The incident took place at around 18:25 local time (19:25 GMT) on Tuesday in the centre of Kerzers – known in French as Chiètres – in Fribourg canton, about 20km (12 miles) from the capital, Bern.

At least three people were taken to hospital, police said, and there were reports that a rescuer was also hurt.

The cause of the fire is not yet known but an investigation is under way into whether it was deliberately started.

There have been reports that a person doused themselves in gasoline but the authorities said they could not immediately confirm this.

Video posted by local media shows a bus in flames and a local resident described seeing a thick column of smoke.

The bus involved had reportedly travelled from the Düdingen municipality, 17km south of Kerzers.

In a landmark case, the court handed the company’s British former chief operating officer Mike Wainwright, who has also competed as a racing driver, a 32-month jail sentence and fined the company $148m (£119m).

This is the first time an entire company has been charged by Switzerland’s highest court, and bribery convictions of senior staff are rare.

Trafigura’s lawyers said the company and Wainwright intended to appeal against the verdict, so the former executive was not jailed immediately.

The case against Trafigura has had all the elements of a financial thriller: millions of dollars, shady middlemen and a chain of shell companies located in offshore havens like the Virgin Islands.

Trafigura’s strategy, the court heard, was to set up a complex payment web, through which an official with Angola’s state oil company was paid almost $5m (£4.02m; €4.81) between 2009 and 2011.

Documents presented to the court by Swiss prosecutors showed payments authorised on Trafigura’s own headed notepaper.

The strategy appeared to work: over the next few years, the court heard, Angola signed contracts with Trafigura worth almost $144m (£115.93; €138.56).

Trafigura, whose lawyers appeared bullish before the verdict, denied bribery. The company said its own compliance and anti-corruption measures had been independently assessed and found to be excellent.

But the sheer weight of the evidence – which included dozens of documents, emails and memos – revealed a different picture: strict anti-corruption measures on paper but an intricate structure set up to evade those measures in reality. At the heart of it sat a middleman named “Mr Non-Compliant” in an anonymous Geneva office.

The case will send a chill through commodity brokers worldwide but especially in Geneva, where Trafigura and many other commodity trading houses are headquartered.

In an eerie coincidence, the night before the verdict was delivered, a fire broke out at the five star Hotel des Bergues – where, court documents showed, an Angolan official stayed at the expense of Trafigura in 2008.

Swiss federal prosecutors hope the case will be a symbol that the old ways of doing business are finally over.

They brought the charges to Switzerland’s highest court, reserved for the worst crimes, such as terrorist offences.

Trafigura now faces a large fine and Wainwright, who was in court for the verdict and denied the charges, was told he must serve at least one year of his 32 month sentence in jail.

However, he was not immediately detained, pending the appeal he intends to lodge.

In a speech to executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, the US president said he was “surprised” that Opec hadn’t brought down the price of oil before the elections.

“Right now the price is high enough that that war will continue,” he said, referring to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and suggesting that the higher crude price was helping to sustain funding for the conflict in Moscow.

“You gotta bring down the oil price,” he said. “That will end that war. You could end that war.”

His remarks follow a conversation he had with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Wednesday.

According to Saudi state media, Bin Salman pledged to invest as much as $600bn (£484bn) in the US over the next four years. However, this figure was not mentioned in the White House statement after the call.

Despite the cordial exchange, Trump said he would be asking “the Crown Prince, who’s a fantastic guy, to round it out to around $1 trillion”.

Saudi Arabia is the leading member of Opec, a cartel of 12 oil-producing nations which has a remit to “work together to ensure stable oil prices”.

The price of crude fell by 1% after Trump spoke.

David Oxley, chief climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics, said his comments are in keeping with the president’s desire for lower gasoline prices.

“[It’s] his clear intention to use energy as leverage over Russia to end the war in Ukraine. That said, lower oil prices will certainly not incentivise US oil producers to ‘drill, baby, drill’ – particularly in high-cost Alaska.

“Of course, Saudi Arabia would not be guaranteed to heed a request by President Trump to expand oil production and to bring down global oil prices.”

The US president’s appearance via video link at the World Economic Forum marked his first address to a global audience since his inauguration earlier this week.

