Finland's Ovi

Finnish literature is set to make a notable splash on the German book market in 2011. Finland is in the process of filing an official application to become the theme country of the world’s most prominent literature trade fair, the Frankfurt Book Fair, in four years’ time. Finland’s Minister of Culture Stefan Wallin (Swedish People’s Party) is likely to sign the application already this week.

“The plan is to send our letter of intention to the Frankfurt Book Fair already today or tomorrow. This is an opportunity worth seizing – especially after the organisers of the fair have practically demanded that Finland apply for the guest of honour position for 2011″, Wallin confirms.
Being the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair will be the largest-ever single effort to export Finnish culture.

As yet, no exact figures are available, but presumably Finland’s investment in the undertaking will be in the region of EUR five million. The Frankfurt Book Fair organisation has in several instances emphasised that with a EUR 4-4.5 million investment, a theme region can obtain sufficient publicity.

“It is too early to speculate about the cost of being the guest of honour. First we have to wait for an acknowledgement from Frankfurt. Obviously, at least the Ministry of Education, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Trade and Industry will then take part in the effort”, Wallin says.

But money alone does not guarantee success at the fair. With the smallest-ever budget of a mere EUR 1.5 million, Lithuania failed to produce a breakthrough in the international book market. But then again, so did South Korea, in spite of its whopping EUR 14.5 million investment in the fair.
According to Wallin, the undertaking would coincide perfectly with the south-western city of Turku’s turn as European Capital of Culture in 2011.

At present, around 30-40 Finnish books are translated into German each year. Should Finland succeed in becoming the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair, this figure could increase many times over.

Source: Helsingin Sanomat

Source: Vaisala 

Helsinki Testbed, a joint effort of Vaisala and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, has won the community category of this year’s Productive idea contest.

Helsinki Testbed is a research and experimentation platform for new weather observation equipment, systems, services and forecasting models. It covers the Greater Helsinki area. Helsinki Testbed enhances the cooperation between researchers, companies and end-users, and facilitates the utilization of research results in practice, such as in precision weather services.

According to the contest jury, the Testbed research project is an unconventional and bold demonstration of how meteorology and technology can be harnessed to communicate local weather conditions in real-time. The jury stated that the Testbed project utilizes Finnish technology and know-how in an exemplary way. The long-term goal is to promote the formation of a leading edge meteorological center in the Helsinki area. The idea has significant societal impacts, and it has already gained great international attention.

The contest, established to promote creative business activity, was organized for the 28th time. It seeks new, maximum 3-year-old innovative ideas that have already been taken to productive use. The contest has two categories: business category and community category.

The Productive idea contest is organized by the Junior Chamber International Finland. The contest is carried out in cooperation with the Kauppalehti and Kauppalehti Optio magazines, OP bank group, Ministry of Trade and Industry, the Finnish Industry Investment Ltd, Tamro Oyj, Federation of Finnish Enterprises, Central Chamber of Commerce of Finland, and the Association for Finnish Work.

Read more about the Helsinki Testbed project at:
http://www.fmi.fi/weather/stations_88.html

Visit the Testbed pages at
http://testbed.fmi.fi/

A bleary-eyed researcher who normally sleeps like a log went to bed yesterday claiming a world record after staying awake for more than 11 days and nights.

But when Tony Wright, 43, finally regains wakefulness today after catching up on his sleep, he could be in for a cruel awakening. The human guinea pig will discover that he may have given up ten hours too early to claim the crown.

The record that he broke – of 11 days, or 264 hours – was set by Randy Gardner, an American, in 1964 and is recognised in psychiatric textbooks.

But that is 12 hours shorter than the record which used to be included in The Guinness Book of Recordsbefore being removed from the book in 1989. It was deleted on the grounds that it could encourage records harmful to health and was unverifiable because of the claims of insomnia sufferers.

The Guinness previous record was for 11½ days, or 276 hours, and was set by Toimi Soini in Hamina, Finland, between February 5 to 15, 1964.

Mr Wright’s friend Graham Gynn, who co-wrote the book Left in the Dark, about their research into human consciousness, said he had no knowledge of the Finnish record.

