Bad-boy actor Charlie Sheen, ex-star of the hit American television sitcom Two and a Half Men, is moving to Latvia to take advantage of a citizenship-for-investment plan touted by politician Ainārs Šlesers.

That’s the April Fool’s Day claim of the Chicago Latvian website Cikaga.com.

Šlesers, head of the For a Good Latvia! (Par labu Latviju!) party, in early March proposed that Latvian citizenship be granted to anyone who invests at least EUR 1 million in the country. In an interview with Latvian Independent Television, Šlesers suggested that up to 10,000 individuals could become citizens through the investment program, netting cash-strapped Latvia a total of EUR 10 billion.

That much is true.

However, in a posting that appeared March 31, Cikaga.com Editor Artis Inka used previously published quotes from Sheen interspersed with mock questions to create a story suggesting the actor is moving to Latvia. Sheen, who has received quite a bit of media attention in the United States for his erratic and insulting behavior, has been fired from the television show.

“Do you have a message for the people of Latvia?” the website asked the actor.

Sheen replied: “You’re either in my corner, or you’re with the trolls.”

This is not the first time Cikaga.com has had some fun with Latvian-related news. Last year the site suggested that an aide to President Barack Obama—Michael Strautmanis, the adopted son of Čikāgas piecīši founding member Juris Strautmanis—would be running for election in Latvia. In 2008, the website reported that the Latvian center Gaŗezers in Michigan would be the place where the Democratic Party would select its presidential nominee.

Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds will spend two years beginning in October perfecting his craft as a “fellow commoner” at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College in Great Britain.

Trinity announced the appointment on March 25, noting that the 34-year-old Ešenvalds is the latest in a series of artists who for 30 years have been supported by the college’s Fellow Commoners in Creative Arts program. Each artist spends two years in residence at Cambridge.

Composers chosen by Trinity in years past include Nicholas Maw, Judith Weir, Thomas Adès, Deirdre Gribbin, Richard Causton and Tarik O’Regan.

Ešenvalds, born in 1977 in Priekule, is “the next big thing in musical mysticism,” according to critic Richard Morrison of The Times of London.

Ešenvalds received his bachelor’s degree in 2002 and his master’s in composition in 2004 from the Latvian Academy of Music, where he studied under Selga Mence.

A recipient of numerous scholarships and winner of various awards, Ešenvalds is known for compositions such as “Iespadi Sāremā” and “Légende de la femme emmurée.” His compositions have appeared on more than a dozen recordings.

For more on Ēsenvalds, visit his website, www.eriksesenvalds.com.

Ilmārs Šalts is a survivor of Siberia and of a battalion of young men assigned to work in Soviet labor camps. He told part of his story in the book, A Stolen Childhood: Five Winters in Siberia, and now, in ‘Careerists’: Quarry Duty in the Soviet Army, which was released in November.

Both books previously appeared in Latvian. The first, Nolaupītā bērnība, was published in Rīga in 2001, followed by Karjeristi in 2004.

Šalts’s story begins in 1941, when his family was deported to Siberia. His parents and a grandmother died there. Šalts and his brother and sister returned to occupied Latvia in 1946. Taken in by his motherš cousins, Šalts had only five and half years to finish his studies. When he turned 21, he was drafted into the Soviet army and assigned to a battalion of “stepchildren” to work in the rock quarries of Russia’s Rostov province.

Šalts, now a retired electrical engineer, regained ownership of his family’s home in 1996, according to the self-publishing company AuthorHouse.

A brief review of the Latvian version of the book was published in 2004 by the daily newspaper Latvijas Vēstnesis.

‘Careerists’ was translated by Gunna Dickson, a New York-based writer and editor. She also translated A Stolen Childhood and Lilija Zariņa’s The Red Fog: A Memoir of Life in the Soviet Union, published in 2006.