Zurich - Jacques Aigrain, the head of Swiss Re, the world's second largest re-insurer which suffered huge losses in 2008, has resigned his post, the company announced Thursday. He will be succeeded by current deputy CEO, Stefan Lippe.

Lippe, a German national, has been with Swiss Re for 25 years.

Earlier this month, the re-insurer said it had managed to raise capital, including a 3 billion-Swiss-franc (2.58 billion dollars)- investment from US financier Warren Buffet.

The group was considering taking another 2 billion from other investors.

The capital was needed in light of losses over 2008 reaching a whopping 1 billion francs, with the company now struggling to maintain its AA credit rating.

Zurich - Credit Suisse, the second largest Swiss bank, announced Wednesday it had suffered a net loss of 6 billion francs (5.2 billion dollars) in the fourth quarter of last year, owing to bad trades and restructuring costs.

This made for a larger-than-expected net loss of 8.2 billion francs for the whole of last year, compared to a profit of nearly 7.8 billion in 2007.

Already in December, the bank said the two previous months had brought losses of 3 billion francs.

Geneva  - Next month's Geneva Motor Show is expected to be a little more upbeat than the gloomy Detroit event in January, where manufacturers displayed their cars on poorly-lit stands or stayed away altogether.

Analysts expect car makers to showcase "green" concepts during the show March 5-15 that will hopefully lift them out of the worst crisis in the industry for decades. The trend is toward electric cars, hybrid models, downsized combustion engines and smaller cars.

Geneva - Scientists have again pushed back the restart date of the giant particle accelerator along the French-Swiss border by another six weeks, CERN announced, saying even this schedule was "tight."

By September, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) should be operational again with particle collisions set to take place about a month later, the announcement made late Monday said.

The LHC, operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research - known by its French acronym CERN - has been turned off since September last year following a malfunction which caused damage to integral parts just about a week after the first experiment.

Lausanne, Switzerland - The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) reduced the lifetime ban for doping offences imposed on Austrian nordic skiing coach Emil Hoch to 15 years Tuesday.

Hoch was the trainer of the Austrian cross-country ski team at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Turin when the team9s accommodation was searched by Italian police and medical items which could be used for blood doping and blood manipulation were found.

The Liechtenstein national was subsequently given a life ban by skiing's ruling body FIS for possession of a prohibited doping method and assistance/complicity in doping.

Geneva - Warning that the cholera crisis in Zimbabwe had surpassed the initially estimated "worst case scenario," the International Federation of Red Cross Societies said Tuesday that it was also concerned the outbreak would spread more aggressively to other countries.

"We have reached more than the worst case scenario for Zimbabwe," said John Roach, the head of the IFRC's Africa division, noting that the number of suspected cases was on the verge of the 70,000 mark.