Riga - A rail crash near the Latvian city of Ventspils killed two people Saturday and caused a huge fireball when up to ten tanks of diesel fuel ignited.

A train transporting diesel collided with stationary wagons, probably during a shunting maneuver, according to the state fire and rescue service, as reported on Latvian television. Up to ten large fuel tankers ignited, with flames leaping into the sky, visible from 10 kilometres away.

Riga  - The management of the Latvian national airline, airBaltic, will buy out the 47.2-per-cent stake of the company currently owned by Scandinavian airline SAS, the companies said Thursday evening.

An official airBaltic source confirmed the news to Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa after an SAS company statement said a deal had been reached.

Brussels  - Talks between the European Union and Latvia on providing financial aid to the Baltic country have reached the final stretch, with a decision expected in the coming hours, EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said Thursday.

"We are pursuing ways in which we can contribute to financing the (aid) package with the International Monetary Fund and other partners," Almunia said in Brussels.

"We are in the last phase," he said.

Riga/Tallinn/Vilnius  - Economists are predicting doom and gloom for the Baltic states throughout 2009 and beyond. with jobless figures rising in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and swingeing public spending cuts already starting to bite.

According to Neil Shearing, a Baltic expert with London-based Capital Economics, the recession in the Baltics looks set to deepen. "We now expect output to contract by 5 per cent next year and by up to 1.5 per cent in 2010," he said.

However, after surviving 50 years of Soviet occupation, which they only threw off in 1991, Balts have a longstanding reputation for stoicism in difficult circumstances.

Riga - While politicians in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania concentrate on tackling the economic crisis with austerity plans, lending restrictions and even IMF loans, they may be neglecting another threat to their economic well-being which could eventually be just as damaging.

Figures released this week by the European Union's statistics office, Eurostat, showed populations in the Baltics are shrinking fast, with many more Balts dying each year than are being born.

While Estonia recorded the fourth-largest birth rate in the EU, with 12.2 births per 1,000 inhabitants, it is still losing people faster than it can replace them, with a death rate at 12.8 per thousand.

Riga- An online petition in favour of a Swedish invasion of Latvia is proving a seasonal hit - among Latvians.

Fed up with a government that failed to prevent the Baltic state lurching into a serious recession and unimpressed by belated efforts to get out of it, Latvian Roberts Safonovs took the matter into his own hands and set up an online petition calling on Sweden to take over.