Riga - Senior officials from the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania welcomed NATO plans to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the military alliance without a special "fast- track" scheme Wednesday.

Georgia and Ukraine had hoped to secure Membership Action Plans (MAPs), which would be the next step in achieving full membership, but NATO decided at a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday not to grant MAPs until further reforms had been completed.

As recently as November 27, the Lithuanian parliament adopted a resolution calling on NATO to give MAPs to Ukraine and Georgia.

Riga - Account holders with Latvia's troubled Parex Banka, which is undergoing an emergency nationalization process, had the amount of money they could withdraw capped Tuesday following a decision by the Baltic country's financial regulator.

Under the new restrictions announced by the Financial and Capital Markets Commission (FKTK), individual savers and small companies will be able to withdraw up to
62,000 dollars per month, while large companies will have access to a maximum of 620,000 dollars.

Riga  - The Latvian government rushed to justify its decision to join the UK and Sweden in blocking French proposals to reform the EU's Common Agricultural Policy
(CAP) on Friday.

The Baltic state's agriculture ministry dashed out a special release soon after the vote in an effort to explain why it had broken ranks with its neighbours, Estonia and Lithuania, in the important Brussels vote.

France, the largest single recipient of CAP funds, had proposed mild reforms to the policy which critics say would largely keep subsidies to its farmers intact.

CAP is the largest single item of EU expenditure, accounting for nearly 70 billion dollars annually and is due for renewal when current arrangements expire in 2013.

Riga - A college lecturer arrested by police on charges of attempting to undermine the Latvian economy said Thursday he would be more careful about his public statements in future.

Dmitrijs Smirnovs took part in a discussion in the pages of regional newspaper Ventas Balss on October 2 in which he was highly critical of Latvian central bank policy and advised savers to convert the local currency, the lat, into US dollars.

As a result of his words, the economics expert was detained by police and has been banned from leaving the country pending further enquiries.

Riga - The Latvian government, currently wrestling with a domestic economic crisis, probably isn't on many voters' Christmas card lists this year - which is just as well as the government banned itself from sending Christmas cards Tuesday.

As part of an austerity package designed to cut public spending, only electronic yuletide and New Year greetings will be sent from state institutions, unless departments obtain special permission to send a traditional card.

Civil servants hoping to enjoy a kiss with colleagues under the Christmas mistletoe are in for disappointment too, as the government has also banned spending on official office parties.

Riga  - Latvia could be in line to get around 2.5 billion dollars from the coffers of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Union (EU) according to an economic expert on the Baltic states.

Over the weekend, the IMF confirmed that the Latvian authorities had asked it to provide "technical and financial support" and that it stood "ready to rapidly assist their efforts in the context of a comprehensive economic program."

Neil Shearing of London-based Capital Economics predicted Monday that Latvia's aid package would likely be "much smaller" than the 25 billion-dollar package given to Hungary.