The Rovaniemi-based daily Lapin Kansa leads off on Wednesday with the story of a young woman who was found in a cabin in the municipality of Simo, badly beaten. She said she had been forced into a car early Saturday morning, then taken to a remote forest road where she was beaten and robbed. Her clothes had been burnt and she was abandoned naked in the snowy, subzero wilderness. Hours later she broke into a cottage for shelter. Police have detained two men and two women in connection with the case.
Lapin Kansa also reports on the Finnish postal company Itella’s recommendation that people in Finland mail Christmas packages earlier than usual. The postal service says that otherwise it cannot guarantee that deliveries will be made on time if employees in the postal and logistics branch launch a national strike. Rovaniemi is the site of Santa Claus’s Post Office, which has entered its busiest time of the year.
Mother and child reunion
Finland’s oldest newspaper, Turku’s Swedish-language daily Åbo Underrättelser, starts off its front page with a local dispute over whether an old wooden house near Turku Castle should be demolished to make way for a block of flats and an underground parking garage.
The paper also reports on the case of Alphonsine Uwizeyimana, a Rwandan woman who disappeared just before she was to have been deported in May. On Tuesday, with the support of a local Lutheran parish, she has re-applied for a residence permit and was re-united with her 10-year-old daughter, who had been living with Uwizeyimana’s brother.
The main story in the largest provincial daily, Aamulehti of Tampere, regards the sinking of a boat crowded with Haitian refugees off the Bahamas. Some 30 are feared to have drowned, while 110 were rescued. The daily also focuses on a proposal in Belgium that chronically ill children be allowed to opt for euthanasia.
Aamulehti also repeats a story from Forbes magazine, which reported that a technical glitch on the website of the Norwegian airline Widerøe allowed some customers to buy flight tickets at extremely low prices. For instance, some were able to purchase round-trip United Airlines flights between Helsinki and New York for 241 euros.