He used the platform to insist that companies around the world manufacture their products in the US or face bruising tariffs on imported goods entering the American market.

There were a few stony faces as executives left the hall after the speech, but some were happy.

“A very powerful speech,” said one.

“I liked it, I thought it was really good,” said a delegate from the US. “A lot of it made sense, common sense. He’s just looking for fair trade.”

One Swiss executive though was pretty downbeat. “It’s nothing new but it’s clear what he wants to do,” he said.

“Am I happy? No, I’m not happy. I think it’s bad for the world.”

Trump also said he would demand an immediate drop in interest rates, which he said had led to deeper deficits and resulted in what he described as economic calamity under the tenure of his predecessor, President Joe Biden.

“This begins with confronting the economic chaos caused by the failed policies of the last administration,” he said.

“Over the past four years, our government racked up $8 trillion in wasteful deficit spending and inflicted nation-wrecking energy restrictions, crippling regulations and hidden taxes like never before.”

Interest rates are decided by the US Federal Reserve, the central bank which is independent from the government.

Trump also spoke of “good, clean, coal” to power data centres needed for artificial intelligence (AI).

Earlier this week, he announced that a number of firms, including ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, would invest $500bn to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US.

“We need double the energy we currently have in the US for AI to be as big as we want to have it,” Trump told delegates at Davos, adding that he would use emergency decrees to speed up the construction of new power plants.

“Nothing can destroy coal – not the weather, not a bomb, nothing,” he said.

On the other side of the Atlantic, President Donald Trump was starting his political comeback as the new US president.

“Nothing will stand in our way”, he declared, as he vowed to end America’s “decline”.

Towards the end of the gathering, President Trump was beamed in straight from the White House webcam to deliver his message of world domination directly to the global elite.

While he charmed, almost seduced the audience with a credible picture of a booming US economy about to scale new technological heights, he simultaneously menaced with threats of tariffs to those who did not choose to shift their factories into the US.

Trillions of dollars of tariffs for the US Treasury for those businesses exporting into the US market from foreign factories.

“Your prerogative” he said, with a smile not out of place in a Godfather movie. And then for one of his own, the Bank of America chief Brian Moynihan, a remarkable public lashing accusing the lending giant of “debanking” many of his conservative supporters.

He awkwardly mumbled about sponsoring the World Cup.

In this first week of his second term, most people at Davos were nodding along, as they cannot think what else to do, just yet.

Two worlds colliding, as the ‘America First’ President was beamed in like a 30-foot interplanetary emperor, into the beating heart of the rules-based international economic order.

It is one thing suggesting that trade deficits are a problem with your domestic electorate. It is quite another to suggest at an internationalist forum that a G7 ally, Canada, become a state of your nation, eliciting gasps in the audience, and not just from Canadians.

The address was, by design, charming and offensive. There was carrot and stick for the rest of the world.

As delegates absorbed the mix of threats, invites and on occasion, praise, many appeared to be trying to decide just how much Trump might damage the global trading system, whilst assessing just how far ahead his America is getting in this tech driven AI boom.

Davos has been for this first week the alternative pole of the Trump second term.

There was a coherence to his agenda to use every means to drive down energy prices including by pressurising the Saudis on oil.

This he said would not just help to lower inflation, but also drain Russia’s war coffers of oil dollars to help end the Ukraine war, by economic means. The ceasefire in the Middle East has already bought Trump some geopolitical credibility in these circles.

Christine Lagarde, David Miliband, and John Kerry shuffled into the hall. Various bank chiefs assembled on stage to praise and then lightly question the President.

The bottom line was this: Is president Trump serious about what sounded like campaign trail threats to the world economic system? The answer will reverberate for the next four years and beyond.

The answer sounded like a most definitely, yes. However, this does not mean it is going to work.

Some leading US CEOs told me that they were preparing for tit-for-tat retaliatory tariffs to be applied to their exports. Their assumption was that the President’s love of a rising stock market would restrict his deployment of tariffs.

But no one really knows. In any event, much is up for grabs. He has already withdrawn from the World Health Organisation.

In the promenades the whisper was of his Project 2025 allies suggesting US withdrawal from the IMF and the World Bank too.

The rest of the world does have some counter leverage, once it decides to get back up after the Trump whirlwind.