“It is interesting but has not cropped up at all in our research and is not mentioned in any of the books about sleep and sleeplessness,” he said. “It may have been disputed or not accepted for some reason because everyone now accepts the old record was set by Randy Gardner in 1964 when he was a 17-year-old student.

“As far as we are concerned our main concern was not the record but to show that Tony could train his mind in such a way as to stay awake for 11 days and remain coherent and aware of what was going on around him. That was the main object and I believe what he has done will surprise many scientists who did not believe it was possible. Tony not only stayed awake but handled ten media interviews a day.”

Before going to sleep, Mr Wright attributed his success to the “caveman diet” of raw food he followed during his marathon. Instead of celebrating afterwards, he climbed into bed at 8am having tested his own theory for 266 hours that people can achieve astonishing feats by teaching their brains to work more efficiently.

Mr Wright, a father of three, stayed awake with the help of friends at the Studio Bar in his home town of Penzance. He ate raw food, drank tea, eschewed all artificial stimulants, played pool and kept a diary of how he was coping, while thousands of internet viewers watched him on webcam.

Six CCTV cameras were trained on him the entire time in case he tried to catch a sneaky 40 winks and he was entertained by a stream of volunteers popping in to help to keep him awake.

His diary became increasingly surreal as the lack of sleep took its toll and he spoke slower and slower in interviews on television and radio as the marathon wore on.

He claimed the record at 6.05am yesterday, saying: “I feel pretty good. It’s been a bit of a slog, but I got there. My diet of raw food made it much easier to switch from one side of the brain, which is really tired, to the other but both are pretty tired at the moment.”

He believes that as people get more tired, the influence of the left side of the brain reduces and is replaced by that of the right. “I did this to show that the accepted theory is wrong and the brain does not become less effective with tiredness.”

Going too far

Former Guinness world records to have been deleted since the book was launched in 1954 include:

Sword swallowing. It was deemed too dangerous

Heaviest cat (unethical)

Eating and drinking (could lead to litigation)

Source: Times archive

By Juha Salonen

It has been a quiet morning in the so-called “real men’s sauna” at the Vuosaari Swimming Hall.

Pauli Nevalainen and Tuomas Kekki have bathed without any need for an urgent escape through the door. The heavy-handed löyly-throwers have not shown up today.
The two men have heard stories about such incidents.

“Yes, there have been times when it’s been so hot that there isn’t much room left down on the lower benches”, says Kekki.

“Once there was this guy who poured a whole bucket of water on the stones as he was leaving. I can assure you he wasn’t alone in heading out of the door. Fast. I don’t take part in these sorts of competitions - the old ticker won’t take it any more”, says Kekki, who comes to the hall two or three times a week.

Pauli Nevalainen is another regular visitor, a couple of times a week. He says he has not run into the serious löyly-artists.

“But one good thing about this hall is that you don’t get the boozing sort in here”, he says.
At the swimming hall’s cafeteria, Nikolai Nikanow is waiting for his wife, who is doing some water aerobics. He says that this spring he has two or three times come up against a situation where the water has been going on the sauna-stones with more than the usual regularity.

“A couple of times there were people in there throwing the stuff like there was no tomorrow. It got so bloody hot in there that there were only one or two people left on the upper benches ‘enjoying’ it. The others had all moved down closer to floor level or had voted with their feet and left altogether”, Nikanow reports.
There are two men’s saunas in the Vuosaari establishment. The “family sauna” is intended for normal mortals. The smaller of the two hot-rooms, the one for the real men, has been set aside for those who like it not just hot, but hotter than hell.

The ambient temperature in the sauna is kept above that in the family sauna, and the users make sure the humidity level stays high.

The heat is achieved by a special sprinkler, which squirts a shower of water onto the stones every time the temperature slips back down enough. The sensitivity of the sprinkler system can also be tuned to suit your own tastes, and people also manually throw on water, as in the normal sauna experience.

Nikanow has not taken part in any of the endurance competitions.

“There are a few of them who throw more than the others. My personal opinion is that since it is a public place, they could take a little more account of the other people in there when they are tossing the water on.”

