Questions of nationality, citizenship and identity are sometimes complicated issues. But when it comes to sports things start to really get messy. Just ask handball champion Maria Hyppönen.

MARIA HYPPÖNEN admits she is a little excited. Tomorrow she has an appointment at the police station to submit her application to become a Finnish citizen. Despite her unmistakably Finnish-sounding name, Hyppönen, 32, only has one Finnish grandparent. She was born in Ukraine, at the time a part of the Soviet Union, and after almost two decades in Finland she has no Finnish citizenship, and only an alien’s passport, which is given to Finnish residents who can’t get a passport from any other country.

Always looking for something different to burn in the kitchen, I was delighted to find some red deer (saksanhirvi) in the deli section of my local supermarket last week. Standing in line at the check-out, reduced to reading the small print on the package for entertainment, I was stunned to find that my fillet of Bambi had travelled all the way from New Zealand. I had assumed the deer was Finnish – after all, surely in a country moose and reindeer call home, some farmer would have looked into farming of other kinds of deer? Apparently not.

Immigration is rapidly changing the face of Finland’s cities, but it’s also transforming its countryside. For a “New Finn” fitting into the quaint rural lifestyle can be tricky but rewarding.

Beautiful scenery, carefree summers and proper, snowy winters, and a community that values you as an individual – these are the advantages of living in the Finnish countryside, according to Petri Rinne. Rinne is the Managing Director of Joutsenten Reitti, a development agency working with the rural municipalities of Sastamala, Huittinen, Punkalaidun and Hämeenkyrö, and he passionately believes in the power of immigration to transform the Finnish countryside.

While initially applauded for being more environmentally sound than its paper predecessor, the plastic bag now provides one of the biggest headaches for environmental groups.

A much-parodied scene in 1999’s Academy Award winning film American Beauty sees one of the main characters overwhelmed by the simple beauty of a plastic bag as it dances in the wind. But what of his reaction when the plastic bag is eventually washed down the drain and spat out to sea, wreaking havoc upon marine life? With baited breath we’ll have to wait for the sequel, American Beauty 2: Beauty Runs Ocean Deep.

Academic unemployment is rising and it’s increasingly difficult for many new graduates to find work suited for their degree. A generation of overeducated drifters wait tables and man check-out counters, stuck in job market limbo.

Anne Tarvainen is perhaps a fairly typical social sciences graduate, at least when it comes to working. Having spent ten years reading for a Master’s degree in communication, she is currently employed as a storage worker in a warehouse. For Tarvainen, working and studying concomitantly has been the norm.

In 2003, UK electro artist M.I.A. initiated an international tsunami whose waves of crossover global music are currently hitting Finnish dance floors. However, the roots of these rhythms lay deep in the society they emerged from and bear political meaning beyond mere entertainment value.

Whether it’s Eastern European Balkan beat, Brazilian baile funk or Tanzanian bongo flava, a refreshing wave of beats from beyond the usual bastions of club music is gaining momentum. It is world music armed with 808 drum machines and booming bass lines, fit for a block party from Manila to Mexico City. Although these styles are mainly known to Western audiences for their wild beats and crazy lyrics, most of them harbour a deeper social or political dimension.

Culture jamming activist duo Yes Men have been pulling off anti-corporate hoaxes and making the world of big money look ridiculous for ten years. They want to take the fight against heartless free-market rule off the screen and onto the streets.

In the newly Obama-fied America, the work of the multifaceted anti-globalisation movement is far from over. While the world economy tailspins, corporate excess shows no sign of abating, companies are rewarded for bad behaviour by the markets and governments stand idly by as greed and negligence ravage our planet and destroy the climate. Someone ought to teach the powers that be a lesson.

Can Finland utilise all the immigrant talent at its disposal? In many businesses the question is a matter of economic necessity, but in sports it’s also about national pride.

These attitudes towards black players had been common in Britain up until the 1990s. The stereotypes present in Noades’ diatribe were widespread, with the result that many teams harmed their own chances of winning by not hiring black players.

The Advertising Ethics Council gets hundreds of complaints a year about advertising, but only a few are deemed out of bounds.

The mobile phone ring tone advertisement promotes a puppet yelling “Silence. I kill you!” It derives from comedian Jeff Dunham’s popular act involving Achmed the Dead Terrorist. Is the ad funny? Insensitive and unethical? This is just one of the cases the Advertising Ethics Council had to deal with recently.

The largest Finnish student paper Ylioppilaslehti has a columnist who does not write in Finnish but has a lot to say. The column, named “Subulica” after its writer, aims to bring together Finnish and international students.

Irina Subulica, 23, defines herself as a “Romanian degree student who loves reading politics as much as she loves reading Harry Potter.”