Seventeen young people have received misdemeanor fines for their participation in parties held at the presidential palace last October. The investigation identified 14 minors who violated alcohol and tobacco laws, and they were punished with fines of 120 kroons (7.7 euros) each, spokespeople for the north prefecture said. Misdemeanor charges were drawn up on three adult participants for offering alcohol to minors; they were fined 240 kroons each. Police identified a total of 42 partygoers.
The Harju county court overturned a fine given to the advertising company that produced the K-kohuke curd snack ad, which was widely associated with the Center Party's logo during the pre-election period. At the time, outdoor political advertising was banned. The court cancelled the Consumer Protection Board-imposed fine and ended misdemeanor proceedings against the AD Idea advertising company. During the trial, lawyers for AD Idea asked that the 25,000 kroon fine be overturned and proceedings against the advertising agency ended. The board had found the advertisement to be misleading, and fined the company 25,000 kroons for breach of the advertising law.
Samples taken from the tanker Flawless, one of the suspect-ships in the pollution off Estonia's northwestern coast, failed to prove unequivocally whether oil originated from that ship. None of the samples taken from the Flawless is identical with the sample of the pollution. District prosecutor Lavly Lepp said it couldn't be said on the basis of initial test results whether the Flawless could have caused the pollution. "Initial results of the tests do not confirm the guilt of the tanker Flawless, nor can the ship be conclusively dropped [from the list of suspects] relying on the initial results," she said.
The youngest first-time mothers in the European Union are in Estonia, where a woman is approximately 24.6 years old when her first child is born. The average age of women in the 25 EU member states at the birth of their first child was 28.2 years in 2004, the Irish economic news portal Finfacts reported. In Latvia, the average age was 24.7 years, in Lithuania 24.8 years, in Slovakia 25.3 years and Poland 's 25.5. The oldest first-time mothers were found in Britain (29.7), Spain (29.2), the Netherlands (28.9), Germany (28.8), and Luxembourg (28.7). By way of comparison, in 1994, the average age of women at the birth of their first child was 26.8 years in the EU, 23.4 years in Estonia and 28.2 years in Britain.
