The Finnish aviation safety authority said that Copterline, whose passenger helicopter plunged into the Gulf of Finland outside Tallinn last month, was not to blame for the accident. Authority chief Kim Salonen said an additional inspection would be made for the sake of certainty. "We're going to review weather forecasting, training and safety equipment -everything that concerns flying," he said. A Copterline official said extra inspections were a practical proposition. "It's an authority's duty to check things over," he observed. Investigators have not yet established the cause of the accident.
Parliament's constitutional committee discovered that no amendment was required for Estonia to switch to the euro. "The committee stated that the euro would be introduced if the constitution was not changed, because the respective obligation arises from the EU Accession Treaty," a parliamentary spokesperson quoted the committee as saying. For clarity's sake, amending the constitution or drafting a new constitution could be advisable in the long term, the spokesperson added. In the committee's opinion, this would only cause a multitude of legal problems.
The Prosecutor's Office reported that local police gave up their investigation into threats against members of the Pro Patria Union too easily, the daily SL Ohtuleht reported, and have since opened a probe. During candidate registration for the upcoming local elections, Russian graffiti with such phrases as "You've got seven days left, after that you'll be..." appeared on the stairwell of a house of a Pro Patria Union member. On Aug. 26, the party's flag was pulled down from a wall in the Narva office and torn to pieces.
Police have tracked down a suspect who allegedly stole 80,000 euros worth of watches from a Stockholm store in July 2004. A housing manager in Maardu, a small town near Tallinn, called police to remove two parked cars that were blocking maintenance operations, said police superintendent Margo Reiska. A closer examination tied one of the cars to the suspect, whose name is on an international wanted list, Reiska said. Procedures have begun to extradite the man to Sweden.
During the 60th session of the UN General Assembly, President Arnold Ruutel invited the U.N. to carry out reform: "Estonia is confident that an institutional renewal is necessary to develop the U.N. into an increasingly efficient multilateral institution. To accomplish the goal, U.N. bodies should be reformed and cohesion of the U.N. system increased." The U.N. summit would be successful, he said, only if the adopted decisions were implemented in the near future. The president added that it was important to speed up the process of achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
