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n September 1941, a medical officer performed a deed so heroic he was awarded an Iron Cross by the German high command. With little regard for his own safety, and in the face of heavy Soviet shelling, Major Leo Skurnik, a district doctor who had once fostered ambitions of becoming a concert pianist, organised the evacuation of a field hospital on the Finnish-Russian border, saving the lives of more than 600 men, including members of the SS. Skurnik was far from the only soldier to be awarded the Iron Cross during the Second World War. More than four million people...

Finnish YouTube user might not know how to speak many languages, but she sure sounds like she can. In a video uploaded on Monday 19-year-old Sara mimics what different dialects sound like to her. As she moves from language to language, she makes absolutely no sense yet sounds as if she speaks it fluently. For full disclosure, I wouldn't be able to fact-check most of the languages she speaks anyway. It's only when she gets to her American-English impression that her talent is confirmed. "Yeah, I mean, uh," she starts in her American accent, sounding as if she's a native...

SOCHI, Russia -- Teemu Selanne led his team around the ice, with a bronze medal draped around his neck, after he finished off his sixth Olympics with a sweet victory. If the Finnish Flash is retiring and hanging up his skates after the NHL season, he picked a pretty good way to go out on the world's stage. The final game at the Olympics turned out well for Finland's Teemu Selanne, who will go out on a high note, writes Pierre LeBrun. Story Selanne scored two goals and Tuukka Rask had a 27-save shutout, helping Finland rout the United States...

Jonathan Quick will leave Sochi empty handed, but not quietly. Humiliated after a 5-0 loss to Finland in the Olympic bronze-medal hockey game Saturday, the U.S. goaltender harshly criticized his team’s effort a day after losing to Canada in the semifinals. “It shouldn’t be too hard,” he told NBC. “We do that all year long. We’re professionals. We play back-to-backs all year long. “There’s no reason we show up and not piss a drop.” Quick also took responsibility for his own play. “My job is to stop the puck, and I didn’t do that very well,” the Los Angeles Kings...

It was over in a flash. A Finnish Flash. For Team USA, however, it was more like a flash finish. Team Finland scored two goals in 11 seconds early in the second period to snap a 0-0 tie en route to a 5-0 victory in the bronze medal game Saturday. Veteran Teemu Selanne, playing in his 35th Olympic hockey game, scored two goals including the game-winner to lead Finland. It was a wonderful conclusion to what has been a splendid Olympic hockey career for a classy gentleman. Selanne scored on a nifty backhand shot at 1:27 of the second period...

As many as 4,000 reindeer die in traffic accidents every year in Finland, the Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute says. Most incidents occur in the dark months of November and December, when roads are prone to becoming icy, the Helsingen Sanomat newspaper reports.

SOCHI, Russia -- The Russians dutifully shook the Finns' hands and then skated to the center of a rink built to showcase their return to hockey dominance. When they raised their sticks in a mournful salute, they got more whistles than cheers from their devastated fans. Alex Ovechkin, Pavel Datsyuk and their teammates had nursed dreams about this week for several years. They were all dashed in 60 frustrating minutes. Russia crashed out of the Olympics in the quarterfinals Wednesday with a 3-1 loss to Finland, extending a historic hockey nation's gold-medal drought past 22 years and putting an enormous...

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An Alaska senator said the State Department called his office today to say that they would be creating a post for a U.S. ambassador to the Arctic. Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) introduced the United States Ambassador at Large for Arctic Affairs Act a year ago, pressing Secretary of State John Kerry to make the appointment on economic and national security grounds. Six of the eight Arctic nations currently have ambassador-level diplomats representing their interests before the Arctic Council. The United States will assume the chairmanship of the Arctic Council in 2015. “It’s not always easy explaining to Washington bureaucrats how...

The U.S. plummeted 13 slots to 46th overall “amid increased efforts to track down whistle-blowers and the sources of leaks,” Reporters Without Borders warned in an annual report. The trial and conviction of Private Bradley Manning and the pursuit of NSA analyst Edward Snowden were warnings to all those thinking of assisting in the disclosure of sensitive information that would clearly be in the public interest,” the organization said.

Bride’s family protests dance by groom’s relatives during weddingA wedding in Saudi Arabia quickly snowballed into a scuffle between the families of the groom and his bride after relatives and friends of the groom infuriated their opponents by performing the famous ‘penguin dance’, a newspaper said on Sunday. Relatives and guests began to pour into the massive wedding hall in the eastern Saudi town of Dammam when a heated argument erupted before it led to a scuffle between the relatives of the groom and his bride. Friends and other guests intervened and managed to end the fight that threatened to...

