Finland has had an eventful summer in terms of the weather, with a cold June and now a dangerously electric July. Daily Iltalehti reports that in addition to the Joroinen man who perished on a golf course last week, at least seven people have been hospitalised with lightning-related trauma. Another golf course also experienced a close call on Sunday, as lightning struck a man as he was heading for safety carrying an umbrella.
“I’m told the force of the lightning blast flung the man several meters,” Järviseutu Golf boss Mikko Autio told Iltalehti. “Thankfully first aid personnel got there soon.”
Not all lightning strikes cause direct bodily harm, as four unfortunate pensioners in the village of Liitsola in south-east Finland discovered. Iltalehti recounts how lightning struck a tree which began to smoke, causing two elderly people inside the nearby house to have paroxysms or “different kinds of fits,” according to firemen on the scene. The other two also breathed in smoke, and all were sent to hospital for a checkup.
Yesterday’s weird summer weather didn’t stop at 4,000 daily lightning bolts or two strikes at the Karjurock festival in Uusimaa, as Ilta-Sanomat reports. The regions of Uusimaa, southwest Finland and Ostrobothnia experienced the heaviest rains, the paper says, and at least in Vantaa the waters flooded the roads and congested cars for hundreds of meters nearby to the Vantaa Ikea location.
Ilta-Sanomat also reported falling trees, passenger plane reroutings, leaking roofs and even hail as phenomena connected with the storm front that passed over Finland yesterday.
Plane victims in Ukraine; bloodiest day in Gaza
Meanwhile top daily Helsingin Sanomat reports on the treatment of the dead in the Malaysian Airlines plane crash in the middle of separatist-controlled Ukraine. The daily shows a photograph of both armed and unarmed guards and OSCE monitors wearing medical masks or holding their noses outside the corpse transportation train in the town of Torez.
196 victims have been placed in body bags and in four refrigerated compartments, according to HS. Local train workers say that the temperature in the cold cars can stay between 0 degrees Celsius or lower when the doors are closed. But the smell was overbearing where the sun shone on the train, the paper reported.
Other international news also features in the biggest dailies, with Israel’s strikes yesterday killing more than a hundred people in what Ilta-Sanomat and others called the worst day of the most recent conflict. Israel began a full-scale ground offensive on Gaza almost two weeks ago.
Helsingin Sanomat reports that in that time at least 425–500 people have been killed, mostly civilians. The paper reports that Israel’s army announced it would hire more soldiers in the fight against the ‘Gaza terrorists’, referring to Hamas fighters, and that US Secretary of State John Kerry said in a CNN interview that the USA ‘supports Israel’s right to defend itself’. US president Barack Obama, on the other hand, called for the immediate cessation of hostilities in the area.
Youth concerns and bird trouble
In other domestic news, Turun Sanomat reports that the number of Turku youths taken into clinics for extended cannabis use has doubled in recent years. The average waiting period for getting into a youth outpatient department is a month and a half, with many having to wait even longer. Some of the youngest problem cases are just 12 years old.
“When we notice a cannabis problem in a student, there is almost nothing we can do,” principal Jyrki Latva from the Mikael school said in the Turku paper. “Society should intervene at a much earlier stage.”
Tampere-based daily Aamulehti reports on a different youth story, as do several other newspapers (including Iltalehti here). A house party in Lahti turned nasty during the night, as the resident of the apartment in question discovered in the morning that his car had been used without permission and damaged, causing damage to a parked motorcycle. Aamulehti says that a 25-year-old man has been taken into custody by the police for a string of offenses including causing damages to the vehicles and stealing two mobile phones from partygoers.
Aamulehti goes on to report on a rise in kill permits for jackdaws as the bird population grows nationwide. The species is protected, but is also known for the damage it can cause to bales of hay, fields of wheat and other planted foodstuffs.
“The permits are only issued if no other alternative can be found in dealing with the harmful birds,” Tapio Aalto from the Finland Proper Ely-centre said in Aamulehti’s interview.