Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis has been injured in a traffic accident in Rīga and will spend about a week in a hospital recovering from a concussion and temporal bone fracture, Latvian media report.

The accident occurred at about 3 p.m. local time June 18 when a minibus and the prime minister’s car collided at the junction of Brīvības and Kalpaka boulevards, not far from the Cabinet of Ministers building in downtown Rīga.

Godmanis was taken to the First Rīga Hospital (Rīgas 1.slimnīca), where officials said the prime minister’s injuries are not life threatening.

The prime minister was on his way to meet with Latvian President Valdis Zatlers. The meeting was scheduled at 2:45 p.m., according to the president’s Web site.

Also in the prime minister’s car, according to the daily newspaper Diena, were his driver, a bodyguard and Chief of Staff Juris Radzevičs. None of them were injured. A woman passenger in the minibus was hurt.

Photographs and video of the accident’s aftermath posted on various media Web sites show the minibus with frontal damage, while the prime minister’s car has damage to its right side.

Godmanis was scheduled to travel in the evening to Brussels to attend a European Council meeting June 19-20. Instead, a spokesperson for the prime minister said, Latvia will be represented by Foreign Minister Māris Riekstiņš.

The amount of housing stock in Latvia continued to increase last year, according to the Central Statistical Bureau in Rīga, while the average amount of floor space per resident also expanded.

Housing stock by the end of 2007 had reached 60.1 million square meters (more than 646.9 million square feet), the statistical bureau said in a June 16 press release. Of that, 87 percent was owned privately, an indication of how privatization of government-owned residential buildings has continued. In 2000, 76 percent of the housing stock was in private hands.

Two thirds of the housing stock is in urban areas, the rest in rural areas, the bureau said.

The amount of average floor space per resident continued to grow, too. In 2000, the average stood at 22.6 square meters (about 243 square feet) per inhabitant. Last year, the average was 26.4 square meters (about 284 square feet), a nearly 17 percent increase.

Construction of new residential property continued actively during 2007, the statistical bureau said, with more than 1.18 million square meters (nearly 12.8 million square feet) commissioned. Of that total, 1,998 were single family homes—and 79 percent of those were two-story buildings.

Despite the upbeat numbers, concern about the Latvian real estate market remains. Property values, which had been rising steeply in recent years, have started to fall. In a survey of the housing market in 2007, Rīga-based Arco Real Estate noted that after an initial bump in the first four months of the year, housing prices began to slide. Banks, meanwhile, are cutting back on credit.

According to statistical bureau data, orders for new residential construction totaled LVL 11.02 million in the first quarter of this year, a marked contrast to the LVL 53.6 million in new orders during the first quarter of 2007.

If you live in Australia and want to vote by mail in Latvia’s Aug. 2 constitutional referendum, you will need to find a different country to which to send your application. Both honorary consulates in Adelaide and Sydney have withdrawn from the list of locations where passports and mail ballot requests can be sent, the Central Election Commission announced June 17 in Rīga.

Vote-by-mail applications are due July 11, but the date coincides with the 2008 All Latvia Song and Dance Festival, which runs July 5-12 in Rīga. Honorary consuls Valdis Tomanis in Adelaide and Aldis Birzulis in Sydney, along with other experienced election workers, will be in Latvia during the festival and so will not be able to handle mail ballot requests, commission spokeswoman Kristīne Bērziņa said in a press release.

Latvian citizens in Australia will still be able to vote in person on Aug. 2 at polling places in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. The referendum will ask whether Latvia’s constitution should be amended to allow citizens to initiate dismissal of the Saeima.

Election commission Chairman Arnis Cimdars is disappointed that the honorary consuls have declined to process mail ballot applications, Bērziņa said in the press release.

Applications for mail ballots are being accepted at 11 other locations, including the Latvian embassies in Berlin, Germany; Brussels, Belgium; Copenhagen, Denmark; Dublin, Ireland; London, United Kingdom; Minsk, Belarus; Oslo, Norway; Ottawa, Canada; Stockholm, Sweden, and Washington, D.C., in the United States, as well as at the honorary consulate in São Paulo, Brazil.

Latvian citizens in Australia may send requests for mail ballots to one of those locations, but will have to spend more for express mail service than if they could use the local consulates, the election commission said.

Further information on the referendum and the election process is available from the Central Election Commission’s Web site, www.cvk.lv.