Temperature Plummets to Record Low -- Barely

The temperature in Finland reached a record low for this winter on Thursday. The Finnish Meteorological Institute says the temperature at the Kevo research station in Utsjoki, in northern Lapland, fell to -36.7 degrees Celsius on Thursday morning.

This winter’s previous record low was held by Kuusamo, in northern Finland, where the temperature dropped to -36.6 degrees Celsius last weekend.
On Wednesday night, several locations in Lapland said temperatures plummeted to -35 degrees.
In southern Finland, the town of Lappeenranta holds the record for the most bitterly cold day this year. Last Monday, the temperature there was a freezing -35.5 degrees.

Poseur Doctor Dupes Patients for Months

A young man is suspected of having posed as a doctor for almost a year in western Finland. The 23 year old man worked at the Karkkila Health Centre as a ward doctor.

Police say the suspect had no medical training whatsoever, although he claimed to be in the final year of his medical studies. Police believe that the fraudster forged certificates in order to gain a foothold at the health centre.
The man was arrested early this week under suspicion of aggravated forgery, fraud and unauthorized practice as a health care professional. A decision on whether or not to detain the poseur is expected on Friday. A request for an inquiry into the man’s activities was made at the Vihti police station about one week ago.
Police have however said that the man posed no danger to the safety of his patients, as he worked under the supervision of a senior medical officer.
Medical Advisor Pirjo Pennanen of the health watchdog the National Supervisory Authority for Welfare and Health Valvira said that health care recruiters don’t always verify information or documents provided in hiring cases.
In an interview on YLE Radio 1’s Ykkösaamu programme, Pennanen said it was remarkable that the ruse was not even exposed when the man prescribed medication. However, she pointed out that there is often a certain amount of camaraderie between medical students and pharmacists. She added that the practice of issuing medical students with their own unique identifiers filed in a central register was only introduced last year.
The case was first reported in the tabloid daily Iltalehti.

Obama: ‘We Are at War’

 President Obama on Thursday ordered a series of steps to improve the government’s ability to collect, share, analyze and act on intelligence of terrorist threats, saying the findings of a government review of the attempted airline bombing on Christmas Day revealed significant shortcomings in national security.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Mr. Obama spoke from the State Dining Room.

“We are at war,” Mr. Obama said in remarks from the White House State Dining Room. While he promised not to “succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices” America’s civil liberties for security, he called for the immediate strengthening of the nation’s terrorism watch lists by expanding the criteria for adding people to those lists.
“In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s what these steps are designed to do.”
The president said intelligence reports involving threats to the United States would be distributed more widely among agencies.
“We must follow the leads that we get and we must pursue them until plots are disrupted,” Mr. Obama said. “We can’t sit on information to protect the American people.”
The White House made public the declassified account of how a suspected terrorist managed to elude intelligence officials and board an airplane with an explosive mixture concealed in his underwear. The classified version of the report offered a far starker view, officials said, of how close the United States came to encountering tragedy.
The president said the missteps were not the fault of one individual or one agency. He took responsibility for the failures, saying: “The buck stops with me.”
Mr. Obama ordered the review of the incident in which a Nigerian man traveling to Detroit from Amsterdam tried to ignite an explosive that could have brought down a Northwest Airlines flight and its 278 passengers. The man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, is set to be arraigned Friday on charges of attempted murder on a plane, attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and other offenses.
The president’s statement marked the second time in as many days that he delivered public remarks on the case of the attempted airline bombing and the intelligence lapses that surrounded it. He said Tuesday that the government had enough information to uncover the plot, but intelligence officials “failed to connect those dots.”
Mr. Obama arrived at the lectern in the State Dining Room at the White House more than three hours after he was originally scheduled to speak. His remarks were postponed twice in the afternoon, officials said, because declassifying the security review took far longer than expected.
The White House released the report – detailing what the government knew about the terrorist incident and what should have been done to prevent it – as an attempt to illustrate that the administration is conducting its business with transparency and airing mistakes in an effort to show the American people that they will be corrected.
Top security officials spoke to reporters in a briefing following the president’s remarks.
John O. Brennan, the president’s chief counterrorism adviser, said the intelligence failures that took place before Christmas were not similar to the lapses that led to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Back then, some agencies were denied access to critical information, he said, but those problems have been resolved with the changes in the structure of intelligence agencies.
“This was not a failure to share information,” Mr. Brennan said.
Mr. Brennan, who conducted the internal review, said the most significant finding of his report was the strength of the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He called it “one of the most lethal” cells of the terrorist organization. Before the Christmas Day terror attempt, he said, intelligence officials were not aware that the cell was organized enough to mount a plot on the United States.
“It demonstrated to us that we had a strategic sense of where they are going,” Mr. Brennan said.