The Canadians are now briefing on their retaliatory tariffs. In conversations with both the British business secretary and EU trade minister, Jonathan Reynolds and European Union trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, I detected a desire for calm dialogue.

Both are making similar arguments to try to dissuade Trump from wider tariffs.

Mr Reynolds told me that as the US does not have a goods trade deficit with the UK, there is no need for tariffs.

Mr Sefcovic said that the US should really think about its services surplus too.

But do they not consider the threats to G7 and Nato allies Canada and Denmark (over Greenland) to be straightforwardly unacceptable and as absurd as France claiming back Louisiana? Sefcovic did not want to whip anything up.

Diplomats are making lists of US goods that Europe can now purchase to demonstrate “wins” for President Trump, from arms to gas to the magnets in wind turbines.

It might make some sense for the rest of the G7 to work in unison on retaliation against the tariffs, in order to concentrate the minds of Congress, and the competing factions inside the court of Trump.

There is no sign of that happening.

The US tech supremacy story epitomised by the broligarchy – including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Apple leader Tim Cook, and Google chief Sundar Pichar – had top seats at the inauguration this week.

While the US is streets ahead of Europe, its standing against China is more uncertain.

One of the talks of Davos was DeepSeek’s high performing, much cheaper AI model, made in China. The prediction that the tech bros would be tearing strips out of each other in the court of Trump began to come true within hours, rather than months.

Meanwhile, while most, though not all, here in Davos sounded rather seduced by Trump’s tech-fuelled optimism, some in Europe also see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attract top researchers who may be rather less than enamoured with the direction of US politics. It was openly suggested by the European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde.

Others sought solace in the fact that Europe no longer has to face Biden’s massive green subsidies, creating a more level playing field again for Europe.

President Trump is changing the terms of world trade. The response of the rest of the world to this is as important as what the Trump administration itself decides.

In its latest assessment of global inequality timed to the opening of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting, Oxfam on Monday said the combined wealth of billionaires rose by $2 trillion to $15 trillion last year.

The report, titled Takers Not Makers, said there were 2,769 billionaires worldwide in 2024, an increase of 204 over the previous year. It noted that at least four new billionaires were “minted” every week during the year, and three-fifths of billionaire wealth came from inheritance, monopoly power or “crony connections”.

Oxfam predicted that at least five trillionaires will crop up over the next decade. A year ago, the group forecast that only one trillionaire would appear in that period.

“The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable. The failure to stop billionaires is now spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth accumulation accelerated – by three times – but so too has their power,” Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar said in a statement.

The group warned that the United States’ President-elect Donald Trump’s policies “are set to fan the flames of inequality further”.

 average, the wealth of a single billionaire increased by $2m a day, Oxfam said. The richest 10 billionaires became richer by an average of $100m per day. Even if they were to lose 99 percent of their wealth overnight, they would still remain billionaires, it said.

In contrast, the report said the number of people living below the World Bank’s poverty line has “barely budged” since the 1990s and the number of people going hungry is rising.

The report is based on data from sources including estimates of the wealth of billionaires made by the US business magazine Forbes and data from the World Bank.

The WEF meeting in the Alpine village of Davos, starting Monday, expects to host some 3,000 attendees, including business executives, academics, government officials, and civic group leaders.

ump, who visited Davos twice during his first term and is set to take the oath of office also on Monday, is expected to take part in the forum’s event by video on Thursday. He has long championed wealth accumulation – including his own – and counts multibillionaire Elon Musk as a top adviser.

“What you’re seeing at the moment is a billionaire president taking oaths today, backed by the richest man. So this is pretty much the jewel in the crown of the global oligarchies,” Oxfam’s Behar said, referring to Trump and Musk.

The man was being held with another inmate at a prison in the eastern city of Semnan when he “committed suicide” on Thursday, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency said.

The judiciary-run Mizan News Agency said prison officials immediately took action to save the Swiss citizen’s life, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

Mizan gave no further detail about the man’s identity.

“This morning, a Swiss citizen committed suicide in Semnan prison,” a statement on Mizan’s website, attributed to Mohammad Sadegh Akbari, Semnan’s chief justice, said.

The statement added that he had been “arrested by Iranian security forces for espionage” and the case was “under investigation”.

