Swiss authorities have charged a fugitive banking analyst with data theft and their transfer to several institutions abroad, including Lebanese banks, in what is considered to be one of the biggest security breaches in the country's often-secretive banking sector.

The case of Herve Falciani, a former employee of global banking group HSBC, has been making headlines in Europe since he fled Switzerland in 2008. He has been accused of stealing information between 2006 and 2007 relating to 24,000 customers of the Swiss division of HSBC.

A conference will be held this month in Geneva to examine respect for international humanitarian law in the occupied Palestinian territories, Switzerland announced Thursday.

Switzerland has ordered a returned recruit of the Islamic State group to do 600 hours of community service and will not send him to prison, in the country's first sentencing of a foreign jihadist fighter.

Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber's ruling went into effect this week, he told public broadcaster RTS late Wednesday.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will hold talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov at an OSCE meeting on Thursday in Basel, Switzerland, a U.S. official said, with topics set to include Ukraine and the Middle East.

The official said Kerry -- in Brussels Wednesday for a meeting of the U.S.-led coalition against the jihadist Islamic State group -- and Lavrov would "discuss a range of topics of mutual interest including issues related to the Middle East."

The Swiss parliament on Wednesday elected justice minister Simonetta Sommaruga, a former concert pianist, to the largely symbolic position of president of Switzerland.

The choice of the 54-year-old was all but certain as it was her turn among the seven-member Federal Council, or government, to take the rotating one-year presidency.

The Swiss rejected three issues put to a popular vote Sunday, including calls to cap immigration in the name of saving the environment, according to initial results and projections.

Results published by a handful of the country's 26 cantons, including Geneva, showed voters flatly rejecting the so-called Ecopop initiative, as well as bids to scrap special tax breaks for rich foreigners living but not working in Switzerland, and on forcing the central bank to increase its gold reserves.

A Swiss museum said Monday it would accept a German recluse's bequest of a spectacular trove of more than 1,000 artworks hoarded during the Nazi era.

The decision, announced at a press conference in Berlin, covers priceless paintings and sketches by Picasso, Monet, Chagall and other masters that were discovered by chance in 2012 in the Munich flat of Cornelius Gurlitt.

Swiss authorities confirmed on Friday that three Iraqis arrested in March are suspected of having planned a terrorist attack in Europe on behalf of the Islamic State group.

At the end of March, authorities "arrested three Iraqi citizens suspected of providing support to the criminal organization known as the Islamic State (IS)," Switzerland's attorney general said in a statement.

Five Swiss people died and two more were injured on Thursday when their helicopter crashed in France, only a few meters away from a house, French officials said.

The EC130 helicopter came down in the garden of a suburban house near the city of Montbeliard, some 13 kilometers (8 miles) from the Swiss border, French police said.

Two European climbers have been swept away by an avalanche while a veteran Japanese mountaineer has plunged to his death in a separate tragedy in the Himalayas, officials said Saturday.

A European team of elite mountaineers were 100 metes shy of summiting the world's 14th-highest peak -- China's 8,027-meter (26,335-foot) Shisha Pangma peak -- when Wednesday's avalanche hit.