Lausanne, Switzerland - The inaugural Winter Youth Olympics in 2012 will take place in Innsbruck or Kuopio, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said on Monday.

The IOC said in a press release that the Austrian town of Innsbruck and Finland's Kuopio were picked by the IOC executive board after an evaluation committee report. Lillehammer (Norway) and Harbin (China) were dropped.

The host city will be elected by the IOC members in a postal vote and named by IOC boss Jacques Rogge on December 12.

The Winter Youth Olympics will bring together around 1,000 athletes aged 14-18 to compete in Olympic disciplines. The first summer edition is 2010 in Singapore.

Ludwigshafen, Germany - A takeover bid by BASF, the world's biggest chemicals company, for Ciba Holding of Switzerland has nearly won sufficient acceptance from Ciba shareholders, according to the German company Wednesday.

The 3.8-billion-euro (4.8-billion-dollar) bid expired Tuesday.

BASF said its provisional count showed it had acceptances for 66.665 per cent of free float Ciba stock, just short of the target of 66.67 per cent for the 50-Swiss-francs-per-voting-share bid to become binding.

The quota does not include stock held by Ciba itself or already in BASF ownership.

A Swiss bank, Vontobel, has said that including this additional stock would mean BASF had a grip on 69.382 per cent of Ciba.

Zurich - Credit Suisse became the first major European bank to unveil its third-quarter earnings Thursday warning that the banking business faced continuing tough conditions after the big Swiss bank confirmed a 1.26 billion Swiss-franc (1.08 billion dollars) quarterly loss.

Unveiling the third quarter results, the chief of Switzerland's second biggest bank Brady Dougan said: "We expect the market environment to remain very challenging and we are cautious with regard to the outlook for the fourth quarter."

Dougan went on to say that the third-quarter result was "clearly disappointing" but "understandable" considering the turmoil that has engulfed financial markets in recent weeks.

Zurich - Switzerland's two leading banks were forced Thursday to seek out new capital injections as the nation became the latest country forced to unveil a bail-out plan in the wake of the global financial crisis.

While UBS AG, the nation's biggest bank, turned to the government for 6 billion Swiss francs (5.2 billion dollars) in additional capital, Credit Suisse Group AG said it was raising 10 billion Swiss francs from private investors and the Qatar Investment Authority.

Credit Suisse's announcement came as Switzerland's second biggest bank posted a 1.3-billion-franc third-quarter loss following further writedowns resulting from the world financial crisis.

India attained 50th place in the annual Global Competitiveness 2008-09 ranking. It was at 48th place last year. The list is compiled by the World Economic Forum with its network of Partner Institutes in various countries. 

China has improved its ranking and got 30th spot in the latest list. It attained highest rank among the BRIC economies. US topped the list of 134 countries. The country got the first rank despite financial crisis in the economy.