State of emergency after power failure

The eastern part of Latvia has been without electricity for several days following massive snowfall, prompting Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis to announce a state of emergency. The online newspaper Ir finds the radical measure fully justified: "It changes nothing in the life of the average citizen, and you don't even have to carry your passport around with you like in Russia. Dombrovskis has explained that he took the decision for legal reasons. The law stipulates that certain rights may be limited under the state of emergency, but that will above all affect the forest owners over whose land the cables run. ... Perhaps the state of emergency wouldn't have been necesary at all if the weather forecasts were any brighter, but instead of the normal sunshine for Januay it's supposed to just keep on snowing. And we can't afford to have more overland cables destroyed in another wave of destruction."

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