Category Archives: Finland

Saunas to sourdough: Unesco updates culture heritage list

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Thirty-five entries from around the world added to 2020 list of national traditions

Sauna culture in Finland, sourdough making in Malta, Budima dancing in Zambia and a grass mowing competition in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s prestigious list of intangible cultural heritage.

The entries were among the 35 from around the world added to the list for 2020, and also included the tradition of playing the hunting horn, a status awarded jointly to Italy, France, Belgium and Luxembourg, as well as the art of glass bead making.

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Sound of the city: monkeys shown to prefer traffic over jungle noise

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Experiment let the primates choose what they wanted to hear, with rumbling vehicles thought to mimic elements of their own communications

They may be naturally suited to swinging in rainforests, but monkeys in a Finnish zoo have demonstrated a “significant” preference for traffic sounds instead of the noises of the jungle, researchers have found.

As part of an experiment to see how technology could improve the wellbeing of captive animals, researchers installed a tunnel fitted with sensors in the enclosure of the monkeys at Helsinki’s Korkeasaari zoo, giving the primates the chance to choose to listen to the sounds of rain, traffic, zen sounds or dance music.

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‘Shocking’ hack of psychotherapy records in Finland affects thousands

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Distressed patients flood support services after hack of private firm Vastaamo

The confidential treatment records of tens of thousands of psychotherapy patients in Finland have been hacked and some leaked online, in what the interior minister described as “a shocking act”.

Distressed patients flooded victim support services over the weekend as Finnish police revealed that hackers had accessed records belonging to the private company Vastaamo, which runs 25 therapy centres across Finland. Thousands have reportedly filed police complaints over the breach.

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Who in Europe is getting it right on Covid?

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Different approaches are having notably different outcomes

A second coronavirus wave is sweeping continental Europe, with new infection records broken daily in many countries. There are wide variations, but almost no country has been left untouched – even those that fared well in the first wave.

Across the 31 countries from which the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control collects national data, the average 14-day case incidence rate per 100,000 inhabitants has multiplied from just 13 in mid-July to almost 250 last week.

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Hole discovered in hull of Baltic ferry that sank killing 852

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Sweden, Finland and Estonia to jointly assess new information on 1994 sinking of MS Estonia

Nordic leaders have announced that they will examine evidence from a new television documentary that could shatter the official explanation of how 852 people died in a 1994 ferry sinking in the Baltic Sea.

The makers of the five-part documentary series, which was released for streaming on Monday, claimed to have found a hitherto unrecorded four-metre hole in the hull of the MS Estonia.

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Sniffer dogs used to detect coronavirus in Helsinki airport as part of trial – video

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Sniffer dogs have started to be deployed at Helsinki airport to detect Covid-19 among travellers, in a state-funded trial that it is hoped will provide a cheap, fast and effective alternative method of testing people for the virus.

A dog is capable of detecting the presence of the coronavirus within 10 seconds and the entire process takes less than a minute to complete, according to Anna Hielm-Björkman, of the University of Helsinki, who is overseeing the trial

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‘Close to 100% accuracy’: Helsinki airport uses sniffer dogs to detect Covid

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Researchers running Helsinki pilot scheme say dogs can identify virus in seconds

Four Covid-19 sniffer dogs have begun work at Helsinki airport in a state-funded pilot scheme that Finnish researchers hope will provide a cheap, fast and effective alternative method of testing people for the virus.

A dog is capable of detecting the presence of the coronavirus within 10 seconds and the entire process takes less than a minute to complete, according to Anna Hielm-Björkman of the University of Helsinki, who is overseeing the trial.

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As Covid cases rise again, how are countries in Europe reacting?

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Tighter measures are being imposed, but they vary across the continent

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Coronavirus live news: French PM rules out full national lockdown as cases rise by 9,406

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Jean Castex said government not planning return to full lockdown despite surge in cases; Austria extends mask rules

Melbourne residents are experiencing some of the strictest and longest coronavirus lockdown measures in the world as Victoria continues to work to contain a second wave of Covid-19 infections. An overnight curfew from 8pm to 5am is in place, leaving the streets of a once thriving city deserted.

Related: Melbourne’s curfew descends and vibrant city becomes ghost town – in pictures

Saturday’s Mirror splash in the UK.

Saturday’s MIRROR: Virus alert #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/NiJ4gNUL3Z

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Coronavirus global report: concern over German cases as holidays disrupt French testing

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Spain orders town of 32,000 back into confinement; Poland records highest daily case number so far

Germany has recorded its highest rate of infections in three months, France cannot keep up with demand for tests and Finland warned of an “extremely delicate” situation as Covid-19 case numbers continued to tick up across the continent.

New cases in Germany rose above 1,000 for the first time since early May, with the national disease control centre, the Robert Koch Institute, on Thursday reporting 1,045 infections in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total number of active cases to 8,700.

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Global report: India reports surge in Covid-19 cases as lockdown eased

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Almost 10,000 new cases in India on Thursday as WHO warns situation outside Europe deteriorating

India reported almost 10,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, with hospitals swamped in the worst-hit cities of Mumbai, New Delhi and Chennai, and predictions that the infection rate will not peak before the end of next month.

The country of 1.3bn people now has the fifth highest number of confirmed cases in the world, at 286,579. Over the last 24 hours 357 people have died from the virus, bringing the official toll to 8,102.