Some Finns took part in Hitler’s birthday celebration in Tallinn
 
A total of seven Finns have been banned from entering Estonia on suspicion of association with “extremist and racist movements”, Estonian Ministry of the Interior representative Katrin Vides revealed on Tuesday.

A ban on entry has been imposed on two more Finns because of their criminal backgrounds.

The Estonian daily Postimees reported on Tuesday about three Finns, who were banned from entering Estonia at the beginning of the year for a ten-year period because of alleged neo-Nazi connections.

The men have denied the allegations and have appealed against the decision.

According to the Tallinn-based Finnish police liaison officer, embassy counsellor Ari Lahtela, the number of imposed bans on entry is not significant considering the vast number of Finns travelling to Estonia each year.

“It also does not compare to the number of Estonians who have been banned from entering Finland”, Lahtela continues.

The recently-published Estonian Security Police annual report establishes that last year “skinheads” aspired to create an umbrella organisation in Estonia. International contacts were established, and the skinhead ideology was spread at so-called private parties.

The three Finns who have appealed against the entry-ban took part in one such gathering, which was a fancy dress party organised on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birthday in Tallinn last year.

“Around 25 individuals were present, 15 of whom could be identified from a photograph”, the organiser of the party, Risto Teinonen, 47, says.

Teinonen, who is of Finnish origin, received Estonian citizenship in 2002 for services rendered to the government. Lately the Estonian Security Police has been keeping a keen eye on Teinonen’s doings.

In Estonia, Teinonen is involved in the “New Europe” association.
The organisation has reprinted the books Hitler the Liberator and Hitler and Children from the German occupation period. The latter of the two has also been published in Finnish, German, and English.

According to Teinonen, the books were reissued merely as samples of the German propaganda of the period for those interested in history.

In conjunction with the recent disturbances in Tallinn, politician Dimitri Klenski, who utilised the opportunity to get visibility in the streets, used the same books to demonstrate to the foreign media that there is fascism in modern Estonia.

(AFP and NTB)

A Finnish peacekeeper died of wounds received in a roadside bomb attack in Maimana in Afghanistan Wednesday morning, the Finnish Defence Command said in a statement.

The Finnish soldier was part of an infantry patrol that also included two Norwegian peacekeepers. The patrol was protecting hospital staff, part of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), when the bomb exploded at about 9am Finnish time (GMT+2).

The Finn died about an hour after the explosion. Also the Norwegians were wounded.

An Afghan intelligence official was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse that the bomb might have been remote-controlled.

Norwegian news agency Norsk Telegrambyrå (NTB) reported that four Norwegians were slightly wounded, whereas according to the Finnish defence ministry, three Norwegians were wounded.

The Finnish Defence Forces told the Finnish News Agency (STT) that another Finnish peacekeeper had been near the accident and escaped unscathed.

Jyri Häkämies (cons), the Finnish defence minister, conveyed his condolences to the family of the killed soldier and said the exact course of the events had yet to be established. He told STT that Finland had not yet drawn any conclusions about the future of Finland’s participation in the Afghanistan operation.

Jens Stoltenberg, the prime minister of Norway, told the country’s Parliament that Norway did not intend to pull out its troops from Afghanistan. A Norwegian soldier was killed in Kabul in 2004.

Tarja Halonen, the president of Finland, issued her condolences to the family of the Finnish soldier.

The Finnish government honoured the casualty with a moment of silence.

(HELSINGIN SANOMAT)

The youth organisation of the opposition Left Alliance Party, the Left Youth of Finland, has narrowly passed a resolution calling for the legalisation of the use and home cultivation of cannabis. The decision came at a convention of the organisation this past weekend.

The initiative won by two votes. One of those voting against the measure was Jussi Saramo, who was re-elected as President of the group. In his view, the matter should have been given more consideration, and should have been debated in a broader context of policy toward intoxicants, with input from experts in the field.

“However, as chairman, I stand behind the decision”, he added.
The decision was not a big change to the organisation’s previous policy line on drugs; Saramo noted that an earlier statement on drug policy issued by the Left Youth states that there should be no punishments for personal use and home cultivation of cannabis.

However, the policy line, accepted four years ago, stated “Cannabis should not be legalised in Finland”. Now the executive of the organisation will have to update that document.