The Swiss Foreign Affairs Department confirmed the death, adding that its embassy was in contact with Iranian authorities.

In recent years, Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have arrested dozens of dual nationals and foreigners, mostly on charges related to espionage and security.

Switzerland plays an important intermediary role between Washington and Tehran as it represents American interests in Iran and shares messages between the two countries.

However, many teams remain in the dark over their group opponents.

The draw procedure means that eight groups are not yet fully decided, as they will contain either the winners or losers of the Nations League quarterfinals, which take place in March of next year.

Spain take on Netherlands in their Nations League quarterfinal, and the winner will join Turkiye, Georgia and Bulgaria in Group E while the losing team goes into Group G alongside Poland, Finland, Lithuania and Malta.

World Cup 2022 runners-up France are also involved in a Nations League quarterfinal, playing Croatia, and if they win that they will go into Group D with Ukraine, Iceland and Azerbaijan.

England are one of only four top-seeded countries who know their fate, and under new manager Thomas Tuchel, who takes charge on January 1, they will take on Serbia, Albania, Latvia and Andorra in Group K.

 At this year’s European Championship, England beat Serbia 1-0 in their opening group game before going on to reach the final which they lost 2-1 to Spain.

The group contains a possible flashpoint with Serbia and Albania set to face each other twice, after the Balkan feud came to the fore again at Euro 2024.

For political reasons, Ukraine and Belarus could not be drawn into the same group, as with Gibraltar and Spain. Kosovo were kept apart from Serbia and Bosnia, but no such restrictions were placed on Serbia and Albania.

Serbia still does not recognise the mainly ethnic Albanian nation of Kosovo’s independence after one of the bloodiest of the 1990s post-Yugoslavia Balkan wars.

At Serbia’s Euros match against England, Kosovar journalist Arlind Sadiku made a double-headed eagle gesture – the symbol of Albania’s flag – to Serbian fans during a live broadcast, and had his credentials rescinded by UEFA.

UEFA also imposed punishments after fans of Albania and Croatia joined together in chants of “Kill the Serbs” and Serbian supporters chanted “Kosovo is the heart of Serbia” and displayed a flag with Kosovo inside Serbia’s borders.

A similar flag led to a FIFA fine for Serbia at World Cup 2022, after the players hung the flag in their dressing room for their game with Brazil.

In 2014, a Euro qualifier between Serbia and Albania was abandoned following a brawl between players after a flag, depicting so-called Greater Albania, an area covering all parts of the Balkans where ethnic Albanians live, was flown over the stadium.

Last month, Romania were awarded a 3-0 win over Kosovo when the game was abandoned after the Kosovo players left the field when they heard pro-Serbian chanting from the home fans.

The 2026 World Cup will be played in the US, Canada, and Mexico, kicking off on June 11 with the final on July 19, and will be the first to include 48 teams, expanded from 32.

Europe will have 16 places at the tournament, up from 13 at the last World Cup and the 12 group winners qualify automatically.

The 12 group runners-up go into the playoffs along with the four best-ranked group winners of the 2024/25 UEFA Nations League that did not finish in first or second place in the European Qualifiers group stage.

Group A

Winner Nations League quarterfinal Germany/Italy, Slovakia, Northern Ireland, Luxembourg

Group B

Switzerland, Sweden, Slovenia, Kosovo

Group C

Loser Nations League quarterfinal Portugal/Denmark, Greece, Scotland, Belarus

Group D

Winner Nations League quarterfinal France/Croatia, Ukraine, Iceland, Azerbaijan

Group E

Winner Nations League quarterfinal Spain/Netherlands, Turkiye, Georgia, Bulgaria

Group F

Winner Nations League quarterfinal Portugal/Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Armenia

Group G

Loser Nations League quarterfinal Spain/Netherlands, Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Malta

Group H

Austria, Romania, Bosnia, Cyprus, San Marino

Group I

Loser Nations League quarterfinal Germany/Italy, Norway, Israel, Estonia, Moldova

Group J

Belgium, Wales, North Macedonia, Kazakhstan, Liechtenstein

Group K

England, Serbia, Albania, Latvia, Andorra

Group L

Loser Nations League quarterfinal France/Croatia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar

Qualifying matches start in March next year and will be played through until November, and teams will play each other home and away.