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January 9, 2002

 
 
Sveiki, all!

Just as we thought our mail ills were over, the web interface to our new mail server took ill last night... still trying!

It was a busy day in the news, both in Latvia and regionally, in a week that saw the resignation of the Estonian cabinet and a fresh salvo from Putin seeking to derail NATO membership for the Baltics (hot on the heals on the OSCE closing shop because it didn't seem to be finding a whole lot of violation of the rights of ethnic Russians).

In brief:

  • Germans shocked by dreary school test results; 25th out of 32, we noted this story in excerpt form because it mentions that as badly as the Germans did, they still finished ahead of the Latvians
  • Bush lifts speed limits on computer exports; more noteably, Bush adds Latvia in particular to the list of U.S. allies facing no restrictions
  • Group Says 37 Journalists Killed Worldwide in 2001; group includes Gundars Matiss, killed in Latvia; Matiss was killed last November after being attacked in his apartment building in Liepaja. Matiss' specialty was investigating organized crime. (There's no background in the story on Matiss' death.)
  • Tajikistan Gets 74 Million Dollars in Foreign Aid; Germany, the U.S., and *surprise* Latvia are Tajikistan's biggest supporters. A good information link we found on Tajikistan follows:
    http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/tajik.html
    While Tajikistan is still a mess, it has developed a strong trading partnership with Latvia (over 70 million USD annual turnover)
  • Latvian Bobsledder Out of Olympics; the illustrious career of Sandis Prusis may be at an end; Prusis has denied the drug findings
  • Higher food prices boost Latvian December inflation; consumer prices soared more than 3% in December, bringing annual inflation to 2.5%

    and, regionally,
  • PUTIN USES RUSSIANS IN BALTIC STATES TO CHECK NATO EXPANSION; suggests Macedonia as a model (not mentioning that Macedonia was desperate to retain Russian talent essential to rebuilding its economy); insists on Russian being made an official language; Latvia, however, does not share Macedonia's desperation; story is (surprisingly, at least in terms of what we tend to see) critical and distrustful of Russia; article notes that Russia still insists Latvia "joined" the USSR willingly [and legally], "which was certainly not the case". So, Putin's true colors?
  • Cabinet of Estonia resigns; ITAR-TASS report makes the worst of it, of course, however, the facts and figures cited in the report pretty much summarize all the rest of bits and pieces of coverage in the Western press.

This week's link is to (U.S.) college student encounters with the Baltic region.

This week's picture is of a lesser seen part of Riga.

As always, AOL'ers out there are invited to join AOL Lat Chat Sundays, starting around 9:00 to 9:30 (we confess to watching X-Files and joinging at 10:00), running until 11:00 or so. AOL'ers can follow this link from their AOL browser: Town Square - Latvian chat. And thanks to you participating on the Latvian message board as well: LATVIA (both on AOL only).

Ar visu labu,

Silvija Peters

  Latvian Link

This week's link is to a site at the University of Washington:

    http://depts.washington.edu/baltic/

to the University of Washington Baltic Studies Program. Follow "Baltic Encounters" menu selection to student's stories and pictures of their Baltic encounters. The site was created by Marita Graube as part of her senior project.

  News


Germans shocked by dreary school test results
Reuters World Report Tuesday, January 01, 2002 9:04:00 PM
Copyright 2002 Reuters Ltd.
By Katya Andrusz

