The police in the eastern Finnish town of Varkaus said Friday that a local girl aged 12 had confessed to kidnapping a baby and burying the three-month infant in a snowdrift earlier this week.

The police had said earlier on Friday that the main suspect was a 15-year-old.

The police quoted the 12-year-old as saying during questioning that she had snatched the baby on a whim.

The baby survived three hours buried in the snow.

STT

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia on Friday cut its 2009 handset market share estimate by four points to 34 per cent.

"Beginning in 2010, Nokia is revising its definition of the industry mobile device market that it uses to estimate industry volumes," Nokia said in a statement.

"This is due to improved measurement processes and tools that enable Nokia to have better visibility to estimate the number of mobile devices sold by certain new entrants in the global mobile device market."

"These include vendors of legitimate, as well as unlicensed and counterfeit, products with manufacturing facilities primarily centred around certain locations in Asia and other emerging markets."

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Two Finnish Centre party MPs said Friday they backed direct government funding of the country's public broadcaster.
Tuomo Puumala, a deputy leader of the Centre party, said in a statement that a lump-sum tax had been the wrong way to go in the first place.

"In that case Nalle Wahlroos as well as somebody living on a basic pension would have paid the same amount," Mr Puumala said, citing the managing director of Sampo Bank.

Two Finnish lawyers said in a report Friday that the country's head of state or prime minister could issue a statement labelling postwar trials of Finnish leaders as a breach of the rule of law.

The 1946 trials, which most Finns prefer to call "war responsibility trials" instead of the less palatable heading used by the allies, saw Risto Ryti, president in 1940-4, six wartime cabinet members and an ambassador jailed for waging war against the Soviet Union in 1941-4, a conflict known as the Continuation war in Finland.

Finland's trade deficit fell to about 55 million euros in January from some 95 million in the year-ago period, the National Bureau of Customs said in a statement Friday.

Exports fell by about four per cent year-on-year with imports dropping by about five per cent from the year-ago period.

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The police in the eastern Finnish city of Varkaus announced Friday that they suspected a local girl, 15, of kidnapping a baby from a pram and burying the three-month infant in a snowdrift.

The police added that child protection officers had taken the suspect into custody.

The suspected kidnapping took place on Monday, with the baby surviving hours buried in the snow.

Earlier this week, the police upgraded the investigation into an attempted murder inquiry.

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Matti Vanhanen (centre), Finland's prime minister, said Thursday that leaders of the ruling parties had settled a row over the decision-making process pertaining to crisis mangement troop deployment.

Mr Vanhanen said the secretariat of the constitutional committee had found a solution that satisfied all ruling party leaders.

But he refused to disclose any details about the agreement.

Finnish regional daily Aamulehti on Friday quoted a Taloustutkimus poll as indicating that about 47 per cent of the public felt that Parliament should reject the permit applications of all three utilities planning building nuclear power stations in Finland, with some 38 per cent of the respondents backing extra nuclear generating capacity.

Aamulehti said 22 per cent of the respondents would like to see a single permit, 11 per cent two and six per cent three permits.

Commissioned by the paper, market research company Taloustutkimus interviewed 1,000 people in early March. The margin of error was stated as three percentage points either way.

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Finland's Supreme Administrative Court on Friday began proceedings over what is commonly known as the Tiitinen list, which allegedly contains the names of Finnish informants used by the Stasi, East Germany's state security ministry.

The court is to rule whether the Finnish Security Police (Supo) is to hand a copy of the list to a reporter who requested one.

In 2008, the Helsinki administrative court ordered Supo to disclose the list, with Supo appealing the ruling.

Supo has warned that making the list public would undermine national security, hurt relations with foreign intelligence organs and violate privacy.

Swedish-language daily Hufvudstadsbladet reported in its Friday issue that one of the names on the list was Riitta Juntunen, a spokeswoman at the Central Organisation of Trade Unions.

The Supreme Administrative Court ruled in 2003 that Supo did not have to disclose the list.

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Finnish daily Hufvudstadsbladet reported Friday that Riitta Juntunen, a spokeswoman at the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK), had handed 940 pages of reports to the Stasi, East Germany's notorious state security ministry, between 1979 and 1985.

The paper added that Ms Juntunen, known by the codename Kati in the Stasi's files, had been paid 70,000 West German marks for her services.

November last year, Hufvudstadsbladet quoted Petra Sauerzapf-Poser, Ms Juntunen's colleague at the German Democratic Republic's interpretation and translation bureau in Berlin, as saying that Ms Juntunen had denounced her to the Stasi.

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