Welfare spending in Britain has increased faster than almost any other country in Europe since 2000, new figures show. The cost of unemployment benefits, housing support and pensions as share of the economy has increased by more than a quarter over the past thirteen years – growing at a faster rate than in most of the developed world. Spending has gone up from 18.6 per cent of GDP to 23.7 per cent of GDP – an increase of 27 per cent, according to figures from the OECD, the club of most developed nations. By contrast, the average increase in welfare...

Artifacts included a battle axe, a knife, and a bronze buckle, all associated with burned human bones, initially thought to be dated to around 1000 - 1200 CE before analysis. Similar objects have been discovered in the Baltic Sea area and in Ladoga Karelia. Identical cape buckles have also been found in Gotland. But based on the University of Helsinki analysis, the cremation grave finds date to a time that is significantly earlier -- during the Viking Age between 775-980 CE, based on their application of AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) techniques... ...in the area between the towns of Loviisa and...

The Nordic Council has received recommendations from the expert panel to forbid antifeminist speech in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Norway). The “Expert panel” was full of radical feminists and profeminist men. In the report antifeminist speech and right-wing extremist hate speech towards immigrants are treated as a part of the same movement. Antifeminist Threats and Harassment must be made Illegal (We recommend that the Nordic governments ensure that threats and harassment on the basis of gender are made illegal. Hate speech online must be prosecuted similarly to hate speech in other public spheres.) Low threshold services...

EU countries have informally told the European Parliament they want the Union’s foreign service to open an embassy in Iran. Tarja Cronberg, a Finnish Green MEP who chairs the parliament’s Iran delegation, said member states’ ambassadors in Tehran backed the idea when she met them in the Iranian capital on an official trip earlier this month. […] The EU already has embassies in other pariah states, such as Belarus. But Iran and the EU remain wary of each other despite the Geneva breakthrough. …

Explanation: What's happening behind those houses? Pictured above are not aurora but nearby light pillars, a local phenomenon that can appear as a distant one. In most places on Earth, a lucky viewer can see a Sun-pillar, a column of light appearing to extend up from the Sun caused by flat fluttering ice-crystals reflecting sunlight from the upper atmosphere. Usually these ice crystals evaporate before reaching the ground. During freezing temperatures, however, flat fluttering ice crystals may form near the ground in a form of light snow, sometimes known as a crystal fog. These ice crystals may then reflect ground...

AFTER 40 years of hesitation and seven hard years of reform and lobbying, Turkey is basking today in the most qualified of invitations to begin the process of joining Europe - a continent whose eastern half the Ottoman empire controlled for centuries. A European Commission report released yesterday, which paves the way for a deciding vote by the 25-member European Union at its December summit, was heavily qualified, and Turkish leaders were muted in their expressions of delight at their initial success. Presenting the decision to the European parliament last night, commission president Romano Prodi said it was a "qualified...

My sustainment of my children comes through INTENSE INTIMACY not just lament and prayer for there is a difference between Mary at my feet and those that knew me from a distance . Do you see I AM your lap of Pure Joy and Breakthrough and it is in my presence that you receive your breakthrough. So see that you break through all distractions to me for they are a wall of resistance to all the blessings already laid at my feet for you to discern and receive. Luke 10:38-42 38 Now while they were on their way, it occurred...

A Finnish man was abducted in Senegal after travelling to the West African nation to meet a woman he met on a dating site. The man travelled to the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to meet who he thought would be a woman he met online; however, the trip turned into a nightmare when he was abducted and held for three weeks. A criminal gang in Senegal is suspected of conning a number of western men to travel to West Africa to meet local women they have met on the dating site. Senegalese police said that the Finnish man recently flew to...

Finland is boiling with rage this weekend over the $25 M bonus payment the CEO Stephen Elop is set to receive as he leaves Nokia NOK -1.35% after his two-year tenure. Questions are now being raised by the oddest aspect of the bonus: the board of Nokia seems to have given Elop a $ 25 M incentive to sell the handset unit cheaply to Microsoft MSFT -0.87% way back in in 2010. This effectively means that the board hired a man who was given a giant carrot to drive down Nokia’s overall valuation and phone volumes while preparing a sale...