“We don’t need any more drugs, but victimising the users does not help”, Saramo says.
Left Alliance Chairman Matti Korhonen says that the party is distancing itself from the vies of its youth organisation. In his view, holding a vote at a convention is not the right way to decide on such big matters.

“The party’s starting point is one of zero tolerance”, Korhonen notes.

He added, however, that he welcomes drug policy debate as such.
In November the chairman of the Satakunta section of the Left Youth of Finland was sentenced by Pori District Court to a fine for growing and smoking marijuana.

An aide to a Left Alliance MP, who lived in the same commune, but was not convicted in the case, was nevertheless not allowed by the party to run as a candidate in the Parliamentary elections in March.

ovi

By Anna-Stina Nykänen

The new Minister of Culture Stefan Wallin, 39, travels nearly every weekday morning from his home in Turku to work in Helsinki. In the capital, as a part of his work with the Culture Ministry portfolio, he handles gender equality matters. Last Friday, for instance, he made a speech in which Finnish fathers were urged to take a greater part in the care of their own children.

“Usually he manages to say hello to the girls before he leaves, as they are waking up. But sometimes he has to take the 5 o’clock train - we call it the Horror Express”, explains Wallin’s wife Elina Pirjatanniemi.
     
The family’s morning carousel is left for Dr. Pirjatanniemi to operate. She feeds and dresses the children and takes 7-year-old Stella to preschool and her 5-year-old little sister Freja to kindergarten, before she heads off to her own workplace - teaching future lawyers at the University of Turku, preparing lectures, and writing scientific articles on her special subject of environmental law.

The 40-year-old Pirjatanniemi also picks the kids up in the afternoon before her husband gets back home from Helsinki.
“The house is not in the sort of shape where we could invite guests over any old time. There are piles of piles everywhere: piles of washing, piles of stuff, piles of papers”, says Pirjatanniemi.
      Fortunately these days a minister is no longer obliged to have a “representative home”.

The modern government minister can in this respect at least enjoy a normal family life. This whole vexed question of putting together the ministerial duties and those of parenthood has in recent years been increasingly in the news. Back in the 1990s, the then Prime Minister Esko Aho was branded by his political opponents as “a cellphone daddy”. Before that, nobody paid much attention to how much a male minister contributed to family life.
In the last government term, the Foreign Trade and Development Minister Paula Lehtomäki took off for maternity leave while in office. There were a few questions asked as to whether this was the end of her political career.

Now Lehtomäki is back, this time behind the Environment desk in the new centre-right administration, and she is expecting her second child, but she is not the only member of the government with the patter of tiny feet in prospect.

The young men in the government have pointed out that they, too, have small children at home.

The Swedish People’s Party chairman Wallin in particular has come out and declared himself a feminist, and said he firmly intends to make sure he has enough time left for his family.
How do ministers manage the juggling act of work and family? Are they simply ludicrously hard-working, do they have some kind of robot at home to do the chores, or are there more hours on their wristwatches?

Can the state be a flexible employer with regard to ministers’ family matters?

Elina Pirjatanniemi is particularly pleased at a recent comment by Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen.

“Vanhanen said more or less that now we are not in crisis mode, and that the work can be done during the daylight hours. This won applause from the troops at home. And it could also be an example to the corporate sector.”

She notes at the same time that according to the statistics it is the upwardly mobile fathers of young children who put in quite the largest number of overtime hours.
Pirjatanniemi finds the feminist sentiments of her husband perfectly natural. She says there are plenty of feminist men among her colleagues and circle of friends.

“There’s nothing so very special about him. But it is nice that in this position he has been able to bring out that side of him. Some might think that there is a little home-tyrant lurking behind it all, but the truth is that this is his own personal mission.”
Wallin intends to be away from home for a maximum of two nights a week, and no more. He wants to take his turn at ferrying the kids to their medical check-ups and he will not give this up for ministry meetings.

“I did suggest this to him once, but he almost got upset at the idea [of skipping a visit]. I was, I suppose, more traditional than him in my way of thinking.”

What about doing chores around the house? Does it work?
      “We do things in different ways. Sometimes I get annoyed at the way he goes about it, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual at times.”
     
