Behind its front page of adverts, Helsingin Sanomat leads with the Competition Commission’s call on Wednesday for an end to restrictions on the number of taxi licences.
Below that is a report of how Russia’s actions in Ukraine have stoked fears among Finns of travelling to their eastern neighbour. Around 400 trips to St Petersburg and across the Karjala border have been cancelled, according to one travel agent, and bookings for travel to Russia are down on last year.
Tourists and travel agencies alike blame the media for unnecessarily stirring up anxieties just as St Petersburg had started to be thought of as a normal tourist destination. ”The outlook of the middle classes in St Petersburg is of course completely different to the Russian state’s foreign policy. No-one there has bad feelings towards Europe,” one Finnish business traveller told the paper.
Veterans’ battle with bureaucracy
Tampere's Aamulehti revisits a story from a year ago, when they reported that government money put aside to help war veterans was in fact never being put to use. Last year Tampere revealed that only one third of the 124,000 euros they'd been given by the state ended up going towards helping veterans in Tampere. A needlessly bureaucratic system was leading to huge hold-ups.
But this year the paper announces that Tampere’s doing much better, with 90 percent of the cash destined for veterans now ending up where it should.
88-year-old Lauri Määttänen, who served on the frontline in 1944, is one of Finland’s 32,000 remaining World War Two veterans, of whom half survive on just 1,000 euros a month. He tells the paper that the free bus journeys and tickets to the swimming hall are the most important benefits for him. ”Take those away, and how would I ever get anywhere?” he says.
But although Tampere has put its system in order, the paper hints that the same might not be true for other parts of the country. In Pori, 95 percent of the money for veterans was going unspent because government couldn’t decide which services to invest the money in.
Angling for trouble?
In other press, the paper of the Social Democrat party Demokraatti leads with the claim that the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry is intending to start charging pensioners €35 a year for fishing licences. The paper argues against the measure, insisting that the over-65s' most popular hobby keeps them mentally and physically sharp, and keeps fish stocks under control.