MANY long faces in Riga today after the government ‘won’ the referendum vote on Saturday and thus remains in power. The victory is entirely pyrrhic, however: when your main political weapon is reliance upon the apathy of the electorate, your days are numbered.

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IT TAKES a very special sort of petty criminal to steal from old ladies, young mothers and little kids, but that’s the distinction that can be claimed by a group of thieves who have stolen all the benches from Arkadijas Park.

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DURING a previous life I worked for a few years as a motoring journalist. It was certainly one of the easiest and most over-privileged jobs imaginable.

Once a week at the very least, all the main motoring hacks (plus as many hangers-on and blag merchants who could make it) would be flown to Southern Spain, Italy or the French Riviera, put up in a top class hotel, issued with a brand new car to drive with abandon and generally treated as if the sun shone out of their proverbials. Not bad for a job that essentially boils down to saying “The latest model is a bit bigger, a bit better and a bit more expensive than the one it replaces” in anything from 500 to 1,000 words.

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