One of the biggest airlines in the world, Turkish Airlines, is opening a customer service centre in Vilnius to service its clients in Scandinavian and Baltic countries.

A Public Private Partnership (PPP) project to reconstruct the A14 Vilnius-Utena highway has received approval from the European Investment Bank (EIB) and is set to receive financing from the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI). The total sum of the loan is to be capped at EUR 40 million and will have a 12 year term.

Amber Grid will this week ask the EU Innovation Network Executive Agency (INEA) to extend Gas Interconnector Poland-Lithuania (GIPL) financing agreements after Poland and, later, Lithuania pushed back the expected completion date for the joint pipeline project by two years and a half.

On September 27-29 first national cyber security exercise Cyber Shield 2016 will take place in Lithuania. Over 100 representatives of more than 40 Lithuanian state, cyber incident management and investigation, scientific, energy, communications operators, and other agencies, will practice responding to cyber incidents at the exercise.

President of Lithuania and Chair of the Council of Women World Leaders Dalia Grybauskaitė hosted a high-level discussion aimed at focusing international attention on the economic cost of violence against women at the United Nations General Assembly.

An administrative building of Lithuania's bankrupt bank Snoras in Tallinn has been sold for 1.377 mln euros to Estonia's real estate investment company EE Estate Berlin Invest.

On September 21 a team of military instructors formed mainly by military personnel assigned to the Lithuanian Grand Duke Kęstutis Mechanised Infantry Battalion, Motorised Infantry Brigade Žemaitija, was formally deployed to Ukraine. The troops will continue Lithuania’s participation in the United States-led Joint Multinational Training Group – Ukraine.

On September 15, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the Municipality of Vilnius signed the first part of a EUR 50 million loan facility to support the city’s investment programme for the coming years.

The community of VMU as well as the entire country have been deeply shaken by a great loss: we are mourning for Professor Leonidas Donskis, a respectable and beloved colleague, friend and academic, and one of the most prominent thinkers of Lithuania. Professor Donskis was a philosopher, political theorist, historian of ideas, social analyst, political commentator and defender of human rights and civil liberties. He was a professor of Political Science and Head of VMU Academia Cum Laude at Vytautas Magnus University.

Gazprom, which lost most of the Lithuanian market this year, will not hold a second auction of gas sales to the Baltic states, but Lithuania's energy minister and market players say this will not cause any problems to the country, which will continue buying gas from Norway's Statoil and other suppliers, or from the Russian gas giant under direct contracts.