A pair of Swiss policemen cast a suspicious eye as a creature in a space helmet with a camera mounted on top and carrying an astronaut's backpack wanders around Basel's St. Johann Park.

But what appears to be a visiting extra-terrestrial turns out to be a maverick designer, Jan Torpus, who is pushing the boundary between the real world and fantasy in a project he calls "augmented reality."

The world's biggest watch event opens in Basel, Switzerland, this week on the back of a bumper year thanks to Asian demand for luxury timepieces.

Whether this hunger will extend to the expected star of the show -- a $5 million diamond-laden model by Hublot -- is unclear but with 1,815 exhibitors from 41 countries, high-range watch devotees can expect to see something they like.

A 66-year-old Swiss pastor has become the oldest known woman to have given birth in Switzerland after delivering a pair of twins, tabloid SonntagsBlick reported Sunday.

"A 66-year-old had a pair of twins at the women's clinic," Martin Vincenz, a spokesman for the cantonal hospital in eastern Switzerland's Graubuenden, told the tabloid.

The United States on Wednesday summoned Syria's envoy in Washington to express "outrage" over his government's month-long bombardment of the flashpoint city of Homs.

During talks at the State Department with Syrian Charge d'Affaires Zuheir Jabbour, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman also urged Syria to live up to its November 2 commitment to the Arab League to end such violence.

Swiss authorities have intercepted mobile phone surveillance equipment destined for Syria and Iran, an official told Swiss Television.

Juergen Boehler from the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) told the German channel's "10 vor 10" program European suppliers had tried to send the goods via Switzerland but customs officials seized them at the border.

Switzerland Wednesday said it was closing its embassy in Damascus and urged its nationals to leave Syria "as quickly as possible".

The embassy closure, which follows that by the United States, was announced by Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter and comes against a background of increasing violence inSyria where the regime is seeking to crush a nearly year-long rebellion.

Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal met the Swiss Middle East envoy in Cairo late on Wednesday as part of efforts to normalize relations with European governments, sources in the Islamist movement told Agence France Presse.

A Hamas official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Meshaal and Jean-Daniel Ruch, whose country is not part of the European Union, discussed the possibility of relations between Europe and the Islamist group which rules Gaza.

Switzerland said Wednesday it had finally finished the process of rehabilitating more than a hundred people punished during WWII for having helped Jews escape Nazi persecution.

But only one of the 137 people vindicated by the report actually lived to see their name cleared.

Switzerland's parliament elected Finance Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf as president on Wednesday to replace outgoing leader Micheline Calmy-Rey.

The Federal Assembly voted in Widmer-Schlumpf of the center-right Conservative Democrats to head the rotating office with 174 votes out of a possible 211, after voting in a new seven-member government cabinet in Bern.

Switzerland added 18 senior Syrian military and interior ministry officials to a travel ban list Friday, as activists said security forces killed at least 14 anti-regime protesters.

The Swiss list now has 74 names on it, a statement said, while adding Syria's Commercial Bank to a separate list, now 19 long, of sanctioned firms.