Saeima election scheduled Oct. 7

Andris Straumanis | 

The next election for the Saeima, Latvia’s parliament, is scheduled Oct. 7. As in previous elections, Latvian citizens living abroad will be able to cast ballots for the 9th Saeima. However, this year voting will be eased with the establishment of multiple polling places. In previous years, voters had to either cast ballots by mail or appear at the nearest Latvian embassy or consulate.

Latvian ciitzens abroad also may vote by mail. Those wishing to do so have until Sept. 15 to submit their passport and a request for an absentee ballot. The request must be submitted to the closest Latvian embassy (or, in some cases, a consulate) using a form available from the Central Election Commission in either Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word format. The commission also provides a list of locations where absentee ballots may be requested.

Latvian citizens who live abroad, but find themselves in Latvia on election day, may also vote at a local polling place.

In the United States, according to the Embassy of Latvia, polling places will be set up in Boston; Chicago; Cleveland, Ohio; Los Angeles; Minneapolis, Minn.; New York; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Seattle, Wash., and Washington, D.C.

In Canada, polling places will be located at the Embassy of Latvia in Ottawa and in the Latvian Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto.

In the United Kingdom, polling places will be set up in London, Bradford and the Straumēni rest home in Catthorpe.

Voters in Ireland will be able to cast ballots at the Embassy of Latvia in Dublin. One interesting factor to watch in this year’s election will be whether the estimated 20,000 Latvian citizens now in Ireland will swell the ranks of those voting abroad. In 2002, the total votes cast abroad was 7,367, down 27 percent from the 10,080 votes cast in the 1998 election.

In Sweden, voting will take place in Stockholm and Göteborg.

In Germany, polling places will be located at the Latvian embassy in Berlin and the consulate in Bonn.

Polls will be open Oct. 7 from 07:00 hours until 22:00 hours.

All 100 members of parliament are to be elected. Political parties have until Aug. 8 to submit their candidate lists. The first to submit its list, with 89 candidates, was the conservative party Tēvzemei un Brīvībai/LNNK (For Fatherland and Freedom/LNNK).

Andris Straumanis is a special correspondent for and a co-founder of Latvians Online. From 2000–2012 he was editor of the website.

What to do with the kids after school

Daina Grosa | 

Cālis.lv

Cālis.lv is among Web sites that may help readers find after-school activities for children in Rīga.

Having recently moved to Rīga with the family for an extended period of time, one of the tasks that lay ahead was to organise after-school activities for my children. After deciding on the school the kids would attend we learnt that school in Latvia finishes at lunchtime and then the kids need to be kept busy during the afternoon.

To find out more about the options for extracurricular activities a logical place to start was the Web.

Cālis.lv

The first port of call was Cālis.lv, a portal for families. It sounded like it could be the place for all my answers. Agnese Vidnere, then living in Finland, began the site in 2001. On the site, a “Cāļenciklopedija” (literally, a “chicken encyclopedia,” but cāļi in this case means children) provides all manner of advice on child-rearing, from how to handle the temper tantrums of 2-year-olds, to tips on buying prams and strollers, to parents’ thoughts on pocketmoney dos and don’ts. Also in the encyclopedia are sections on pregnancy, a place to find baby names, and finally—success!—activities for pre-schoolers. Parents have posted their experiences, so other visitors get to read both good and bad reviews on schools, daycare centres and sports activities.

Rīga government

But where is an easily navigated list of after-school activities? I was still none the wiser when it came to the big picture. Suddenly, I found one: the Rīga City Education, Youth and Sport Department Youth Direction,www.rsdc.lv/jln. Although the graphic design side of the site is definitely lacking, the information is both in English and Latvian, and seems to be a pretty comprehensive listing of government-funded extra- curricular activities. This does not mean that every institution has its own Web site, but phone numbers and addresses are certainly a good starting point. For more information on sporting options in Riga there’s Sports Rīgā  however, this is more a list of government departments involved in sports.

E-Skola

Then there’s E-Skola, an absolute goldmine of information. Run by the city government, the site is meant for those who are involved in children’s education in Rīga. Published only in Latvian, it is obviously aimed at informing the locals, those who work in education or who live in Latvia and seeking education-related information. Nevertheless, there are quite a few gems to be found here, such as details on the process involved in getting your child into the prestige schools in Rīga, competitions that children can enter during the school year, a recently founded parents’ committee and its involvement in educational matters and much more.

I had to remind myself this was not the information I was originally after and, as is often the case with Web surfing, I had to pull myself away from this tempting tangent.

