Daylight Robbery! Sky high data roaming charges… There are few things that unite travellers from just about every country these days. I could go on but by now my editor is getting twitchy as I vent my spleen at the cost of using smartphone, dongles and blackberrys outside our home market.

The explosion of devices offering mobile browsing has been nothing short of a phenomenon – our very own information revolution. All these machines rely on the heavy use of data. This is all well and good when at home where calling plans usually have generous data allowances, but it suddenly becomes horrendously expensive when roaming and we start paying through the nose for every megabit transferred.

When mobile devices and social networks are combined, they have the power to change to world, writes Giuseppe Lugano.

On 3 April 1973, Motorola executive Martin Cooper made the world’s first call on a mobile phone – to his rival Joel Engel of Bell Labs. That mobile phone weighed more than one kilo and had no other features than the call function. Since then, mobile phones have become lighter, fancier, cheaper and much more powerful. The turn of the millennium opened the era of the smartphone, a portable multimedia computer that can act – at our convenience – as a digital camera, camcorder, music player, audio recorder or navigation system.

Who would have thought that capitalism would turn out to be humankind’s greatest agent of global peace?

The bad news is that governments of the G7 countries are now as indebted as they were at the end of the Second World War. The good news is that this has been achieved without war.

The global economic crisis has evoked a multitude of strong emotions. Gratefulness is unlikely to be among them. Yet, grateful we should be. Why? Global capitalism has replaced war as the agent of global and regional transformation. The present economic crisis is a manifestation of a relatively recent trend where market forces, not armed forces, reshape the world. This may be bad news for state finances but it is very good news for the humankind.

It is always good to go and see for yourself. Better to get a first hand impression than constantly listening to what others tell you is taking place. So I jumped at the chance to visit Athens and get a feel for how the Greek capital is weathering its economic storms.

Athens in the summer is a hot, steamy city and usually abandoned by those who live there, anxious to enjoy the islands. But this year there is little chatter of “getting away” and a lot of talk about “getting down to it.” The August arrival of the representatives from the EU, ECB and IMF, nicknamed the Troika, ensured anyone important in government was firmly at their desk ready to open the books.

“Not only was I welcomed as a Palestinian, but I was treated as a human being with dignity” is how 23-year-old Nasser Barakat from Gaza City describes his holiday to Malaysia when comparing it to the imposed blockades and deprivation in Gaza.

MY NAME is Nasser Barakat. I’m 23 years old and from Gaza City. I work as an emergency water, sanitation and hygiene advocacy taskforce officer with the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef). My work involves helping Gazans with the enormous difficulties they are facing in accessing safe and clean drinking water, and the sanitation problems which plague Gaza. This is due to the Israeli siege on the coastal territory which prevents the import of most reconstruction material, critical spare parts and sufficient quantities of fuel.

When we take our own culture as the norm, it is impossible to understand representatives of other cultures on their own terms, writes Sanni Saarinen.

France recently passed a law banning the use of the Islamic full-face veil in public. Similar laws are being debated in many other European countries.

Eero Huovinen, the bishop of Helsinki at the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Finland, said Monday that the church might have to consider relinquishing its power of legal solemnisation if Parliament passed a same-sex marriage bill into law.

Huovinen was commenting on a proposal by Bjarne Kallis, a Christian Democrat MP.
Huovinen added that in the Evangelical-Lutheran Church marriage was an institution between a man and a woman.

STT

Far-reaching regulations are necessary for introducing transparency to the operations of investment banks and funds. But despite this, no regulations have been drawn up, writes Julio Godoy.

More than three years after the start of the financial crisis that brought the world economy to the brink of collapse, the governments of industrialised countries are still struggling to reach a consensus on the minimum regulation required for the operations of international banks and hedge funds.

For those that came in late, the Finnish parliament passed a new Universities Act during 2009 that took effect from the start of this year. The year 2010 is therefore a very important one in the history of Finnish universities.

University staff have ceased to be civil servants, and the threat of this change almost resulted in strike action 2009; decision- making is now taken by rectors who have been appointed by a board, rather than having been elected by their peers; universities now control their own budgets and need to attract external funding; and universities will ‘own’ their buildings in a different way, rather than ‘renting’ space through a centralised government body.

As a result of the financial crisis and the Greek bailout, the eurozone’s future hangs in the balance, writes Juuso Salokoski.

IN February 2008, I gave a presentation to the Helsinki International Rotary Club about the emerging global financial crisis. At that time I was quite alarmed by the financial tsunami that I felt was coming and I was predicting a 1,000 billion dollar (US) loss for the world financial system. As a banker, I was horrified about what would happen after these losses.