstfeld (Uri) with Bodio (Ticino) and passing below Sedrun (Graubünden).

A clay tablet that has baffled scientists for 150 years has been identified as a witness's account of the asteroid suspected of being behind the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Researchers who cracked the cuneiform symbols on the Planisphere tablet believe that recorded an asteroid thought to have been more than half a mile across. The tablet, found by Henry Layard in the remains of the library in the royal place at Nineveh in the mid-19th century, is thought to be a 700 B.C. copy of notes made by a Sumerian astronomer watching the night sky. He referred to the...

Before 1878, in a period with increased rate of ablation, a supraglacial lake formed in the centre of the glacier, this lake subsequently became covered by ice and snow. The collapse of the glacier tongue in 1892 finally released the accumulated water, a large cavity 40m in diameter and 20m high containing estimated 20.000 cubic meters water at the glacier terminus remained as testimony. From this lower cavity, an 85m long intraglacial conduit led to the upper cavity (the former lake) with an additional volume of 80.000 cubic meters. [History of Geology: Outburst flood from Glacier de Tete Rousse: A...