Geneva - Charles Aznavour, the ageing French singer, will take up a new role as the Armenian ambassador to Switzerland, media reports said Friday.

Aznavour made the announcement on Armenian TV, saying he was honoured to have been given the position.

The Armenian diplomatic mission in Geneva could not confirm the appointment.

Geneva - The United Nations' Human Rights Council announced Friday will hold a special session next week to address the financial crisis.

Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, the Nigerian ambassador to the UN in Geneva and the president of the HRC, said the special session would focus on the protection of human rights in difficult economic times, particularly defending the most vulnerable.

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.