Latvia's environment minister is being sacked for planning to take part in a march by veterans who sided with the Nazis against the Soviets in World War II, the prime minister's office said Friday.

"No minister has ever attended this event, so it is important the dismissal happens before it takes place, not afterwards," Andis Blinds, spokesman of Prime Minister Laimdota Straujuma, told AFP.

Latvia said Wednesday it expected Egypt to immediately release Al-Jazeera correspondent Peter Greste, a dual Australian-Latvian citizen, charged by Cairo with spreading false information and aiding terrorists.

"We expect his immediate release as he has committed no crime," Latvian foreign ministry spokesman Karlis Eihenbaums told Agence France Presse.

A Ukrainian protester whose account of torture has shocked Europe arrived in Vilnius late Sunday, hours after a Kiev court ruled that he could leave the country for treatment.

Dmytro Bulatov left Ukraine following intense pressure by Western leaders after he appeared on television, his face swollen and caked in blood, and said he had been kidnapped and tortured over his role in protests that have rocked the country.

Latvia's parliament on Wednesday gave the green light to a new center-right coalition government led by its first ever woman prime minister.

Laimdota Straujuma, 62, won the parliamentary vote after Valdis Dombrovskis stepped down over a supermarket roof collapse that killed dozens in the capital Riga in November.

Latvia's prime minister resigned on Wednesday, in the wake of a supermarket roof cave-in that killed 54 people, just weeks before the country enters the eurozone.

The political thunderbolt announced by Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis effectively put an end to Latvia's government.

Latvia mourned its dead Saturday after rescuers spent a second night looking for survivors in the rubble of a Riga supermarket whose roof collapsed, killing at least 52.

The latest body was hauled out at dawn and hopes of finding anyone alive were dwindling nearly two days after the worst disaster since Latvia's 1991 independence.

Rescuers in Riga retrieved bodies from a collapsed supermarket Friday and combed the rubble for survivors as the death toll from Latvia's worst post-Soviet disaster mounted to 45.

The roof of the Maxima supermarket smashed down on customers during peak shopping hours around 6:00 pm on Thursday in the Riga suburb of Zolitude.

The tiny Baltic state of Latvia received the green light from its European partners Tuesday to become the 18th member of the eurozone from next year.

In what Latvia's prime minister Valdis Dombrovskis described as a "good day for Latvia and also for Europe," the ECOFIN council -- made up of the economy and finance ministers of the EU's 28 member states -- gave formal approval to the country's euro membership.

Latvians gathered across the Baltic nation Monday to remember the tens of thousands of their countrymen deported to Siberia during half a century of Soviet occupation.

With 42,000 Latvians hauled off in cattle trucks on March 25, 1949 alone, the date is now Communist Genocide Memorial Day in Latvia, an EU member of two million people.

Lying face down in deep snow, naked, in bone chilling sub-zero weather is enough to make anyone think twice.

But such are the extremes required to penetrate the mysteries of the "pirts" - Latvia's little-known and complex interpretation of what is known in other parts of the world as the sauna, banya, hammam, Roman bath or Native American sweat lodge.