Helsingin Sanomat leads with the increased cost of electricity transmission, a story that’s been high on the agenda in recent weeks. Recent legislation demands that power firms ensure stability of supply, and in effect that means they have to bury their power lines to prevent them coming down in stormy weather.
To pay for this the transmission companies announced price hikes recently, but which company has the biggest increases? According to HS it’s not Caruna, which has taken a thorough pounding in the press for its increased prices and tax arrangements, but a small municipally owned company on the eastern border.
Caruna is second, but unsurprisingly companies with more urban clients don’t have such high prices. HS also has a quote from ‘Finland’s leading competition law expert’, Petri Kuoppamäki.
He says that as a natural monopoly there was no need to sell Caruna to foreign investors, and doing so was ‘a big mistake’.
Military call-ups to change
HS also has news of a significant change in legislation governing Finland’s military preparedness. In future the military will be able to summon 25,000 reservists for exercises immediately, without any right to seek an exemption, if the country is in a state of ‘raised readiness’.
The move is to deal with hybrid war situations, where a full state of war is not declared but the armed forces nevertheless need to deal with some threat or other. In those situations the commander of the armed forces will be able to summon 25,000 reservists immediately. If he wants more soldiers than that, the president can authorise such a move on his recommendation.
Beyoncé’s Finnish link
You may have seen something about Beyoncé’s halftime show at Sunday’s Super Bowl. It was a highly-charged, political performance of her new song Formation, featuring tributes to the Black Panthers, a black power salute, and plenty of references to all aspects of the African-American experience.
Iltalehti, though, found a Finnish angle that the rest of the internet seems to have missed. Bey’s bullet belts — an integral part of her tribute to the Black Panthers, not that you’d know it from reading the IL story — were designed by a Finn.
Petteri Hemmilä is from Rovaniemi and studied design in Finland and Paris before striking out to found his own label in 2013. He could not, as IL points out, have hoped for a better advert than Beyoncé’s globally-acclaimed, provocative show.