Learn Finnish: Saimme uutisen ulkoministeriön kautta. - We received the news via the ministry for foreign affairs.

Kautta translates to "via," "through," or "by means of." Here, it expresses the abstract channel through which the news arrived. As with most postpositions, it requires the preceding noun, ulkoministeriö (ministry for foreign affairs), to be in the genitive case, resulting in ulkoministeriön kautta.

In English, "news" is usually an uncountable noun. How does Finnish treat uutinen here?

In Finnish, uutinen is a perfectly normal countable noun meaning a single news item, article, or report. Because it is singular here (uutisen), the sentence literally means we received one specific piece of news. If you meant the news in general or multiple reports, you would use the plural: uutiset.

Why is uutinen in the accusative case (uutisen) instead of the partitive case (uutista)?

This represents a complete, bounded action. The subject received a specific, whole piece of news, so the object takes the accusative case (which looks identical to the genitive case for this word). If the sentence used the partitive (Saimme uutista), it would imply an incomplete action or an unspecified mass of ongoing information.

What is the suffix -ö doing at the end of ulkoministeriö?