      BERLIN, Jan 2 (Reuters) — Germans, proud of philosophers and writers such as Nietzsche and Goethe, have long assumed their schools were among the best in the world.
      But they have been shocked out of their complacency by an international comparison of students in 32 countries by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which put German schools in 25th position.
      The land of the "Dichter und Denker" (poets and philosophers) was stunned to find its students were in the bottom third of the "PISA" test -- far behind top-scoring Finland and lagging Italy, the United States and Spain which the Germans had assumed to have inferior schools.
      "Are German students dumb?" asked the influential weekly magazine Der Spiegel in a cover story that catalogued many of the weaknesses in the country's schools.
      "The public is up in arms about how dumb out students turned out to be," wrote Berlin's Tageszeitung newspaper. "They can't read, they can't write and forget about mathematics. German students are near the top of the list for incompetence."
      The first-ever global survey of the key skills of teenagers involved students around the world and included 265,000 15-year-old German students. They were tested in the summer of 2000 in reading comprehension, mathematics and science and the results were released last month.
      To add insult to injury, the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test also showed that fewer Germans reached the top scores than in 12 of the 15 European Union states.
      Stunned by the poor performance, politicians and education experts have called for far-reaching reforms of the country's schools.
      The test found that only nine percent of German pupils were able to understand the complex texts they read, putting them on a level with Austria and Switzerland but a long way behind Britain, with 16 percent or the United States with 12 percent.
      But the real nightmare for German educators was at the other end of the scale -- 10 percent of the pupils tested were unable to process even the most simple of texts, and another 13 percent just reached the lowest level.
      This puts Germany ahead of only four other countries in the reading comprehension part of the study, two of which (Latvia and Brazil) are not even members of the OECD.
      ...[excerpted]

Bush lifts speeds limits on computer exports
Reuters Financial Report Wednesday, January 02, 2002 7:40:00 PM
Copyright 2002 Reuters Ltd.
By Andy Sullivan

      WASHINGTON, Jan 2 (Reuters) — President George W. Bush on Wednesday allowed U.S. technology firms to sell high-speed computers to Russia, China, India and countries in the Middle East, easing a Cold War-era ban designed to halt the spread of nuclear arms.
      Computer manufacturers may now export computers capable of complex three-dimensional modeling, calculating fluid dynamics, and other advanced applications to Pakistan, Vietnam and other so-called "Tier 3" countries without specific permission from the government.
      The Bush Administration more than doubled the processor speed limit, from 85,000 Millions of Theoretical Operations Per Second, or MTOPS, to 195,000 MTOPS.
      A typical U.S. home computer now sold in retail stores is capable of roughly 2,100 MTOPS. The limits on computing power come into play on more powerful workstations and so-called server computers used to manage organizations.
      The restrictions were put in place in 1979 as part of a broader effort to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. Giving countries such as India and Pakistan advanced computing power would allow them to develop missiles and other weapons more easily, the reasoning went.
      Exports to U.S. allies such as Canada, Mexico and all of Western Europe do not face such restrictions. On Wednesday, Bush added the Baltic nation of Latvia to that list.
      The U.S. will maintain its embargo on technology exports to North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Sudan and Syria.
      Computer manufacturers have opposed the limits, pointing out that, while the United States has restricted exports other countries have not, allowing Tier 3 countries, which include many Eastern European nations, to get their hands on fast computers, while placing U.S. manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage.
      High-tech companies welcomed the move.
      "We are pleased and we think it represents good progress," said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel Corp. "It'll provide some headroom for export control for us over the next couple of years."
      Bob Cohen, a vice president at the Information Technology Association of America, an industry group, said it would provide a much-needed sales boost.
      "It's certainly a step in the right direction," Cohen said. "It's going to help our industry climb out of some of the doldrums we've been in the past year."
      In recent years, the government had moved to ease export restrictions. The Clinton Administration boosted the MTOPS limit to 85,000 from 28,000 last January and the Senate passed a bill on Sept. 6 that effectively removed MTOPS limits.
      But efforts in the House of Representatives stalled as the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks renewed national-security concerns. In November, the House of Representives voted to extend the existing regime until next April.
      Intel, as the world's largest chipmaker and manufacturer of microprocessors, stands to benefit from the move. With the increase, computer systems that use many Intel processors strung together to make more powerful computers can be exported, translating into more potential sales for Intel.
      Mulloy said Intel would continue to press the government to abandon the MTOPS standard and measure high-tech exports another way.
      "We continue to believe that, for the longer term, the best methodology is not one based on performance, but on a market- based formula," Mulloy said.
      The calculation of MTOPS involves counting the number of operations that could be performed by the computer during a second, based on a specified formula. The actual number of operations varies based on factors such as the chip's cycle speed.

Group Says 37 Journalists Killed Worldwide in 2001
Reuters Online Service Thursday, January 03, 2002 6:39:00 PM
Copyright 2002 Reuters Ltd.