The job of a minister of state is not some emergency detail; it can go on for years.

This means that routines have to be developed for getting through the everyday, ones that keep everyone satisfied, says Pirjatanniemi.
      “My own work is important to me, too. It’s not like I shove my own needs into a bottom drawer.”
      Two years ago, when she was writing her doctoral thesis, Elina Pirjatanniemi’s husband stayed at home for two months. Her study on environmental crimes was very well received as a pioneering piece of research.

“At that time everything revolved around me. Steffi was wating at home with the kids, when I came back tetchy after a day of writing. There was no need for me to spend my time and energy wondering if he’d be able to find the girls’ welly-boots and coveralls, and that was important for us.”
     
Things probably would not have gone as smoothly if one of the partners had not concentrated totally on the home front.
      “It is a utopian idea to think that two people with a family can simultaneously be in an intensive phase of their career. You have to get a sense of rhythm going.”
      She takes the view that working life allows a woman rather more freedom to have different phases in her career. A man is supposed to go ballistic, like a rocket.
     
Now it is the wife’s turn to stretch herself thin between home and work. The Wallins are fortunate in that Pirjatanniemi has a flexible job. As a researcher she can to some extent determine for herself whether she works at home or on the campus, at night or during the day.
      “Anything that comes up suddenly is my responsibility. If one of the kids has a tummy problem, I’m the one who bends and tends to it. Our life would get out of shape immediately if both of us were working to a stopwatch schedule.”
      Both husband and wife cook, and the washing machine gets filled by the one whose shirts or blouses happen to be on the bottom of the pile. “I do the ironing, yes, because I happen to like it. Steffi deals with the aquarium and the car.”
     
Evening tasks are divided: one makes dinner, the other reads a bedtime story to the children. If Wallin has been away for any amount of time, the kids are all over him like a rash, and their mother can withdraw into the background to do her own thing.
      “He has to make up any shortfalls in his reading to them: the children calculate that each of us read about as much, and keep us to it. Then the other one can go and watch Sportsnight.”
     
A cleaning firm comes every second week to keep the place tidy - the result of a common Christmas present between the parents. Grandparents and friends also help out. Many of those friends also have small children of their own, so it requires some thought before asking them for help.

“In this respect, I think we probably are on the debt side of things”, Elina admits.

A good kindergarten provides the children with the sort of stimuli that they might not get at home.

“In my own personal version of Hell, the day would be spent in handcrafts and making stuff”, confesses Pirjatanniemi, with obvious relief that the task can be performed at the kindergarten and preschool instead.
Wallin has excellent powers of concentration. This helps in keeping work and home on an even keel. At the summer cabin he can answer an important call and as soon as he has hung up he can be back loafing on the jetty as before.

“He can also write a newspaper column at the same time as the kids are playing a board game on the floor right next to him. I can’t manage that sort of thing. If the children are getting over an illness and are with me at work for the day, drawing or something, I cannot get my thoughts focused properly.”
Sometimes Pirjatanniemi gets her own timetable wound too tight, and tries too hard. “I can get through the day’s tasks alright, but I’m glum, I sigh a lot, and I swig down coffee by the bucketful. And then at work when I’m supposed to be coming up with creative ideas, I can’t string a sentence together.”

Bad conscience is also a familiar visitor for Elina Pirjatanniemi. At work she frets over a child’s runny nose and at home she worries about an unfinished article. A sense of inadequacy strikes. On Friday it can feel as if she has run a steeplechase course and collapsed in a heap over the finish line. At that point it is necessary to stop engines, wind down, and read a good book.

It is worth keeping the weekday routines as simple as possible.

“The ideal is to just be and just wig out on Fridays. And on Saturday mornings you don’t get out of your pyjamas until it is absolutely necessary.”
When she was the Minister of Culture in the previous government, Tanja Saarela was criticised for not “getting about” more during her summer vacation, for not being seen at cultural events and the festivals that litter the short Finnish summer.

Saarela wanted to spend her holiday time in peace with her children. A Minister of Culture (and Sport) can very easily fill the evenings and weekends with work-related engagements.

