MOSCOW (AP) — The Kremlin on Monday used what it said was a letter from a Latvian student who wants to be taught in his native Russian language -- and President Vladimir Putin's reply -- to criticize Latvia's plans to scrap state-funded high-school education in Russian.
      In his letter, Latvian student Yaroslav Karpelyak asked Putin to "help him receive an education in Russian," the Kremlin said. Putin's reply, posted on the Kremlin Web site, was the latest salvo in a dispute over Latvia's plans to switch the primary language of instruction in about 150 high schools from Russian to Latvian next year.
      "I understand your desire to study and learn about life in your native language. In many countries, children from large ethnic communities have this right," Putin wrote. "In modern Europe, this is an indicator of the level of democracy in a nation.
      Putin wrote that the letter showed "you are a person who does not tolerate injustice" and that "the most important thing is that you are not alone."
      "This gives rise to optimism that the Russian language, which has been heard in Latvia for centuries, will continue to be heard there," Putin wrote. "In my opinion, this will only enrich Latvian society and culture, as well as encourage business contacts and truly good-neighborly relations between our countries." [Conveniently leaving out mentioning the brutal program of Russian assimilation instituted by Tsar Alexander III, making it illegal to even speak Latvian on the street. Or that the Russian empire was an invader the first time, too! Our experience, and that of our relatives, has been just the opposite, that most young ethnic Russians have embraced Latvian, but often in the face of opposition by the older generations.]
      The phasing out of most Russian-language instruction is the latest effort to strengthen Latvian, which was supplanted by Russian during 50 years of Soviet rule that ended in 1991 in the small Baltic Sea coast nation.
      Some 15,000 people — mostly Russian students and their parents — rallied against the plan last week in the capital, Riga, in one of the largest demonstrations since Latvia regained independence in the Soviet collapse.
      About 35 percent of Latvia's 2.4 million residents are Russian speakers, mostly descendants of industrial workers and others sent to Latvia during the Soviet era. Some claim the staunchly pro-Western government is forcing them to abandon their heritage.
      In a statement in May, Russia's Foreign Ministry said Latvia's decision to eliminate instruction in Russian was part of a wider effort to "assimilate" ethnic Russians by force.

      DUBLIN, July 22 (Reuters) — A rise in the euro combined with weaker global markets has exposed a sharp decline in Irish competitiveness which threatens the country's once robust economy, a leading Irish economist said on Tuesday.
      Jim Power, chief economist at financial services group Friends First in Dublin, said Irish competitiveness had been eroding since 1999 but the fact had been "camouflaged" by currency weakness and a firm external environment.
      "Over the last two years we've seen a sharp appreciation of the euro and a sharp weakening of the global economy so the loss of competitiveness has been highlighted very clearly," he told Reuters after publishing his quarterly economic bulletin.
      "We need to look at the issue closely and address it on all fronts, and if we don't do that we're going to become a peripheral economy again," he said.
      Ireland, for decades the poor man of Europe, enjoyed an unprecedented boom during the late 1990s as massive foreign direct investment led to almost full employment and double-digit annual growth rates.
      However, beneath the surface spiralling wages and soaring inflation were taking their toll on the competitive edge that had lured multinationals into key sectors such as pharmaceuticals and IT which were driving the economy.
      The country has since been hit hard by the downturn in world markets, with growth plunging and job losses an almost daily staple of domestic newspapers.
      Last week, luxury goods company Waterford Wedgwood (WTF-u.I) blamed ballooning costs for job losses at its flagship crystal-making plant in southern Ireland, the latest in a string of cuts that have sent shivers through the Irish labour market.
      Power said key areas to be addressed if the economy was to get back on track over the next few years included improvements to the country's crumbling infrastructure, and measures to restore competitiveness in wages.
      He warned that Ireland's "trump card" in attracting foreign investment, a 12.5 percent corporate tax rate -- one of the lowest in Europe -- was being adopted by Baltic states such as Estonia and Latvia, and that others would follow.
      "You can be guaranteed that over the next few years all the eastern and central European countries will try and replicate it," Power added.
      Estonia and Latvia are among eight eastern and central European countries due to join the European Union next May.

      STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Seven Nordic and Baltic ministers for gender equality on Wednesday expressed their "abhorrence" over Greek plans to increase the number of brothel permits in Athens for the 2004 Olympic Games.
      "It is with indignation and surprise that we have learned that Greece plans to increase brothel activities during the Olympics in Athens 2004. This will lead to more women being exploited and abused," Cabinet ministers for gender equality in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said in a joint letter to the mayor of Athens.
      "We ... will in this way express our abhorrence and protest your plans, which we do not feel to be compatible with the fundamental ideals behind the Olympics," they wrote in the letter, faxed to The Associated Press by the Swedish government and posted on the government's web site.
      Greek authorities say they have decided to implement a 1999 law which stipulates that all brothels must have permits. Presently only a few of the brothels in Athens have permits. Officials said they will give 230 permits while the law provides for 200.
      The ministers said in their letter it was "of utmost importance that the opposition to all forms of commercial exploitation also include women and children who are especially vulnerable in connection with the Olympic Games."
      Sweden's vice prime minister and minister for gender equality, Margareta Winberg, was not immediately available for comment, but said in an interview published Wednesday in the daily Aftonbladet that the brothels may have negative consequences if permitted.
      "It will encourage the visitors to Athens to buy sex and it also sends a signal to the Greek population that women should accept this," Winberg was quoted as saying.
      Greece's powerful Orthodox Church last month accused Athens city authorities of seeking to increase the number of prostitution licenses in the capital before the games, expressing "surprise and dismay" over a city council petition urging the government to re-examine prostitution regulations in the Greek capital.
      The council responded that the church had been "misinformed," and that it only had asked the government to "clarify operating rules" for brothels in an effort to curb the illegal sex trade.
      Greece has a small and tightly controlled legal prostitution industry and a much larger illegal one, maintained mainly through illegal immigrants from eastern Europe.

      RIGA, Latvia (AP) — A powerful explosion at a propane gas exchange center near an outdoor market in the Latvian capital, Riga, left five people dead and injured 12 others, authorities said Wednesday.
      The explosion occurred Tuesday night at 10 p.m. (1900 GMT) inside the Birgita Ltd. gas company, leveling a small building and toppling a nearby wall where merchants were selling vegetables. The next day, cabbages, chunks of concrete and several wrecked cars were still strewn about the area.
      "The only thing we are sure of at this point is that it was an accident," Riga police spokeswoman Ieva Ziedre told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
      She said investigators were considering the possibility that a company employee inside the building after it closed may have inadvertently ignited a propane cylinder, typically used for stoves in houses that are not connected to main natural gas supply lines.
      The employee was killed in the blast.
      Ziedre said worker may have been refilling a gas cylinder at the site and that a cigarette could have set off the blast. She said the city center station was only authorized to exchange propane tanks -- not to refill them.
      All the other fatalities were farmers selling goods along the collapsed wall that skirted the Central Market, which, during the day, is the capital's busiest outdoor market. There were relatively few sellers and buyers in the area at the time of the explosion.
      Six of those injured remain hospitalized, and one was in serious condition, Ziedre said. The others were treated for minor injuries and released.
      Police opened an investigation to determine if any labor or safety laws were breached.
      Nobody at Birgita Ltd. was immediately available for comment.

      VIENNA, Austria (AP) — Austria has an exceptionally poor record in bringing Nazi war criminals to justice even though numerous suspects still live here, the Simon Wiesenthal Center contends in a new report.
      "Austria has failed to convict a Holocaust perpetrator in more then two decades and refuses to establish a special prosecution agency despite the existence of numerous suspects in the country," the center contends in its annual report on Nazi investigations and prosecutions worldwide.
      The 40-page report, which was posted Saturday on the organization's Web site, reviewed legal efforts in 39 countries between April 2002 and this past March.
      At least a dozen countries, including some in which Holocaust crimes were committed or which offered refuge to perpetrators, were investigating and prosecuting suspects, the center said.
      Six Nazi war criminals were convicted — five in the United States and one in Germany -- its report says. Legal proceedings were begun against 10 other suspects in the United States and one in Germany, and there were ongoing investigations involving nearly 500 suspects worldwide.
      "Attempts to investigate and bring to justice Holocaust perpetrators are still under way in quite a few countries and have yielded highly significant results," said the report's author, Efraim Zuroff.
      "The existence of political will to bring Nazi war criminals to justice is an absolute prerequisite for the successful prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators," he said.
      The report gives an "A," or "highly successful," grade to the United States; a "B," indicating some "practical" success, to Germany; and a "C" for "minimal success" to Canada, Costa Rica, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Poland.
      A "D" grade for "insufficient or unsuccessful efforts" went to Argentina, Australia, Austria, Britain, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Spain.
      Although the center gave an "F" for "total failure" to Colombia, Norway, Sweden and Syria, its report had especially harsh words for Austria, where legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal lives and works.
      "Austria once again has failed to secure a conviction or file an indictment against a single Nazi war criminal," the report says. "There appears to be little will in Vienna ... to prosecute such criminals."
      Calls to Austrian government offices seeking comment on the report went unanswered Saturday.
      A separate report issued earlier this year by 160 Austrian historians and researchers criticized the alpine country's post-World War II governments for their unwillingness to indemnify Holocaust victims, saying Austria acted "often halfheartedly."
      Thousands of Jews — including those sent to concentration camps -- were forced to pay a special "flight tax" and a "Jewish property levy" to leave the Third Reich, that report said.
      Unlike Germany, which has engaged in deep and public soul-searching for decades, Austria has been slow to come to grips with its complicity and to admit any responsibility for Nazi-era crimes, portraying itself as a victim rather than a perpetrator.
      However, historical records show a disproportionately high number of Austrians played leading roles in the Nazi death machine, and that thousands of Austrians enriched themselves by stealing or otherwise forcibly taking Jewish property.
      Adolf Eichmann, dubbed the Nazi's "station master of death" for his central role in the extermination of Jews, was an Austrian. He was captured by the Israelis in Latin America, tried and sentenced to death, and hanged in Israel in 1962.
      — — —
      On the Net:
      Simon Wiesenthal Center, www.wiesenthal.com

