President Dalia Grybauskaitė is attending a high level EU conference on unemployment issues organized by Italy which is now at the helm of the Council of the European Union. At the conference, EU leaders and heads of state and government of member states, social security and labour ministers and representatives of workers and employers are sharing experience and discussing ways to boost employment, promote youth entrepreneurship and speed up implementation of existing tools to fight unemployment.

On Wednesday, 8 October, President Dalia Grybauskaitė will travel to Milan to attend a high level EU conference on unemployment issues. The conference is organized by Italy which holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union for this half of the year.

European Parliament president Martin Schulz was in Lampedusa Friday to mark the first anniversary of the tragedy on 3 October 2013 when 366 migrants lost their lives trying to reach the small island off the Sicilian coast. While in Lampedusa the president will also meet the families of victims and participate in a conference on the Mediterranean's migration crisis.

The vetting of president-elect Jean-Claude Juncker's team by Parliament's committees commenced on Monday 29 September. 21 of the 27 commissioners-designate have now been heard by MEPs who had the opportunity to quiz the candidates on their competence and expertise for the portfolios assigned to them. Read our summary here of what has happened thus far.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius visited Klaipeda on Wednesday and praised the region for being among economically most potent ones in Lithuania. Butkevicius added that it has a great potential to attract investments.

On 30 September, representatives of the President of Afghanistan and NATO signed the Status of Forces Agreement providing a legal basis for the new NATO training mission Resolute Support as of January 1, 2015.

Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Linas Linkevicius met with ambassadors of the European Union member states residing in Lithuania and discussed regional security, international policy and other most important issues of the EU.

The hearings of the commissioners-designates of the new European Commission are starting in the European Parliament. Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis, representative of Lithuania to the position of Commissioner for Health, will be questioned by MEPs on Tuesday, 30th September.

The 27 candidates hoping to be part of the European Commission led by Jean-Claude Juncker start appearing at hearings at the European Parliament today. During the three-hour hearings EP committees will test the candidate commissioners' expertise and competences ahead of the EP voting on whether to approve the new Commission on 22 October. The hearings will be shown live on our website and can also be followed on various other platforms. Read on to find out how.

According to Statistics Lithuania, the number of members of political parties increased by more than 6,000 in 2013 and reached 114,100 people by the end of the year. In other words, 4.7% of all adults were members of political parties.