Yes, it would be possible to go to family-type events with the children in tow, but for the kids it might not be so much fun to have their father along in “minister-mode”.

“Sometimes the girls ask their father if he’s going to be making another of those speeches. ‘Is it going to be a long one?’”

Speeches are always too long. The only way the children can be got through them without complaint is with the bribe of a lollipop in their mouth.
A minister from a small political party such as the SPP is less in the public eye than one from a big party. Even so, the publicity thing affects the children.

“I worry a bit that the girls will think that their father’s work is more important than others’. I’ve explained to them that there are jobs that are important, even if you do not see the people who are doing them”, says Pirjatanniemi.
She has even had to defend political cartoonists when her daughter was offended by the pictures of her father: ‘Why do they always draw Daddy like that?’

Mother explained that the drawings are part and parcel of democracy. If there is someone in power, there must also be counterweights to that power. It is necessary to be able to write and draw freely about those holding the reins.
The greatest difficulties for Elina Pirjatanniemi in the new situation have come from the way the people around tend to relate to her - although she is slightly embarrassed at having to make the admisasion.

“I have always been very egocentric in my way. It was a tough pill to swallow when people started to think of me through the filter of another person. It was annoying to be Mrs Minister.”

The law doctorate wife has been asked if she is “still at work”.

“I’m not a little girl any more, and to me it seemed like I was having a dishrag thrown in my face. Oh, so I should suddenly quit my job, because my husband is a minister? It’s a idea out of the stone age, and politics isn’t like that any longer. Yuck! Scary stuff.”
There have even been those who wonder aloud that she has her own surname. They don’t exactly grumble at it, but kind of stare, as you would at a strange breed of dog, she says.

One thing she has got used to, however, is that going out to do things with her husband in town can be a lengthy exercise, as people are forever stopping him in the street to talk.

“Yes, it’s like going out for a walk with a snail”, she laughs.
Helsingin Sanomat

People live well in the North, close to nature, but not in some backwoods backwater. Children are red-hot at texting on their Nokia mobiles, even when they are out picking lingonberries amongst the bears somewhere. Some of them even ski to school - at least if you believe what they tell you at the Foreign Ministry.

The Finnish Embassy in London has opened a web portal for British schoolchildren under the name “Kidzone Finland”. The intention is to provide a broader picture of what Finland is like, through information and quizzes, explaining how life is in a country that is a blank spot for most British kids, who know little more than Tove Jansson’s Moomins, if even that.
Birdsong twitters in the background as Kidzone tells us that Finns send gazillions of SMS messages each year.

Older technology is also featured prominently: a massive icebreaker is pictured to show how Finland copes with its chilly winter.

Finnish design is not forgotten, either. “Finland is a very stylish country”, we are told, “When Emilia turned nine, her aunt sent her a Marimekko T-shirt”.
Emilia is one of three Finnish children with whom the English kids can play and interact in the pages.

One trick to pull in and hold the readers is a series of quizzes, and the winner of a competition can get a trip to Finland. The British children’s author Michael Morpurgo has agreed to serve as the jury for the competition. The writer has not visited Finland himself, but nevertheless believes that the Finns have a direct and caring attitude to their natural surroundings that the British kids could learn from.

As Kidzone reports: “Forests are well cared for in Finland, using a way that copies the forests’ natural life-cycle… If looked after properly and wisely, forests will always grow new trees. This makes them an important ‘renewable resource’”.

The British attitude to their natural surroundings is “more sentimental” in the view of Morpurgo. Cute domestic animals are cosseted like members of the family, but nobody has any qualms about slaughtering foxes, regarded as vermine.

“The same goes for children. If they are cute, they are spoiled rotten, but throughout history children have been treated in the most horrible fashion - enslaved, abandoned, beaten up.”
Morpurgo remembers well the furore that emerged at the beginning of the year over a European survey of children’s well-being. The Dutch won it, the Finns were on the podium or thereabouts, while the British children came at the bottom of the heap. As Morpurgo notes: “I guess the Finns are doing something right.”

The writer hazards a guess that unlike in the stiff and hierarchical British school system, Finns perhaps pay more attention to the main event - children’s wellbeing. In Britain, school classes can also be excessively large, at worst well over 30 pupils to a class.

