Summed up

BIRDS WERE SAFE: The Swedish King Carl Gustaf XVI participated in two failed hunting trips during his informal three-day visit to Lithuania Oct. 20-23, the daily Lietuvos Rytas reported Oct. 24. The daily said that the Swedish monarch arrived in Lithuania and went hunting ducks and partridges with seven former school fellows in the southern Marijampole district on Sunday and Monday morning.

BIG BROTHER HEARS YOU: The Latvian Parliament's budget and finance committee has proposed to allocate, under amendments to this year's budget, 819,000 lats ($1.31 million) to the Constitution Protection Office for the purchase of mobile-phone-tapping equipment. The committee will propose to allocate the funds at the cost of increasing this year's budget deficit.

ANOTHER FIRST FOR THE POLICE: Latvian economic-affairs police has for the first time in its practice stumbled upon an organized group attempting to help several Latvians, residing abroad, to acquire citizenship of foreign countries using counterfeit documents. At this point there are four suspects in the case, but they have not yet been detained.

WILL TEAR DOWN TOWN: The Latvian State Real Estate Agency has decided to demolish the civil facilities in the town around the former Skrunda radar station in western Latvia and will soon announce a tender for the demolition contract. The former Skrunda-radar-station town will be demolished because the SREA has not received any noteworthy proposals for further use of the town by the deadline set for June 1.

CAN'T SEE THE CAUSE: The Latvian National Environment Health Center has failed to establish any relationship between complaints by patients of a Latvian eye-care center and the use of Cidex, a disinfectant liquid for cleaning instruments at the medical facility, NEHC spokeswoman Inga Prizevaite said Oct. 27. Some 15 to 20 patients who had eye surgery at the center during the last three weeks, returned to the center complaining of eyesight problems. Initially, medics believed those problems were related to allergies but it was later assumed the problems were caused by Cidex.

SPY TRAPPED IN SWEDEN: A Lithuanian citizen accused of being a U.S. spy by the Russian Federal Security Service earlier this summer has vowed to apply for political asylum in Sweden due to what he said is persecution by Lithuania's officials, the daily Lietuvos Rytas reported Oct. 30.

DEAD MAN WANTED: Estonian security police has put Vladimir Lenin on the wanted list accused of fraud in connection with fuel export. The security police took court action against the 34-year-old Russian revolutionary's namesake several years ago, accusing him of fictitiously exporting motor fuel to non-existing foreign companies through the Ikla customs checkpoint on the Estonian-Latvian border in 1995-96, a security police spokesman said.

CELEBRATING FIRST 10: Estonian border guards, who recently began celebrations of the 10th anniversary of border restoration, are building up a system of sea monitoring as its priority task for the near future. Chief of Staff Aare Evisalu said the department had successfully coped with its tasks during the first decade after restoration.

SAYS THERE WAS A BANG: The American millionaire diver Gregg Bemis Jr., who conducted a diving expedition to the hull of the sunken ferry Estonia, said the vessel had experienced an explosion on board at some point in its tortured existence. Relying on tests done on two metal samples taken from the hull, Bemis said recently that an explosion occurred aboard the vessel in the vicinity of the starboard forward bulkhead, the Albuquerque Journal of Bemis' home state New Mexico reported.

83,780 PEOPLE BLEW: Traffic police in Estonia has established, during all-out checks on drivers over the past year, that about 2.5 percent of all people driving a motor vehicle had alcohol in their blood. Twelve months of checks under the code name "Everyone Blows," in which all drivers on a certain road were subjected to a breathalyzer test, showed that 1,399 of the total of 83,780 drivers checked had alcohol in their blood, corresponding to a ratio of 2.48 percent, a police spokesman said.

AIMING FOR PRESIDENT'S OFFICE: Lithuanian stunt pilot Jurgis Kairys has set his sights on the presidential post, the Lietuvos Rytas daily reported Oct. 31. It quoted Kairys, who won the acrobatic flying world cup last week, as saying that he had been persuaded by different people to think about the possibility of taking the high office. Kairys, who is 48 years old, said it would take about six years to prepare himself for the presidential election.