In a quiet moment recently (and don't ask me why, but it was while I was waiting for an installation to finish!) I checked what would happen if I typed "Alexander Stubb" into Google.

Not surprisingly this active MEP's own site came first and it was followed by a wikipedia entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Stubb

which contained one glaring mistake ...

When talking about Alexander Stubb's languages (which are many and good) it said that he "spoke Swedish, English and German in addition to French and his native Finnish".

WRONG, completely wrong !

Alexander Stubb is a member of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority and therefore his native language is Swedish.

Naturally he also speaks Finnish because he comes from the part of Finland where Finnish is the dominant language, but his native language is Swedish and he almost certainly (not mentioned in this article which started at graduating from an American college) went to schools in Finland where the teaching is done in Swedish (and where Finnish is the first "foreign" language).

Of course this makes me wonder who wrote the article. They seem to have found a good source of information because the article is detailed enough but the article can't have been written by a Finn because even the many Finnish-speaking people who voted for him in the MEP elections were all well aware that he came from the Swedish-speaking minority (and it didn't bother them).

If you now go to the site you will hopefully (unless this has been "corrected" back) see an accurate text as far as languages go, because naturally I corrected it (along with a few minor typing errors).

P.S. It's nice to be right on occasion. One of the references after the article itself is to Alexander Stubb's abridged c.v (on his own web site). In it you will find something that was considered unimportant to the (US American?) writer of the main text in that he/she while including Mr Stubb's matriculation from an American high school (in 1986) didn't bother to mention that he two years later matriculated from a school in Finland. That school according to Mr Stubb himself was "Gymnasiet Lärkan, Helsinki, Finland" Readers with Swedish will know that "Gymnasiet" is the Swedish word (including a "the") equivalent to the German "Gymnasium" (the Finnish word is "lukio") , and that Lärken (also Swedish - for "the lark") is a well-known Swedish school in Helsinki.