{"id":152,"date":"2006-10-10T07:22:39","date_gmt":"2006-10-10T06:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=152"},"modified":"2006-10-10T07:22:39","modified_gmt":"2006-10-10T06:22:39","slug":"forgotten-world-37-latvia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=152","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten world (37): Latvia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Travelling from north to south, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Latvia\">Latvia<\/a> is the second of the three Baltic states. Like the other two, it was absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940, regained its independence with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and became a member of the European Union in 2004.<br \/>\nLatvia has a population of only 2.3 million and its capital is Riga. About a quarter of the population is Russian-speaking and the rights of this section of society have been a bitter issue since independence. Government reforms introduced in 2004 to restrict the use of the Russian language in schools remain controversial.<br \/>\nSince independence, Latvia has had a series of unstable coalition governments with a total of  12 different administrations. Economic growth has been strong but high inflation remains a problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Travelling from north to south, Latvia is the second of the three Baltic states. Like the other two, it was absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940, regained its independence with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and became a member of the European Union in 2004. Latvia has a population of only 2.3 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}