Month: June 2007

I was pretty amazed when I read an AP story where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Paris after meeting with France’s new President Nicolas Sarkozy that democracy will come to the the Middle East no matter what. “Yeah, it’s really hard,” she said. “It’s hard for democracy to take hold in a place…

Kesä on vihdoin saapunut näille pohjoisille asteille. Vaikka tämä kaikkein suosituin vuodenaika on saapunut miljoonien vuosien ajan, aina se epäröi ennen kuin muuttaa maisemat niin perusteellisesti. Pikku epäröinti, jota luonto harrastaa on ymmärrettävä. Vuoden ajat tällä hiljaisella Euroopan nurkalla eivät ole koskaan kevytmielinen asia, vaan ne ovat kuin vallankumouksia. Pian ihmettä alkaa tapahtua: lehdet puhkeavat,…

One of the reasons why the Finnish government hasn’t shown any interest in rejoining Karelia with Finland is because of its large Russian-speaking population. The other factor is fear that Karelia could in the future cause a new war with Russia. The last matter that some government officials want for Finland is to turn the…

What do cities and towns like Viirpuri, Käkisalmi, Hiitola, Kivennapa, Sortavala and Terijoki have in common? They were all once a part of Finland, before the Karelian Isthmus was ceded to the former Soviet Union after the end of what Finnish historians call the Continuation War (1941-44). Even though my knowledge of Finnish geography was…

Prior to Finland’s entry into European Union in 1995, there was little written in the English-language media about the Nordic country. Apart from news agencies like Reuters and the Associated Press, a handful like the Financial Times wrote regularly about Finland as well. When I wrote for the FT in the late 1980s and early…

As the US administration debates the closing down of the Guantánamo Bay prison, the stigma of opening such a detention center for enemy combatants, a concept conjured to detain anyone without due process indefinitely, will live on. Erasing the damage to US prestige abroad as a beacon of hope for the word’s oppressed will take…

Possibly one of the interesting matters about the multicultural society debate in Europe is that some don’t grasp what it means or implies. If we look at the etymology of the word, everyone knows that multi derives from the word multus, meaning many or much. Defining culture is a bit more complex. For the sake…

Here’s a snapshot of the sublime landscapes that accompany us north of the 60th parallel. Witnessing such a sunset is magical. It’s like being nowhere but between two great frontiers that meet briefly at a special moment. Those two frontiers are Space and Earth. Here’s wishing everyone a wonderful midsummer if relevant to your region.

It was on a Saturday afternoon in April 1978 when I was locked up in a police cell in Buenos Aires for forgetting my ID at home. The other mistake I made was to accidentally point my camera at the US consul’s home. When I reached the corner, two undercover policemen ran from behind and…

Did you know that one out of 35 people in the world is an immigrant, according to a 2004 United Nations study? In numbers, that translates to 175 million people (2.9% of the world’s population) versus 75 million (2.5%) in 1960. In the United States, the number of immigrants total over 34 million, accounting for…