      NEW YORK (Reuters) — The number of journalists killed in the line of duty rose sharply last year to 37, with eight killed in the war in Afghanistan alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Thursday.
      In 2000, 24 journalists were killed while on the job, said the CPJ, a New York-based nonpartisan group which is dedicated to the defense of free press.
      "Journalists covering the war in Afghanistan showed extraordinary courage, but we should also remember that journalists around the world who uncovered corrupt, illegal acts, and graft at high levels of power were murdered with
      impunity," said CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper.
      At least 25 of the 37 journalists killed in 2001 were murdered. In addition to Afghanistan, journalists were killed in Colombia, the Philippines, China, the United States, and 17 other countries, CPJ said.
      The highest death toll for journalists in a single country during one year occurred in 1995, according to CPJ's records, when 24 journalists were killed in Algeria.
      In addition to the eight journalists killed in the war in Afghanistan in 2001, Marc Brunereau, a free-lance reporter, died last year of wounds suffered in Afghanistan in 1999.
      The eight journalists killed in Afghanistan last year were Pierre Billaud of Radio Television Luxembourg; free-lance reporter Volker Handloik; Johanne Sutton of Radio France Internationale, Harry Burton and Azizullah Haidari of Reuters; Maria Grazia Cutuli of Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera; Julio Fuentes of Spain's El Mundo newspaper; and Ulf Stromberg of Swedish channel TV4.
      Burton, Haidari, Cutuli, and Fuentes were ambushed by gunmen while traveling in a convoy from Kabul while they were covering the U.S. campaign to hunt down Osama bin Laden and destroy the al Qaeda network and the Taliban.
      The U.S. blames bin Laden for the Sept. 11 attacks.
      While covering the attack in New York, where two hijacked airplanes were crashed into the twin towers, freelance photographer William Biggart was killed when he rushed to the towers with his camera, CPJ said.
      The other journalist killed in the United States last year was Robert Stevens. A photo editor for The Sun, Stevens died of anthrax inhalation after an envelope containing the agent was mailed to the tabloid newspaper in Florida.
      Elsewhere, Fadila Nejma and Adel Zerrouk were killed in June while covering anti-government protests in Algeria.
      Feng Zhaoxia, who covered criminal gangs, was found with his throat slit in China, CPJ said.
      In Latin America and the Caribbean, Juan Carlos Encinas was killed in Bolivia; Flavio Bedoya, Jose Duviel Vasquez Arias, and Jorge Enrique Urbano Sanchez were killed in Colombia; Parmenio Medina Perez was shot and killed in Costa Rica and Jose Luis Ortega Mata was shot twice in the head while reporting in Mexico; Salvador Medina Velazquez was shot in an ambush in Paraguay; Brignol Lindor was hacked to death by a machete-wielding mob in Haiti; and Jorge Mynor Alegria Armendariz was shot outside his home in Guatemala.
      Other journalists killed throughout the world last year included Nahar Ali in Bangladesh, Georgy Sanaya in Georgia, Moolchand Yadav in India, Gundars Matiss in Latvia, Muhammad al-Bishawi in the Palestinian Territories, Roland Ureta and Candelario Cayona in the Philippines, Eduard Markevich in Russia, Withayut Sangsopit and Kaset Puengpak in Thailand, Igor Aleksandrov in the Ukraine, Martin O'Hagan in the United Kingdom, and Kerem Lawton and Milan Pantic in Yugoslavia.

Tajikistan Gets 74 Million Dollars in Foreign Aid
AP WorldSources Online Friday, January 04, 2002 4:42:00 PM
Copyright 2002 The Associated Press
Copyright 2002 XINHUA

      MOSCOW, January 4 (Xinhua) — Tajikistan received humanitarian aid worth 74 million U.S. dollars from some 40 countries during January-November last year, Tass cited the Tajik Statistics Committee as saying Friday.
      The committee officials said that the volume of goods, received by the republic in the period, totaled nearly 200,000 tons.
      Suffering two-year heavy drought, the country got a lot of humanitarian food aid, mainly flour and wheat weighing 161,400 tons.
      Building materials and petro-products were dispatched to those areas, stricken by natural calamities--mud and stone streams as well as earthquakes, said the committee.
      Germany, the United States and Latvia rendered the greatest humanitarian aid to Tajikistan. They offered 70 percent of the total value of foodstuffs and industrial goods received by the republic.

