The biggest daily Helsingin Sanomat leads off with a survey of Finns’ attitudes toward immigration and asylum seekers.
It finds that most Finns want a tougher line on immigration. Nearly 70 percent of respondents to the HS/TNS Gallup poll said that Finland should tighten its policy on accepting asylum applications. A majority also agreed that, at least at first, those granted asylum should have lower social security benefits than native-born Finns. Most also said that people granted asylum should show that they can support their whole family before being allowed to apply for family reunification. Meanwhile 59 percent said they do not see it as a problem if the number of asylum seekers in their neighbourhoods increases.
In other stories, HS reports on game wardens’ fears of increased traffic accidents involving elk, deer and wild boars around the Sipoonkorpi National Park, just east of Helsinki, where hunting was banned in 2013. There have been more sightings of elk in the area, but so far no figures showing an uptick in road mishaps.
KL: New Safe Harbor in Finland?
The main business paper, Kauppalehti, looks at the recent EU court ruling that the 15-year-old Safe Harbor data security agreement with the US is no longer valid following revelations of National Security Agency tracking of international civilian online activity. KL asks whether the move could benefit Finland as European companies scramble to find EU-based servers to store their data safely. The paper warns that EU “firms using cloud service could be made to face judicial consequences of they continue store personal data on US servers. Many companies don’t even know the physical location of the cloud services they buy, [where they store data] such as customer information.”
It quotes Mikael Salonoja, risk management director at Finnish IT giant Tieto, who urges firms to check the location of their servers and whether Safe Harbor is mentioned in their IT service contracts. If so, he recommends switching to a safe EU service – such as Tieto’s of course. KL also interviewed Jaakko Wallenius, the security director of Finnish telecoms provider Elisa, who says: “We have customers who highly value the fact that we operate in Finland and that our servers and data are located in the country.”
But could Finland become a safe haven for data from other EU countries? Mika Sarhimaa, CEO of Hewlett-Packard Finland says that “Finland is quite a competitive country for locating data centres, but more work is needed in developing services and marketing.”
In other stories, Kauppalehti downplays former Centre Party Secretary Jarmo Korhonen’s tell-all book about murky campaign financing in Finland, saying that “his right hook falls short”. And it reports that the biggest Nordic bank, Nordea, has posted third-quarter results that are down from a year earlier, falling below analysts’ expectations. Operating profit was 1.03 billion euros, slipping from 1.13 billion a year ago.
KL also writes about the Moomin Characters company’s decision to allow Finnish NHL hockey player Antti Raanta to keep an amateur painting on his helmet that shows Tove Jansson’s feisty Little My in New York City – although the unauthorised image by a Swedish artist violates Jansson’s explicit instructions about how her beloved Moominvalley figures can be used.
ÅU: School violence, tennis court drama
Meanwhile Finland’s oldest newspaper, Turku’s Swedish-language Åbo Underrättelser, tells of an unusual disturbance at the city’s Samppalinna school on Tuesday. A dispute between two fourth-graders escalated when one reported it to her mother – who in turn sent her grandparents to pick up the child. They were accompanied by a third person. Police say that when the three adults arrived at the school, they burst into a classroom where they assaulted a male pupil and a teacher. The suspects have been detained.
ÅU also offers a blow-by-blow account of Finnish tennis veteran Jarkko Nieminen’s tearful final singles match in Stockholm, which he lost to Spain’s Nicolas Almagro despite scoring two match balls in the second set. Nieminen, 34, was playing his last ATP event but he is still in the doubles with Johan Brunström.
