Its second compilation of Latvian hardcore, punk and ska music is available for download as a do-it-yourself compact disc, the youth culture portal HC.LV has announced.

The Latvia-based portal, recently reborn after being unavailable for several months, announced Aug. 15 that release of HC.LV Compilation, Vol.2 follows on the success of the first compilation released in 2004.

The second compilation includes 10 tracks from the groups Butter In Fly, Cacophonics, Catapulta, Emanon, More Than Talking and Reaching Bravo. The first compiliation, still available on the Web site, has 22 tracks.

The portal, project coordinator Deniss Fedotovs said in a press release, went online in 2000 and continued until the end of 2004, when it temporarily ceased operation.

The recordings are available for download from HC.LV.

A new postage stamp commemorating the life of Pope John Paul II, who visited Latvia in 1993, will be released by the Latvian Post Office beginning Aug. 14.

The 15-santīm stamp shows the late pope with St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City in the background. A total of 1.8 million stamps were printed in Austria.

The pope, known earlier as Karol Wojtyla, was born in 1920 and died in April of this year. He served as pope from 1978 until his death.

First day covers and cancellations will be available Aug. 14 at the Basilica of Aglona in Latgale province, coinciding with the culmination of the annual pilgrimmage to Aglona by Catholics and others from throughout Latvia.

Vizma Belševica, one of Latvia’s most admired contemporary poets and writers, died Aug. 6 after a long illness, according to the Latvian news service LETA and President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga’s press office.

She was 74 and was born in Rīga in 1931.

In recent years, perhaps her best-known work was the “Bille” trilogy, autobiographical novels that told the story of a young Latvian girl’s coming of age from the 1930s into the 1950s. The first, Bille, was published in 1995, followed by Bille dzīvo tālāk in 1996 and Billes skaistā jaunība in 1999.

Belševica studied at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. Her first collection of poetry, Visu ziemu šogad pavasaris, was published in 1955. But in 1968, she ran afoul of Soviet authorities because of a nationalistic poem and for many years could no longer get her own work before the public.

One of her two sons, the poet Klāvs Elsbergs, died in 1987 after falling—or being pushed—out of a ninth-story window of the writers’ union building in Dubulti. Belševica’s other son, Jānis Elsbergs, also is a poet. Until 1999 he published under the pen-name Jānis Ramba, according to the Latvian Literature Centre.

In 1990, Belševica was named an honorary member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. Five years ago, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature, LETA said.