Since Mrs. Marathon Pundit is from Latvia, I follow events there closely.
Vike-Freiberga was a multi-lingual psychologist who spent most of her adult life as a Canadian academic. She was a candidate to replace Kofi Annan as UN General Secretary.
Latvia has a small number of troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Valdis Zatlers comes with significant baggage. He's a former Soviet Communist Party member, and has admitted accepting "gratuities" from patients he treated.
Doctors are very poorly paid in the Baltic nation, and such side-payments are common, if not a sleazy way to supplement one's income there.
Latvia's northern neighbor, Estonia, has been feeling the brunt of Russia's ire in the way of riots by ethnic Russians there--which may have been orchestrated from Moscow--as well as cyber attacks very likely directed from there.
Having its own large Russian minority, relations between Latvia and Russia have been chilly since Latvia won its independence from the Soviet Union a few months before the dissolution of that nation. However, a border dispute between the two nations was recently resolved--in Russia's favor.
Mrs. and Little Marathon Pundit will be traveling to Latvia in July. I've been there a couple of times before, but there is too much going on at work for me to break away for more than a week.
She will be taking blog-related photographs while there.
Related posts:
News you probably missed: Latvian president addressed joint session of Congress
Russia's cyberwar on Estonia
Riots in Estonia expose wounds of Soviet occupation
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