Latvian Bobsledder Out of Olympics
AP Online Tuesday, January 08, 2002 9:54:00 AM
Copyright 2002 The Associated Press
By J. MICHAEL LYONS
Associated Press Writer

      RIGA, Latvia (AP)Latvia's Sandis Prusis, one of the world's top four-man bobsled pilots, will miss the Winter Olympics after testing positive for steroids.
      Prusis tested positive for nandrolone Dec. 9 after a training run at the Olympic track in Park City, Utah, International Bobsled Federation general secretary Ermanno Gardella said Monday. A subsequent test confirmed the results.
      The federation suspended Prusis for the next three World Cup competitions, including the Olympics, which start Feb. 8 in Salt Lake City.
      Prusis, reached by telephone in his hometown of Ventspils, denied the accusations. He said he has not been notified about the federation's decision but would appeal.
      "It's a huge shock for me; I'm not positive," Prusis told The Associated Press. "This could be the end of my career in bobsledding."
      Prusis steered Latvia to fourth place in the world championships last year and also is a coach on the national squad. Many had hoped he would lead Latvia to its first Olympic bobsled medal since the country broke from the Soviet Union in 1991. Prusis said next month's Olympics most likely would have been his last.
      In November, former Olympic hurdler turned bobsledder Ludmila Enqvist of Sweden confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs. Jeff Laynes of the United States was suspended for two years after testing positive for the banned steroid stanozolol in December.

Higher food prices boost Latvian December inflation
Reuters World Report Wednesday, January 09, 2002 7:52:00 AM
Copyright 2002 Reuters Ltd.

      RIGA, Jan 9 (Reuters) — Latvian consumer prices rose a higher-than-expected annual 3.2 percent in December, bringing average inflation last year to 2.5 percent after 2.6 percent in 2000, the statistics office said on Wednesday.
      Statistics office chief Aija Zigure said average inflation in 2002 was expected to be similar to 2001, with the year-on-year rate at the end of December this year likely to come in at around three percent.
      "But it is indeed difficult to give forecasts as information about administratively regulated prices is really scant," she told a news conference.
      The consumer price index rose by 0.4 percent last month compared with November, when the index had gained 0.2 percent for a 3.1 percent year-on-year increase. In December 2000, the CPI rose 0.3 percent month-on-month and 1.8 percent year-on-year.
      Analysts questioned by Reuters had expected the December CPI to rise just 0.2 percent for a 2.9 percent annual gain.
      The rise in inflation last month chiefly reflected higher food, education and healthcare prices.
      Food prices gained 2.1 percent month-on-month for a 7.8 percent year-on-year increase, as restrictions on imports of meat and meat products due to livestock diseases in Europe and tougher measures against contraband meat continued to bite.
      However, there was a seasonal decline in clothing and footwear prices due to holiday discounts and communication prices fell, mainly for mobile phone services.
      Goods prices rose by an average 2.7 percent last year while prices of services increased by 2.0 percent.
      The statistics office said prices of services rose an annual 1.6 percent in December, while prices of goods rose 3.7 percent year-on-year.

PUTIN USES RUSSIANS IN BALTIC STATES TO CHECK NATO EXPANSION
COMTEX Newswire Monday, January 07, 2002 2:40:00 PM
WASHINGTON, Jan 07, 2002 (United Press International via COMTEX)