      GENEVA (AP) — Walter Zapp, inventor of the legendary Minox spy camera, has died, the manufacturer confirmed Monday. He was 97.
      Zapp died at home in Binningen, near Basel in northern Switzerland, on July 17, said Thorsten Korteneier, spokesman for Minox GmbH, in Wetzlar, Germany.
      Zapp's invention — smaller than a cigar and weighing less than a cigarette lighter -- has been used in James Bond movies as well as other spy films, said Korteneier. More than one million of the cameras have been sold.
      But Zapp, who sold the patent after World War II, realized no great riches. All he left was a workshop with experiments and a box full of pictures and poems in Binningen, where he lived with his son, said the weekly Zurich-based newspaper NZZ am Sonntag.
      "Since he was a child," Minox said, "the self-taught Zapp — who had a photographic memory -- lived just for one idea: the miniaturization of the picture camera."
      Zapp was born in 1905 in Riga, Latvia. "I was a sickly baby and grew up a weakling," he said.
      At 17 he served an apprenticeship as an art photographer in Tallinn, Estonia. The wooden cameras he had to use were too heavy for him, and he began wondering if they could be made smaller.
      Fourteen years later, in 1936, Zapp succeeded in producing a camera so small that it could be hidden in a closed hand: the prototype Minox.
      "If it was going to be small, then make it really small. He was consistent in this way," Zapp's son told the NZZ am Sonntag in an interview.
      With the Baltic states caught up in the conflict between the Soviet Union and Germany during World War II, Zapp -- who was an ethnic German -- fled to Germany in 1941.
      Already he had produced 17,000 of the cameras, which were sold to a department store in the United States, said Korteneier.
      The Riga firm continued to produce a limited number of cameras but soon had to give up because of a lack of suppliers.
      But Zapp had taken a camera and the design in his pocket, and he was able to found Minox GmbH in Wetzlar with an old friend, Richard Juergens, and the help of the victorious Americans.
      Because labor was in short supply in post-war Germany, Zapp redesigned his camera so that it could be built by machines.
      Two of the company's main investors were cigar factories, which took over and dismissed Zapp after just two years. He had sold the patent for a life annuity and a settlement.
      Zapp moved to Switzerland, where he lived for the rest of his life.
      To supplement his income, he made a wide range of products, from a beer stopper to binoculars.
      The successor of the cigar factories went bankrupt on January 1, 1989, and Minox was taken over by the optics company Leitz.
      The new owners brought Zapp — in his 80s — back as a development engineer, and he continued to try to shrink his invention.
      The company quoted him as saying, "If I succeed in what I am imagining, I hope I will produce the subminiature camera of the 21st century. Even if I don't live long enough to see it, if it succeeds, it will be enough."
      Zapp is survived by a son and a daughter. A private funeral was held July 22, in Binningen.

      LONDON, July 29 (Reuters) — Following are some of the major events to have occurred on August 5 since 1900:
      1914 — The first electric traffic signals to control different streams of traffic were installed at Euclid Avenue and East 105th street in Cleveland, Ohio.
      1940 — Latvia was absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic.
      1995 — The United States and Vietnam declared an end to decades of enmity, formally established diplomatic ties and pledged a new era of cooperation.

      RIGA, July 30 (Reuters) — Latvian support for joining the European Union has fallen below the 50 percent mark just two months before a referendum, a monthly poll showed on Wednesday.
      Politicians and analysts called on the government to boost a limp campaign ahead of the September 20 vote when Latvians will say whether they want to join the wealthy 15-nation bloc next May.
      Support dropped 7.5 percentage points to 49.6 percent while the "No" camp gained 9.9 percent to 34.5 percent in July, the survey by independent pollster Latvijas Fakti found.
      Those still undecided had dropped to 15.9 percent from 18.4 percent in June.
      Latvia, one of 10 mostly East European countries invited to join the European Union next year, is the last to hold a referendum.
      "In my opinion, this is a signal to the government to start doing something," Guntars Krasts, a member of parliament from the pro-EU For Fatherland and Freedom Party, told Reuters.
      "But I'm still optimistic that the final result will be in favour of joining the Union -- I'm absolutely positive about this," he added.
      The binding referendum requires at least 50 percent of those who voted in the last general election in October last year to turn out to become valid, but the poll found that 69 percent planned to vote, comfortably above the threshold.
      "I believe people are still answering this question based on gut feelings and not as someone informed," political analyst Karlis Streips said. "But it is likely to change once the government starts its information campaign," he added.
      So far seven of the 10 countries have voted for membership. Estonia holds a referendum a week before Latvia. Cyprus is not holding a referendum.