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Why do female leaders seem to be more successful at managing the coronavirus crisis?

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Plenty of countries with male leaders have also done well. But few with female leaders have done badly

On 1 April, the prime minister of Sint Maarten addressed her nation’s 41,500 people. Coronavirus cases were rising, and Silveria Jacobs knew the small island country, which welcomes 500,000 tourists a year, was at great risk: it had two ICU beds.

Jacobs did not want to impose a strict lockdown, but she did want physical distancing observed. So she spelled it out: “Simply. Stop. Moving,” she said. “If you don’t have the bread you like in your house, eat crackers. Eat cereal. Eat oats. Eat … sardines.”

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Swimming under the ice: ‘There’s nothing. You are completely alone’

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Freediver Johanna Nordblad first took to cold water as a cure for pain after a severe injury. This month she attempts to break the world record for swimming beneath ice

Evening is falling and the cold winter light is bleeding out of a steel-coloured sky. Soon the short Scandinavian afternoon will give way to night here on the edge of Lake Sonnanen in the south of Finland. Not a single gust of wind moves the pine branches; not a single ripple disturbs the water’s surface. Nothing disturbs this infinite expanse of trees, ice and snow enveloped by absolute silence.

It’s here, in a simple hunter’s lodge 170km northeast of Helsinki, that freediver Johanna Nordblad and her sister and personal photographer, Elina, spend most of their free time. With urban rhythms left far behind, their days are occupied by shovelling snow, gathering firewood and spending long hours after dinner chatting by candlelight.

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Woman’s ring lost 47 years ago in US is unearthed in a forest in Finland

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Debra McKenna, who misplaced the ring in Maine in 1973, received it in the post after it was dug up by a metal detectorist

An American woman’s high school class ring that was lost in Maine in 1973 has been found in a forest in Finland.

Debra McKenna, 63, lost the ring in Portland when she was a student at Morse high school, the Bangor Daily News reported. She said the ring was largely forgotten until a metal detectorist found it buried under 20cm (8in) of soil in a forested Finnish park 47 years later.

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Reasons to be fearful – the international news review of 2019

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This year world leaders struggled to manage the fallout from the erratic tenant in the White House – as China flexed its imperial muscles. We look back at the events that created the most turbulence

Click here for 2019’s reasons to be cheerful

A year of high anxiety was rendered more alarming by intensifying clashes of interest between world powers. As international cooperation declined, and nationalist agendas gathered strength, China, the US, Russia and Europe, and their respective allies, emulators and proxies, engaged in often dangerous competition.

The Chinese communist regime’s increasingly assertive behaviour at home and abroad, reflecting the authoritarian outlook of its paramount leader-for-life, Xi Jinping, produced head-on collisions with western countries, notably over Hong Kong, trade, technology and the repression of the Uighur Muslim minority in Xinjiang.

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Estonian minister mocks Finland’s ‘sales girl’ PM Sanna Marin

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Estonian president apologises after Mart Helme questions Marin’s capability

Estonia’s president has apologised after his country’s interior minister mocked Finland’s new prime minister – the world’s youngest serving government leader – as a “sales girl” and questioned her fitness for the post.

Mart Helme, 70, the leader of the populist far-right party Ekre, ridiculed Finland’s Sanna Marin, 34, and her government – in which four out of five coalition leaders are women under 35 – on his party’s radio talkshow on Sunday.

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Feminism comes of age in Finland as female coalition takes the reins

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For more than a century, the Nordic country has blazed a trail for women in politics. But even there, the battle for equality isn’t over, writes Emma Graham-Harrison

Just off Helsinki’s main shopping drag, toddlers in glitter paint whirl round their mothers, who are somehow managing to listen intently to a lecture on how to boost their careers with LinkedIn. No one bats an eye at the intermittent shrieks.

It’s business as usual at this Christmas networking meeting in the country that has come closer than perhaps anywhere else to making “having it all” a feminist reality, rather than an impossible goal to torment exhausted, overstretched women.

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Finland anoints Sanna Marin, 34, as world’s youngest-serving prime minister

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Transport minister is the nation’s youngest leader ever and the country’s third female PM

Finland’s transport minister, Sanna Marin, has been selected to lead the Social Democratic party, making her the country’s youngest prime minister ever.

The 34-year-old Marin, whose party is the largest in a five-member governing coalition, will be the world’s youngest-serving prime minister when she takes office in the coming days. She is also Finland’s third female government leader.

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Russia arrests conman who built fake border with Finland

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Guards detain man who took thousands from migrants before leading them on bogus journey into what they thought was EU

Russian authorities have detained a man who built a fake frontier post in the woods near the country’s border with Finland and promised migrant workers he could smuggle them into the European Union.

The man erected mock border posts and charged four men from south Asia more than $10,000 to take them to EU member Finland, the Russian border guard service said on Wednesday.

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Thousands of rare ‘ice eggs’ found on beach in Finland

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Couple stumble upon unusual occurrence that is result of very particular weather conditions

A rare collection of “ice eggs” has been spotted in Finland, a phenomenon experts say only occurs in highly particular conditions.

Risto Mattila, who photographed the eggs, said he and his wife were walking along Marjaniemi beach on Hailuoto island on Sunday when they came across the icy balls covering a 30-metre (98ft) expanse of shoreline.

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