Helsingin Sanomat has a report on criminality among candidates in local elections this month. The newspaper scoured candidate lists and forensic data to find all candidates who have been convicted of a felony in the past five years.

The good news is that fewer candidates have convictions than in the last municipal elections in 2017.

The bad news is that there are still plenty of candidates with criminal records, with an average percentage of candidates convicted of 3.7% among the major parties.

With more than 30,000 candidates running, that’s a good chunk of budding politicians, but that’s a reduction from 2017, when the figure was four percent.

The Finnish party leads the way, with 8.2% of candidates convicted over the past five years. That’s down from the nine percent of applicants who were convicted in 2017, but still includes 101 assaults, 144 cases of drunk driving or aggravated drunk driving, 23 cases of threats and one case of forgery, among 489 convictions in the HS dataset. .

You can explore this dataset on the HS website.

The participation rate among voters of foreign origin is generally much lower than that of the general population. On the All Points North podcast, we asked why. You can listen to the full podcast using the built-in player here or via Yle Areena, Spotify, Apple podcasts or your usual podcast player using the RSS feed.

The article continues after the audio.

Football forever

The Finnish sporting event of the summer is the European Men’s Football Championship, where the team advanced to the finals for the first time. Tuesday evening coach Markku Kanerva announced the team that will play in the tournament in a relatively lavish ceremony (for Finland) with team announcement video posted on social media.

Some surprising names have been omitted.

Ilta-Sanomat mentionned Juhani ojala like the omission of the big name, with the center rear left at home with the full-backs Albin Granlund and Niko Hämäläinen.

Coach Kanerva said it “broke his heart” to tell the players who were not going to make the final squad.

Finland’s tournament kicks off in Copenhagen on Saturday June 12, with a match against Denmark. They then play Russia and Belgium in St. Petersburg.

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Hot weekend ahead

Iltalehti offers some optimistic reports of a weekend where the temperature could climb to 25 degrees, bringing warmer conditions to the many graduation parties scheduled for Saturday and Sunday.

It’s not exactly a heat wave, says the meteorologist interviewed by IL, but there will be several days where some places could be hotter than 25 degrees.

Inland areas south of Oulu are expected to benefit from the best weather conditions, but it is expected to be over 20 degrees during the day for most of the country.

However, there is a risk of heavy localized showers in the afternoon.