Seventeen people were slightly injured and around 50 evacuated Sunday when a fire swept through a restaurant in the Swiss city of Lausanne, police said.

The fire broke out around 4:00 pm (1500 GMT) in a restaurant on the ground floor of a six- or seven-story building, local police spokesman Michel Gandillon told Agence France Presse.

Palestinian authorities have received the reports of Swiss and Russian forensic investigations into the 2004 death of Yasser Arafat, an official said Tuesday, without disclosing the findings.

"The report was delivered" by the Swiss laboratory, Tawfiq Tirawi, who heads the Palestinian investigation into Arafat's death, told Agence France Presse.

Washington's intensifying hunt for tax evaders and their accomplices is creating a state of paranoia in the Swiss banking industry, with many bankers afraid to even leave the country, observers say.

"There are many hundreds, up to a thousand (Swiss bankers and others who have worked directly with U.S. clients) who are afraid of travelling to the United States or even to leave Switzerland," Martin Naville, the head of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce, told Agence France Presse.

Swiss President Ueli Maurer said in comments broadcast Saturday that he was outraged at revelations of sweeping U.S. surveillance on allies, insisting the snooping would weaken rather than strengthen Washington.

"One cannot conduct surveillance and spy on one's friends. That is how you disrupt confidence between states," he told Swiss public broadcaster SRF.

A plan to reimpose immigration quotas in Switzerland and give existing residents an advantage in the job market could pass in a plebiscite next February, an opinion poll showed Thursday.

Fifty-two percent of voters backed the "Stop Mass Immigration" proposal, while 40 percent are against it, pollsters Isopublic said, adding that the margin of error was 4.2 percent.

Iran nuclear talks may resume in Geneva in October, the Swiss foreign minister said on Tuesday in an interview with Swiss public radio.

"It is possible that the dialogue will continue in Geneva from October," said Didier Burkhalter, whose country represents the United States' interests in Iran.

Voters in Switzerland's Italian-speaking region Sunday slapped a ban on wearing full-face veils, a move condemned by the country's Muslim community and Amnesty International.

Results from a referendum in the southern canton of Ticino showed that 65 percent of the electorate backed a proposal to forbid the covering of faces in public areas by any group.

Swiss voters overwhelming rejected a plan to scrap the country's military draft in a referendum Sunday, an exit poll showed.

A full 73 percent of voters threw out the plan spearheaded by pacifists and backed by left-wing parties, but opposed by the right, parliament and the cross-party government, said the poll by the gfs.bern institute for public broadcaster RTS.

The Swiss parliament voted Tuesday to raise the legal prostitution age from 16 to 18, tightening the country's liberal sex-trade laws to bring them in line with European standards.

The lower house of parliament voted to change the Swiss penal code to make it illegal to pay for sex with a minor, following suit after the upper house adopted the bill.

The Swiss economy, already one of the soundest in struggling Europe, grew by 0.5 percent in the second quarter, official data showed on Tuesday, beating expectations.

The increase beat the expectations of analysts polled by the AWP financial agency, who expected the small, Alpine nation's gross domestic product to grow between 0.0 and 0.4 percent.