An estimated 250,000 cigarettes, carried by up to 30 passengers on one flight from Rīga, were seized Nov. 6 by Irish customs officials at Dublin airport.

Customs officials described the smuggling operation as “highly organized,” Irish Revenue said in a press release. The couriers each carried 5,000 or more cigarettes.

No one was arrested. The L&M and Marlboro brand cigarettes had a street value of EUR 85,000 with an estimated potential loss of EUR 68,750 in taxes.

The seizures arose as a result of intelligence and profiling, an Irish Revenue spokeswoman told Latvians Online. The customs service’s “Operation Swift” targeted passengers arriving from Rīga.

It is not the first time smugglers from Latvia have tried to bring contraband cigarettes into Ireland. In March, for example, customs officials seized 1.4 million cigarettes valued at EUR 483,000 from passengers arriving during the St. Patrick’s Day holiday. In May, 46-year-old Sandra Piruska of Latvia was arrested at the airport with 17,200 cigarettes in her baggage.

Arrivals from Latvia into Ireland are allowed to bring only 200 cigarettes for personal use, according to Irish Revenue.

Of the 32 million cigarettes seized so far this year from passengers arriving from the Baltic states, more than half—17 million—were carried on flights from Rīga. The total seized represents a retail value of EUR 11.6 million and a potential loss of revenue of EUR 8.8 million, Irish Revenue said.

The number of people claiming Latvian ancestry in Australia has increased over five years and now tops 20,000, with females outnumbering males by 1,000, according to new census results.

A total of 20,058 people claimed Latvian ancestry in the 2006 census, according to results reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Of those, 10,529 were female and 9,529 were male.

In 2001, a total of 18,938 persons claimed Latvian ancestry.

Broken down by states, census results show that New South Wales had the largest population with Latvian ancestry, a total of 5,879, followed by Victoria (5,771), South Australia (2,933), Queensland (2,610), Western Australia (1,792), the Australian Capital Territory (603), Tasmania (331) and the Northern Territory (145). Of the country’s major cities, Melbourne had the largest Latvian ancestral population with 4,609.

The number of people in Australia with Lithuanian ancestry stood at 13,276 and the number with Estonian ancestry was 8,232.

More than 250 different ancestries were reported in the census and many people claimed more than one, the statistics bureau said in a press release. Australian was the most popular ancestry, with 37 percent of census respondents claiming it. English, Irish and Scottish were the next most popular. Respondents were asked to report at least one ancestry, but no more than two ancestries.

The latest Australian census was held Aug. 8, 2006, and results began to be available in June of this year. Australia conducts a census every five years.

Latvia’s Jeļena Prokopčuka failed to make it three in a row in the 2007 ING New York City Marathon, coming in third in the Nov. 4 women’s race after winning the competition in 2005 and 2006.

The women’s race was won by Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain, who took the title in 2004. Radcliffe finished the course in a time of 2 hours, 23 minutes and 9 seconds. Second place went to Gete Wami of Ethiopia, who finished in 2:23:32, according to results posted on the marathon’s official Web site.

Prokopčuka finished third, covering the 26-mile course in a time of 2:26:13. Last year, she won the race with a time of 2:25:05.

If Prokopčuka had won, she would have been only the second woman in the marathon’s history to win the race three times in a row. Norway’s Grete Waitz was the first to do so in the 1980s.

However, Prokopčuka edged out fourth-place finisher Lidiya Grigoryeva of Russia, who earlier this year won the Boston Marathon. Prokopčuka came in second in the Boston race.

Other Latvian runners in the New York marathon, according to the official Web site, included Andrejs Visockis, Ģirts Filipovs, Ints Dalderis and Neville David, all of Rīga, and Malda Caune of Salaspils.