Following on from yesterday's analysis of where middle-class Helsinki residents are and aren't sending their children to school, today's Helsingin Sanomat leads with another story of people movements within Finland.
This time it's the news that graduates of higher education from eastern Finland and Lapland are likely to move considerably further away from their home towns than highly educated people from the south and west. The paper's crunched numbers from Statistics Finland to find that the average 30-something ex-graduate has relocated 31 kilometres from where they grew up, with those from the far north having travelled 204 km on average.
The story sheds light on a much-discussed issue in Finland, that vast swaths of the country's towns, villages and countryside are emptying out as people flock to the big growth centres. "People are moving away everywhere in Finland, but in Kainuu and Lapland the talk in many municipalities is of real migration, where a person's whole social circle will leave. In the south and west, people's hobbies, social circle and family links stay put even though their address changes," an expert tells the paper.
Sparse school networks, high unemployment and a lack of built-up areas are the factors that push people further away, another researcher adds.
Meanwhile Hesari's spoken to a number of migrants who've left their hometowns all over Finland for the promised streets of Espoo. "Staying where I grew up wasn't an option," says one, adding that people who grow up in the capital are privileged because the area already has schools and jobs.
Where will the cuts hit?
A number of papers this morning look ahead to this week's 2016 budget announcement, in which the government is set to announce some swingeing cuts to public services.
Iltalehti has gathered together previous announcements of what some of those cuts are likely to be, ranging from limiting non-working parents's rights to subsidised daycare, to freezing the pensions index and in future pegging payments to salary rises, which are set to be much more moderate.
The paper also previews an end to benefits such as pensioners' housing allowance (which will cost 40,000 people up to 200 euros a month), and to the subsidy for gluten-free food for people affected by celiac disease.
From next year patients will be forced to pay more of their travel costs to get to a doctor, and there will be cuts to the international development budget, to innovation help for businesses, and to subsidies to get the unemployed back to work, the paper says.
Racist abuse row
The tabloids this morning both carry news of a storm of racist abuse on social media, coming in the wake of the recent row over a prominent MP's call for a "fight to the end" against multiculturalism.
At the centre of this incident is the Ethiopian-born entertainer Prinssi Jusuf, who late last week posted a photo on Facebook of himself and two friends posing in front of a Finnish war memorial emblazoned with the words "On behalf of the fatherland".
The fact that Jusuf and his two companions are all black was evidently too much for many people seeing the picture, who "unleashed a torrent of online racial abuse," according to Ilta-Sanomat. This included a string of death threats as well as racist language, and accusations that Jusuf, who was brought to Finland aged two and has completed military service for Finland, was mocking the country's war veterans.
Jusuf tells Ilta-Sanomat: "Just because someone has a different skin colour to the majority here doesn't mean they can't give all they can for the country's benefit. I think it's stupid to suggest that, were something bad to happen here in Finland, someone with different coloured skin would turn and do a runner."
Meanwhile Iltalehti asked the head of the Finnish Veterans' Association whether he was offended by the photo. "I don't see any problem with it at all," he says, adding that there's nothing wrong with people of different backgrounds being proud of this country and its war veterans.