Zurich - Swiss banking giant UBS AG reported Tuesday its first profit in four quarters.

The world's biggest wealth manager, which has emerged as one of the major victims of the recent round of financial turmoil triggered by the US mortgage market meltdown, reported a third-quarter profit of 296 million Swiss francs (256.3 million dollars).

The Zurich-based bank said last month it planned to raise 6 billion Swiss francs from the government and it planned to shift 60 billion Swiss francs of toxic assets to a special Swiss central bank fund.

Zurich - The weak global economy has affected third-quarter profits at the world's largest recruitment firm, Adecco, sending them sharply down by 23 per cent compared to the same quarter of 2007, to 168 million euros (212 million dollars).

Revenue dropped by 6 per cent over the same period to 5.1 billion euros, the company reported Tuesday in Zurich.

Revenue fell by 9 per cent in the United States and Canada, the second most important market.

Zurich - Switzerland's reinsurance giant Swiss Re reported a surprise third-quarter loss Tuesday, slipping 304 million Swiss francs (259 million dollars) into the red after registering a profit of

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.