      RUSSIAEuropean diplomats and NATO officials have furrowed brows these days as they mull over a disturbing Christmas gift delivered by President Vladimir Putin, a gift very different from the one he gave when he lined up with Washington in the war on terrorism.
      On Dec. 24, Putin conducted a carefully staged phone-in.
      The questions asked and who asked them were fully arranged in advance, and no spontaneous participation was allowed. Putin used the occasion to renew Moscow's threats to the three Baltic republics -- Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. His goal is to check their admission to NATO.
      These countries were conquered by the Russians in 1940 and only freed of Moscow's yoke with the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago. The Russians continue to insist that these states wanted to join the Soviet Union, which is certainly not the case.
      Moscow also exploits the presence of large numbers of Russians who chose to remain in these Westernized states rather than return to more backward Russia. But Moscow complains that they are a mistreated minority.
      Putin announced he intended to take a much more vigorous stance on protecting the interests of Russian-speakers and called for a fight for official status for language. These remarks referred mostly to the Commonwealth of Independent States, set up when the Soviet Union imploded to maintain ties between Russia and Soviet republics that are now independent. But he also made a particular reference to the Baltic States, which are not CIS members.
      Replying to a caller from Riga, Latvia, Putin drew a parallel between the Baltics and the Balkans.
      A decision was made in Macedonia, he said, under pressure from the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe giving the Albanian population of Macedonia the right to representation in the state, including the security bodies, proportionate to their numbers in the overall Macedonian population. There was every reason, Putin said, to extend this principle to Russians in other countries, including those in the Baltics.
      "They have the right to demand that this principle should apply to them too," Putin said.
      The big difference between Latvia and its sister republics and Macedonia is that the Russians in the former have stayed on because they know they are better off than they would be in the motherland. In Macedonia, Albanians have been striving to improve their disadvantaged position.
      Putin, however, can use the ethnic issue to effect in the run-up to the NATO summit in Prague, Czech Republic, next November. There are already Western European governments that say they are worried about bringing such an issue into the alliance and stirring up the Russians who they want to draw closer to NATO.
      They take this position although the Baltics have shown a democratic respect for language and ethnic rights such that last month the OSCE ended its monitoring missions in Latvia and Estonia. Lithuania had earlier received OSCE approval.
      Moscow reacted with anger to the OSCE action in keeping with its policy of seeking to promote divisions that can weaken their states.
      Putin's "Christmas present" struck a sour note scarcely in harmony with the optimistic chorus of Western voices that see him as seeking to make Russia a part of the West.
      It was the same note sounded some years ago by Moscow's diplomats, when Yeltsin was in the Kremlin. With arrogant confidence, they told their Baltic hosts that they, the Russians, would be back.

Cabinet of Estonia resigns
COMTEX Newswire Tuesday, January 08, 2002 12:25:00 PM
By Albert Maloveryan
(c) 2002 ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved.

      TALLINN, Jan 08, 2002 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX)Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar made a resignation statement at a Tuesday session of the Cabinet. His move implies the resignation of the entire Cabinet.
      The power crisis in Estonia started in early December after a member of the ruling coalition, the Reform Party, had made an alliance with the opposition Center Party in the Tallinn city assembly. As a result, leader of the Center Party Edgar Savisaar gained the influential post of Tallinn Mayor.
      The move of the Reform Party results from old differences in the ruling coalition. This confession has been recently made by Laar, who says the actions of the Reform Party are "an unpleasant surprise" for him.
      The conduct of the Reform Party, which represents the interests of Estonian bankers, accelerated the fall of the government whose popularity rating was critically low in the past months of 2001.
      The coalition government of Laar was formed in March 1999. The parliament majority (54 votes of 101) made "the bulldozer tactics" possible, and the government could gain support to any projects it favored. The projects included the extremely unpopular ideas of selling two largest power plants and the Estonian railroad to foreign investors. Both projects are curbed now.
      Estonia had to quit the railroad deal because of the criminal record of the buyers, who had been chosen by the government. One of the potential investors is wanted by Interpol and the United States for dodging the resolution of an American court. The Tallinn police had to institute criminal proceedings against the other buyer.
      The office of Laar's Cabinet resulted in a sharp deterioration of the position of the poor, especially pensioners who found themselves on the brink of hunger death. Prices on medicines and food, communication services and transport fares increased a lot. The inflation made 5.75 percent in 2001, a 1.75 percent year-to-year rise.
      Scandals, which personally involved Mart Laar, also affected the Cabinet rating. Thus, upon the premier's return from vacation the government decided to return the building of the Russian Drama Theatre in downtown Tallinn to a pre-war student corporation. Last November Laar made a private trip to the British Isles and his expenses were covered by the Conservatives.
      Therefore participation of the premier's party in power institutions as such was called into question.

  Picture Album

Peters shares his father's predilection for magnificent ruins. These houses perhaps, are not quite magnificent nor quite ruined yet, still, their predominant earth tones strike a Latvian chord. This picture is from last July, wandering around town up-river from (south of) the dirigible hanger market.

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