Airlines Resume Flights
With airlines in various world cities resuming more flights, Lithuania’s airports expect to be offering about 40 destinations in May. According to Lietuvos Oro Uostai, which manages the country’s three international airports, eight new destinations are opening up from Vilnius airport and six from Kaunas this month. On April 30, Aeroflot resumed flights between Vilnius and Moscow. Ryanair will be offering connections to Athens, Paris and Oslo from mid-May.
Other airlines will be flying from Vilnius to Barcelona, Dortmund, Dublin, London Stansted, and Larnaca in Turkey. From Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city, Wizzair will be offering connections to two destinations in Norway, Ålesund and Stavanger. Other airlines will connect Kaunas to Alicante in Spain, the Greek island of Rhodes, and Pahos in Cyprus. On May 31, Wizzair is resuming flights between Kaunas and Norway’s Bergen. All destinations from Lithuania’s airports are listed at https://www.vilnius-airport.lt.
Dual Citizenship for Canadian Basketball Star
Ignas Brazdeikis, a Lithuanian-born Canadian professional basketball player, has had his Lithuanian citizenship restored. The 22-year-old athlete was allowed to keep both nationalities due to amendments to Lithuania’s citizenship law. “His citizenship has been restored because the amendments allowing children who were born Lithuanian citizens, but later acquired the citizenship of another state, to keep both citizenships came into force on January 1,” said Evelina Gudžinskaitė, head of the Migration Department.
The amendments to the Law on Citizenship allow minors who acquired their Lithuanian citizenship by birth to claim their right to dual citizenship regardless of when they acquired the citizenship of another country. Before that, the right to dual citizenship could only be claimed by minors who acquired their dual citizenship by birth.
Brazdeikis was born in Lithuania’s Kaunas in 1999, and migrated with his parents to the US when he was three. He later moved to Canada and was granted Canadian citizenship.
Last week, the player signed a 10-day contract with the NBA’s Orlando Magic.
International Media Conference
The restitution of Free Lithuanian Press celebrated on May 7 is the backdrop for an international conference held at the Lithuanian Seimas (parliament) on May 6-7. The topic is Current Media Challenges and Maintaining Independent, Professional Media in Lithuania. A Media Council was formed under the Ministry of Culture in 2017 to establish national news policy for 2019-2022. A document signed by the Culture Minister in 2019 indicated that the financing of quality news content is insufficient. However both media and consumers have not seen adequate steps taken. The conference is meant to concretize the Council’s guidelines, with the participation of Culture Minister Simonas Kairys, president of the European Journalists’ Federation Mogens Blicher Bjerregård and representatives of the Lithuanian Journalists’ Association as well as local and cultural press.
