RIGA – For the first half of the day June 17, Vaira Vike-Freiberga sat on the sidelines, virtually unnoticed, while Latvia's Parliament set about voting for a new president of state. But when the usual suspects – Anatolijs Gorbunovs, Vaira Paegle and Raimonds Pauls – failed to receive enough votes to qualify, lights and cameras started shifting toward this little-known Canadian-Latvian academic.By evening's end, Vike-Freiberga, bouquets of flowers spilling out of her arms, had become the first woman elected president in the former Soviet Union."My heart has always been in Latvia," she told ...
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