Former diplomat denies ties to Russian intelligence

Andris Straumanis | 

A former senior diplomat in the Latvian Embassy in Washington, D.C., is fighting an accusation that he has had ties to Russian intelligence services.

Pēteris Viņķelis, 36, and his brother are expected to ask the Latvian state prosecutor to investigate who this week sent an anonymous letter to members of the Latvian parliament. The letter alleges that Viņķelis and members of his family have worked for Russian intelligence services for years.

Viņķelis denied the allegation, according to Latvian media reports, and said he believes the letters are a politcally motivated provocation.

The anonymous letter also suggests that Viņķelis’ wife, who remains in the United States with their children, also has had ties to Russian intelligence.

Although the security office of the Latvian Parliament has been asked to investigate the allegation, several government officials told Latvian media they doubt the charges.

Since leaving his post in Washington, Viņķelis has worked with the Jaunais laiks political party of Prime Minister Einars Repše. After Repše became prime minister in November, Viņķelis served as a top adviser, but stepped down from that post Feb. 12 to pursue a career in the private sector.

He told Latvian media that his resignation was spurred neither by the allegations in the letter nor by recent disputes within the party.

Viņķelis served in the Latvian embassy in Washington from 1998 to 2002. Among other functions, he was an active supporter of Latvia’s drive for membership in the NATO defense alliance.

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

Budget proposal slashes Radio Free Europe, VOA

Andris Straumanis | 

The Latvian service of Radio Free Europe would be among a number of U.S.-sponsored broadcasts to Eastern and Central Europe eliminated under President George Bush’s proposed 2004 budget.

The White House released its proposed budget, due to take effect in October, on Feb. 3.

The USD 2.2 trillion budget proposes USD 525 million in spending for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the independent federal government agency that overseas Radio Free Europe and a number of other broadcasting services, including the Voice of America.

But even though that’s USD 41 million, or 9.5 percent, more than the board is expected to receive in the current fiscal year, shifting foreign relations priorities signal the end of many services.

“The budget means an end to most Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasting to the democracies of Eastern Europe where free speech is practiced and where the process of joining the NATO alliance is under way,” Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, said in a statement released Feb. 3.

A total of USD 30 million of the board’s budget would be set aside for creation of a new Arabic-language satellite television network, which the administration foresees reaching up to 50 million viewers in the Middle East.

Although Radio Free Europe and Voice of America officials had been mum about the proposed cuts, the end of the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian services has been rumored for weeks. In January, leaders of all three Baltic republics sent letters to President Bush urging that Radio Free Europe’s services be maintained. In addition, supporters of the station have begun rallying to fight the cuts. The president’s budget must still be approved by Congress.

For Radio Free Europe’s Latvian service, the cuts could mean that at least 15 journalists based in the broadcaster’s Prague headquarters and the Rīga bureau might lose their jobs.

“The closing of these services, whose employees have so gallantly served the cause of freedom, will bring a moment of sadness to many of us who saw victory in the Cold War as a direct result of these radios,” Tomlinson said in his statement. “But we should remember at the same time that the goal these services struggled and sacrificed for has been achieved, and they should take great pride in the role they played in this historic mission.”

President Bush’s budget also slashes USD 180 million is foreign assistance to Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. A total of USD 435 million is proposed to be spent in fiscal 2004, down from the USD 615 million expected to be spent in the current fiscal year.

The funds, according to the budget document, have focused on efforts such as “economic restructuring, democratic transition, and social stabilization.” But, the document adds, money set aside under the heading of “Assistance for Eastern Europe and the Baltic States” is now focused largely on Southeast Europe, especially Serbia.

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

Seeing gobbledygook instead of Latvian?

Arnis Gross | 

Are you still seeing gobbledygook when viewing Latvian Web pages? You shouldn’t be. With the advances in recent years in multilingual capabilities of personal computers it doesn’t matter what type of computer you are using—whether it is a Windows, Macintosh or a Unix/Linux based system.

Nor does it matter if you use Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, Opera or Safari. Just about any recent version Web browser will correctly render Latvian type with all the appropriate diacritics—garumzīmes, šnācēni and mīkstinājumi—on your computer screen.

Ten years have passed since the Baltics were accepted into international computing circles. The introduction of the Latvian computing standard in 1992 slowly signaled the end to the many non-standard fonts that had been developed by enthusiasts from all corners of the globe. At one stage there were more than 20 different de facto Baltic standards, represented by fonts such as BaltTimes, LatHelvetica, Latvian Arial and LaFutura. Today they still cause much angst amongst Latvian newspaper publishing houses. Plus most of the older Baltic fonts won’t work very well, if at all, in your Web browser.

For the World Wide Web and the Baltic languages the future is Unicode—a standard that allows single documents to contain characters or text from many scripts and languages—and to allow those documents to be used on computers with operating systems in any language and still remain intelligible. Unicode (or ISO 10646) already has grown to a list of 65,534 commonly used characters and other glyphs are being added for specialist applications such as historic scripts and scientific notation. There have even been proposals to include some artistic scripts such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Tengwar and Cirth from The Lord of the Rings fame.

Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, Linux Red Hat 8.0, Macintosh OS 8.5 and later versions including Macintosh OS X all support Unicode TrueType fonts and as a result can display almost any character on screen. Examples of Unicode fonts are Arial, Times New Roman, Helvetica and Lucida Grande. Estonian, Latvian, Latgallian, Lithuanian—even the nearly extinct Liv (Livonian) alphabet with the unusual double level accents—are all supported by this universal character set. Baltic letters are located within the Latin Extended-A and Latin Extended-B script ranges (256-591). Web developers can easily access these with a Unicode-aware HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) editor such as Adobe GoLive 5, FrontPage 2000 or BBEdit 6.0 and a matching keyboard driver.

Baltic Web users currently have two choices to configure their Web browsers. You can choose either the subset “Baltic (Windows)” or go all the way with “Unicode UTF-8” encoding. In most cases the encoding is automatically set by the Web browser. If you are using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer you can check this by selecting the “View” menu and viewing the “Encoding” or “Character Set” option. In addition you may also be required to select a proportional (or Web font) and fixed width (or plain text font) to match the Baltic language encoding. If you’re a Macintosh user I recommend you download Apple’s latest Mac OS X browser, Safari, which is considerably faster than Internet Explorer and, with Unicode selected, renders Latvian Web pages flawlessly.

If the Web page is still not displaying the Latvian text correctly you can check the header of the Web page by choosing the “Source” option from the “View” menu. One of the two following lines should have been included in the header: <meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=windows-1257”> or <meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=UTF-8”>.

After a quick scan of several major Web sites in Latvia I noticed that most are still taking the conservative “charset=windows-1257” approach. Transitions Online, a Prague-based online magazine about Central and East Europe, made inroads three years ago when it started marking its pages in Unicode.

The more technically inclined can even take a peek into the style sheet of a Web site to check that no special fonts are being used. The best Web sites will stick to the popular Unicode fonts for maximum compatibility across all of the major computer platforms.

Put your computer to the test. I have created two examples so you can try to find out whether your browser is configured correctly. The first example  will check whether your Web browser can display all three Baltic languages and the second example will prepare you for the future when multiple languages on the same page will be gracing our computer screens.