Latvia’s former President and the country’s candidate for European Union’s first President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, said that the appointment is being conducted with Soviet-style secrecy and contempt for the public, the Daily Telegraph reports.
71-year-old Vike-Freiberga attacked the EU for operating in “darkness and behind closed doors”.
“The European Union should stop working like the former Soviet Union,” she said.
She is the only person to have openly declared herself as in the running to become EU President, a …

Latvia and Finland are theoretically prepared to support Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves for the President of the European Union, Estonian media reports.
Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis said that Ilves is an honourable candidate for the unelected EU presidency.
Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said today that Finland is ready to support Ilves as the EU President.

Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan says that Foreign Secretary David Miliband should apologise to the people of Poland and Latvia, after trying to brand the Latvian and Polish members of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) antisemites.
Hannan writes in his blog that in pursuit of his campaign to be the EU’s first foreign minister, Miliband seems quite happy to prejudice Britain’s bilateral relations with friendly countries.
“His increasingly unhinged allegations have been greeted with horror in …

The “meteorite” that fell in Latvia yesterday wasn’t a meteorite after all, but a publicity stunt by Scandinavian mobile phone company Tele2, newspaper Postimees reports.
“Our goal was to inspire the Latvian people,” Tele2’s marketing chief Janis Spogis said yesterday. “As we saw, thanks to this event Latvia was in world’s media, Latvia was interesting and not because of a crisis, tough times and so on, but because something creative and exciting happened here. It’s once …

A meteorite fell on Earth in Latvia’s Valmiera county near Estonian border, it punched a hole 50 feet wide and 16 feet deep.
The meteorite fell yesterday evening at 5:30pm local time (3:30 GMT) in a meadow next to a farm, Estonian Daily Newspaper reports. No one was injured.
“It wasn’t bigger than a football,” Latvian meteorite expert Uldis Nulle said.
Ansis Shteinbergs, who saw the meteorite fall, said that he first heard a noise that resembled a …

Sweden is bracing for a full-blown economic and political “breakdown” in Latvia, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Sweden’s finance minister Anders Borg had told banks secretly that Latvia’s political order was unravelling, advising them to prepare for the collapse of Latvia’s rescue talks.
Latvia has failed to deliver draconian spending cuts agreed to secure the next tranche of its €7.5bn (£6.85bn) bail-out from the EU, the International Monetary Fund, and Sweden, balking at 20pc cuts in pensions and …

Britain’s broadband networks are lagging behind most European neighbours including Bulgaria and Latvia in terms of quality, the Daily Mail reports.
A report by IT giant Cisco ranked the UK’s systems 31st out of 66 countries and found they were currently “meeting needs for today”. But they were well behind technologically-advanced Japan and South Korea, whose broadband systems are already rated “ready for tomorrow”.
Cisco, which looked at broadband speeds as well as penetration, said Britain’s facilities would …

The NHS are dramatically stepping up their recruitment of cheap east European doctors, Latvians say the NHS are “buying” doctors in bulk.
Medical supremos in Latvia complain that recruitment companies supplying the NHS – and driven by large commissions – “have simply gone mad” with offers to doctors, some speaking little or no English, to move to Britain for salaries up to five times what they earn at home, the Daily Mail reports.
“They are buying doctors …

The Mayor of Latvia’s capital Riga is fed up with unruly British tourists who head to the city for boozy holidays, damaging its reputation among other would-be visitors, AFP reports.
Mayor Nils Ushakovs said that he aimed to attract a wider range of visitors to the picturesque city as the Baltic state tries to battle a deepening recession.
“The only problem is that we have a large share of those British tourists,” Ushakovs said. ”If we also had …