The result of this exercise? I have found a few leads for sporting activities for my son, which I can now follow up with phone calls.

Details

Daina Gross is editor of Latvians Online. An Australian-Latvian she is also a migration researcher at the University of Latvia, PhD from the University of Sussex, formerly a member of the board of the World Federation of Free Latvians, author and translator/ editor/ proofreader from Latvian into English of an eclectic mix of publications of different genres.

Planning a move online? Get a domain name

Arnis Gross | 

You have just created a new Latvian product or service, or have finally made the decision to establish an Internet presence for your Latvian organization, business, hobby or even the family blog. How do you select the domain name?

Lets say that Pēteŗa Pīrāgi, located in Kuldīga, wants to promote its locally popular bakery not only to the rest of Latvia, but to rest of the world. The owner should first sit down (best without a computer) and make a list of words and phrases that people are likely to enter into a search engine such as Google or input as a Web address. For example piragi, pīrāgi (with all the diacritics), Latvian food, beķereja, Latvian bakery, Baltic bacon buns, Baltic food delicacies or visiting Kuldīga. The longer the list the better.

The owner will have two audiences to target: one within Latvia and the Baltic States and the other in the rest of the world. For this reason they may need to go to at least two different registrars: one that handles the .lv domain and the other the popular .com space. The recently introduced European Union .eu top level domain may also be a consideration especially if the owner is expecting an influx of German, Dutch or British tourists to the bakery.

Latvia’s top level domain .lv is managed by the Network Solutions Department of the Institute of Mathematics & Computer Science at the University of Latvia. The department’s Web site is available in either Latvian or English. Visitors can quickly check whether a domain name is available at www.nic.lv. From the list start with the more generic or popular words. You never know your luck, because a previous holder of that name could have recently released it back to the pool of available names. During the 1990s the rules for registering a domain name were fairly lax. At one stage riga.lv was redirecting to a Russian language Web site that had little to do with promoting Rīga. Cybersquatters would often purchase a whole bunch of names with the intent of selling them to unsuspecting firms for many times the original price. Nearly 40,000 .lv domain names have been registered (compared to more than 50 million .com registrations) and the rules today ensure that geographical names and well known company names or trademarks are protected from these warehousing practices. Naming conventions are generally more relaxed and a business or organisation can register at the top domain without the .com.lv or .org.lv extension, for example, mybusiness.lv and myorganisation.lv. Domain names designated with the .id.lv extension are available free of charge for individuals. Surprisingly, a lot of the more popular surnames are still available (only 500 have been registered), so grab one while you can.

Going back to our example, the owner of Pēteŗa Pīrāgi is overjoyed to discover that the No. 1 choice of pirags.lv was available. Out comes the credit card and, after completing all of the necessary details and authorising the USD 35 or EUR 30 charge, the domain name can now be exclusively used by the bakery for 12 months, after which a renewal notice for the same amount will be sent for the following year. In 2004 NIC.lv also introduced the ability to include Latvian letters or diacritics. These domain names are considerably cheaper at LVL 10. The main problem is that for nearly all versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer a special plugin is required to recognise the special letters. Otherwise the user is taken to the standard “Server Not Found” error page. To implement this great idea, the owner of the bakery should have both pirags.lv and pīrāgs.lv for exclusive use and at no additional charge, at least until the technology has caught up and the Domain Name System has become Unicode compliant. NIC.lv provides tūdaliņ.lv as an example to test your Web browser.

For the dot com space Pēteŗa Pīrāgi will need to go to one of the many thousands of registrars located outside of Latvia. Some of the more popular are Register.com, NetworkSolutions and DomainDiscover, where prices start from a low USD 9 for a domain name—nearly 400 percent cheaper than the Latvian equivalent. At these prices Pēteŗa Pīrāgi can register several names, for example, pirags.com, latvianbakery.com and balticbaconbuns.com and have them all automatically redirect to the English language pages of pirags.lv.

The European Commission’s nonprofit organisation EURid has accredited three .eu registrars in Latvia, but only EUREG seems to work and inexplicably defaults to the Russian language. Prices for .eu domain names are quoted at about LVL 15. To date there have been about 3,000 registrations from Latvia. It is not clear whether these figures also includes the reserved names. The owner of Pēteŗa Pīrāgi decides they will watch this space and make an assessment later.

Selecting a domain name is only the initial phase of successfullty establishing an online presence and something that every business should consider sooner than later.