The desks at the back in these giant classes in large faceless schools are occupied by pupils who cannot master the basics of English or of mathematics. Often they are not seen in class anyway, as it is relatively easy for the marginalised to vote with their feet and play truant.
As for Finland, Kidzone reports once again that: “Finland has come up with a system called the Welfare Society that means the government cares for people who most need it. This gives kids lots of rights!”

Michael Morpurgo does offer the reminder that Finnish kids and British children do have much in common, too, including the fact that in both countries many teenagers are regular and enthusiastic binge-drinkers.
The best idea of what Kidzone is about can be gained from visiting the site and logging in. It does not appear to require the sort of registration that will fill your e-mail inbox. The format is to provide information, and then to check understanding by a series of multiple-choice questions. Users can gain badges for their “backpack”, and by answering bonus questions they can get to see Moomin video-clips. It works quite smoothly. The venture is a British localisation of “Project Finland”, which was presented by the Finnish Embassy in Washington DC some years ago.

(HS) Attack on other Finnish site apparently from domestic server 

The website of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) was hit on Monday and Tuesday by at least three denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, which effectively paralysed the site’s service for short periods.

First indications, according to F-Secure expert Mikko Hyppönen, were that the attempts were launched by a Romanian or East European group, who had made earlier threats of such attacks.

Speaking on TV on Wednesday morning, Hyppönen did not rule out the possibility that there might be Finnish members in the attacking group.
In the course of Tuesday it was possible to access the YLE site only intermittently, owing to the massive loading from a hostile attack.

A denial-of-service attack - DoS, or in the case of a co-ordinated series of attacks DDoS (for distributed denial-of-service - is when a website is “swamped” or saturated with malicious intent by external communications requests, such that the victim site is rendered unavailable to its intended, legitimate users.

The company was able to get the servers up and running again, but is apparently braced for further attempts. The head of security at the public broadcaster was unable to identify a motive for the attacks or their possible perpetrators, but the high profile accorded the company during the Eurovision Song Contest - YLE was host broadcaster for the competition in Helsinki - was offered as one reason. YLE has not been the target of such cyber-harassment in the past.
Other Finnish sites to be hit in the past two days have included Eniro and the Suomi24 discussion forums.

In the case of Eniro, it was reported on Wednesday that one such attack was routed through a Finnish server. The company is anticipating further trouble, and forecasts that the problem may trickle down to smaller companies with a web presence.
The Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority collected information on the attacks on Tuesday and passed this to the government.

According to a data security expert at the Authority, the attacks were carried out in an exceptional fashion, making use of peer-to-peer file sharing sites, such that all requests were directed to the YLE server. The logjam was released when YLE restricted all access to the site from foreign IP addresses. There was no intent to penetrate the system, only to cause annoyance and disruption.
Attacks against websites in Estonia continued on Tuesday, apparently an extension of the disturbances that sprang up in the wake of the dispute with Russia over the relocation of the bronze World War II memorial in Tallinn (see attached article).

No evidence has been found as yet to directly link the latest Finnish incursions to those on Estonian government sites in Tallinn and elsewhere, but the Finnish government is reportedly geared up to ward off any such attacks if they should occur.

The United States has declined a Finnish request for a meeting between President Tarja Halonen and US President George W. Bush this week.

At the same time, a meeting was arranged with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who is scheduled to meet Bush today, Tuesday.

According to the office of the President, Finland had asked about the possibility of a meeting with the US President during Halonen’s visit to the United States. The request was turned down for scheduling reasons.

Scheduling problems are routinely invoked in international diplomacy to turn down a proposed meeting.

President Halonen travels to the United States on Wednesday to attend the Annual Gala Dinner of the American Scandinavian Foundation. The Nordic Countries take turns sending a leader to attend the event, and this year is Finland’s turn.

In New York Halonen meets with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as well as representatives of US research institutes, says the President’s office in a statement issued on Monday.
Swedish Prime Minister and conservative leader Reinfeldt travelled to the United States on Sunday and like Halonen, he began his programme with a meeting with Ban Ki-Moon in New York.