An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore

Dear President Obama,
Do you really want to be the new "war president"? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike. I simply can't believe you're about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn't so.
It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That's the way General Washington insisted it must be. That's what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. "You're fired!," said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in' hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).
So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea -- "Let's invade Afghanistan!" Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.
There's a reason they don't call Afghanistan the "Garden State" (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan's nickname is the "Graveyard of Empires." If you don't believe it, give the British a call. I'd have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev's number though. It's + 41 22 789 1662. I'm sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you're about to commit.
With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the "war president." Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line -- and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.
Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn't have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.
I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush's Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.
Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you're doing it so you can "end the war") will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you've said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone -- and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout "tea bag!"
Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.
We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can't take it anymore. We can't take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of "landslide victory" don't you understand?
Don't be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn't be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can't change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.
The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can't be won over by abandoning the rest of us.
President Obama, it's time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say, "No, we don't need health care, we don't need jobs, we don't need homes. You go on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters overseas, 'cause we don't need them, either."
What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that's what they'd do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.
All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam "might" be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish -- the full terror of which we scarcely know.
When we elected you we didn't expect miracles. We didn't even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn't even function as a nation and never, ever has.
Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God's sake, stop.
Tonight we still have hope.
Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON'T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother's son.
We're counting on you.
Yours,
Michael Moore

Public Wants More Action On Employment

Finns now see the most important task for the government as being improvements in employment. A YLE-commissioned poll shows that the public considers bettering the employment situation as even more important than securing the future of public services. Nearly 60% say the government has done a poor job in dealing with weakened employment.

The survey, carried out by the pollster Taloustutkimus, found that 21% of the some 4000 people questioned consider that the government's most important task is to improve employment. Better healthcare services were in second place, seen as the number one priority by 16% of those surveyed.
The chief of research for Taloustutkimus, Juho Rahkonen, says that public social services have traditionally topped the list of concerns among the Finns, but now employment has moved up to the top of the list.
Even so, says Rahkonen, the importance of the traditional Nordic welfare state has not declined in the minds of the Finns.
"It is still there in the background. In fact, this concern over employment may be related to worries about the welfare state and the continuation of what is seen as a good Finnish way of life."
The government received its highest marks for its handling of foreign and security policy, as well as environmental affairs. Overall, backers of the Centre Party and of the conservative National Coalition Party were most satisfied with the work of the present government. Least satisfied were supporters of opposition leftist parties.
The YLE-commissioned survey was carried out during the autumn months.

Rail Problems All Day

Cancellations and delays in Helsinki-area train service are expected to continue all day Thursday because of Monday's train crash at the main Railway Station and difficult weather conditions.

A blizzard is bringing the Finnish capital 5-10 centimetres of new snow and strong winds are causing drifts. Meanwhile the bitterly cold weather continues and the state railways VR says it is unable to warm railyard switches properly because of the snow build-up.
Fewer Commuter Rail Departures
All I trains between Helsinki and Tikkurila in Vantaa have been cancelled for the day. K trains between Kerava and the capital are operating as N trains, halting at all stops. N trains are running six times an hour in both directions.
M and A trains are running three times an hour, and E trains between Helsinki and Kauklahti in Espoo are cancelled. G trains between Helsinki and Saunakallio have also been cancelled. U and S trains between Helsinki and Kirkkonummi are operating on their normal schedules.
Long-Haul Delays Possible
An effort is being made to keep to long-haul train timetables, severe cold in the north may affect schedules. During the morning hours, long-haul train were on schedule.
Although the wreckage of Monday's accident has been cleared away and one damaged track will reopen by Thursday, two will remain out of use indefinitely.

European Snow Delays Flights

Snowstorms in parts of Europe have caused some delays at Helsinki-Vantaa airport. Finnair reports that European flights have been operating 30 minutes to several hours behind schedule.

Delays have also caused baggage handling problems for Finnair and other airlines. Thursday morning, Helsinki-Vantaa had a backlog of several hundred pieces of luggage awaiting loading onto connecting flights.
Finnair says that domestic flights have been operating on time.
The company's Wednesday flight from Osaka, Japan to Helsinki departed today, a full day late because of technical problems and is expected to arrive at Helsinki-Vantaa at 3:30 PM.
The delay in the Osaka flight is not expected to affect other services.