Free Republic

Official preliminary results showed that 63.7% of voters gave their backing to new EU gun laws, including tighter controls for semi-automatic weapons. A majority of voters in all but one canton, the Italian-speaking Ticino in southern Switzerland, came out in favor of reforming Swiss gun laws. […] Swiss lawmakers had approved earlier reforms that the EU deemed sufficient to comply with its legislation; however, that prompted a huge pushback by the rightwing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which gathered enough signatures to force Sunday’s vote on the measures. […] Under the new gun law, semi-automatic weapons with high-capacity magazines would be...

A Swiss regional politician was convicted Thursday for helping 24 migrants to illegally cross from Italy into Switzerland and for repeatedly inciting others to do the same. Lisa Bosia Mirra, a Socialist member of the Ticino parliament in southern Switzerland, was found guilty of the offenses by a regional court and sentenced to a suspended fine, the ATS news agency reported. She helped Eritreans and Syrians stuck at the train station in Como, near the Swiss border, in mid-2016. “The facts have been admitted to by the defendant, who over a period of two weeks worked along with accomplices to...

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).