Reinfeldt says that the main theme of his Tuesday meeting with President Bush is climate policy. The same topic will take Reinfeldt to California, where he meets with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday.

Reinfeldt said in an interview with the Swedish news agency TT that his aim was to get a better understanding of the US strategy against climate change.

Speaking to Swedish journalists in New York, Reinfeldt denied that he was an ideological partner of Bush and said that he disagrees with him on matters such as the death penalty and abortion.
US leaders also met with representatives of the Swedish government more frequently than those of Finland also when the Social Democrats were in power in that country under the leadership of Göran Persson.

Both Finland and the United States have denied that the infrequency of meetings between Finnish and American leaders is an indication of problems in relations between the two countries.

Halonen met with President Bush during a working visit to the USA in 2002. After that bilateral meeting, the two have met only in connection with international gatherings.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has invited Foreign Minister Ilkka Kanerva for a visit to Washington. The exact date of the visit remains open, but the Foreign Ministry says that the aim is that it should take place during the summer.

About 63 per cent of respondents in a poll made public by the newspapers Turun Sanomat and Väli-Suomen sanomalehdet on Tuesday said they opposed membership in Nato.However, support for Nato membership has also risen, by three percentage points to 27 per cent.

Some 78 per cent of the respondents in the latest poll said Finland would have to organise a referendum on whether or not to join the military alliance.

Research company Taylor Nelson Sofres interviewed 1,000 Finns aged 15 and above, excluding residents of the Åland Islands. The stated margin of error is three percentage points.
STT

Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, urged EU countries to punish Estonia for the removal of the Bronze Soldier Red Army monument in late April.

Estonian daily Eesti Paevaleht printed the letter on Friday.

“The western countries give their tacit approval to the fact that by equalling the heroism of soldier-liberators and the crimes of Nazis and their henchmen, Estonian authorities were attempting to rewrite history and reinterpret the role of the anti-Hitler coalition in the victory over fascism in the second world war,” the Baltic News Service (BNS) quoted Mr Lavrov as saying on Friday.

Mr Lavrov added that “Estonia’s partners in Europe and transatlantic organisations in particular, as well as in the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe should give an “adequate assessment of the Estonian authorities’ activity.”

“Russia, which has paid a terrible price for the victory over fascism, cannot remain indifferent to developments in which sacred historical memory is turned into a hostage of the moment’s political demands,” BNS quoted the letter as saying.

Ilkka Kanerva (cons), Finland’s foreign minister, said Thursday he had received the letter in late April, adding it was void of drama and only contained Russia’s views on the Bronze Soldier row.

When asked by the Finnish News Agency, the Finnish foreign ministry refused to give access to the letter by referring to section 24 on secret official documents of the Act on the Openness of Government Activities.

STT

Jouko Huttunen, a paternity expert at the University of Jyväskylä, feels that fathers and mothers in Finland continue to live in the stone age as far as certain attitudes are concerned.

“If there were just a little bit of paternal thinking at workplaces, or if more services were directed toward fathers alongside issues related to mothers, or if the post-natal child clinic system directed more services clearly toward fathers, the attitudes could change”, Huttunen says.

The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health now plans to start encouraging fathers to take parental leave. Stefan Wallin, the Minister responsible for Equality Affairs, is set to launch a project in Helsinki on Friday, aimed at encouraging fathers to take parental leave.

The objective is to promote gender equality at work and in education by increasing the role of fathers in the care of children.

The most frequent users of long parental leaves are mothers who do not have a steady job, or who have little training.

Child care leave is seen as one reason for the weaker position that young women have on the labour market. Employers are afraid to hire women of childbearing age for fear of the absences.

The aim of Wallin’s project is to promote awareness of parental benefits that already exist. This would mean that fathers would also be allowed to use them more.

Mere campaigning and manipulation of attitudes are not enough in the opinion of Jenni Kellokumpu. Legislative changes is also needed, which would eventually filter down to attitudes.

This is suggested by the fact that fathers are using the days off that they are legally entitled to.

“The problem with today’s system is that parents agree between themselves on parental leaves”, Kellokumpu says. “If we could concretely show people we could say ‘Hey Father, these are for you’, men would more consistently avail themselves of the entitlement.”