President Dalia Grybauskaitė extended congratulations to Her Majesty Queen Silvia of Sweden on the celebration of her 70th birthday. The President wished her happiness, continued good health and every success in her very important charity activities.

Financial market fraudsters across the EU could face jail under rules agreed by negotiators from the European Parliament and member states in a bid to restore confidence in the EU's financial markets and boost investor protection.

President Dalia Grybauskaitė met with the Secretary-General of the Council of the European Union, Uwe Corsepius, who handed over to Lithuania a package of documents and photos about its EU integration as a special end-of presidency gift.

Mobile phone manufacturers will be obliged to provide a common battery charger in order to cut cost and waste. The common charger is part of a provisional deal on radio equipment rules struck by MEPs and the Lithuanian Presidency of the Council of Ministers on Thursday. Agreement was also reached on cutting red tape and more robust market surveillance.

On Thursday morning, the first plane of Belarusian Airlines BelAvia to Minsk departed from Lithuania's capital Vilnius.

During the holiday season from the 20th of December to the 5th of January Air Lituanica will be carrying flights from the airports of Vilnius and Palanga in Lithuania to London (Gatwick) and Dublin. Due to the increased passenger flows at this festive time, Air Lituanica would like to warn its clients to plan their time in advance and arrive at the flight registration desks earlier. The company also wishes to inform its passengers that currently each of the main flights introduced to provide Lithuanians with the means to visit their relatives in Lithuania, London or Dublin can still accommodate from 5 to 10 passengers.

President's wife Alma Adamkiene ascertained for the portal Delfi that her husband Former Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus was hospitalized in Vilnius University Hospital Santariskiu Clinics.

On Saturday, the end of Lithuania's Presidency of the EU Council was marked at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonic by Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde.

Nine years ago many European politicians, including (or maybe first of all) the ones in the European Parliament, caught a 'Ukrainian fever'. Wherefore lots of them were wearing orange scarfs for this reason. Fortunately, it went away as fast as the bird flu, which then threatened Europeans. As it turns out, the recurrence of symptoms came up years later. This time it is a 'Ukrainian panic'. And what is needed here is a cold head, factual diagnosis, calculation of profits and loss, as namely this is the basis of international politics.

The European Parliament should consent to a trade deal with the US only if it makes no reference to data protection, says its Civil Liberties Committee in the preliminary conclusions of its inquiry into surveillance of EU citizens by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and EU member states, tabled by lead MEP Claude Moraes (S&D, UK) on Wednesday. The draft text also calls for the swift creation of an EU data storage "cloud" and judicial redress for EU citizens to protect their data in the US.