My plate’s pretty full, so I’ll only give the highlights here. By a vote of 88–8 with 25 abstensions, the Seimas passed the new dual citizenship law today. They hope that a verdict on its constitutionality will be given by the Constitutional Court before the law goes into effect. The law, languishing in negotiation for [...]
Continue reading about Seimas passes controversial dual citizenship law
Yesterday brought an unexpected article from alfa.lt. The Foreign Minister of the Republic of Lithuania, Audronius Ažubalis, was saying that “any comments he may have made about Jewish issues and the citizenship law have been misrepresented.” The rest of the article only quotes the rest of the press release, which cryptically makes refefrence to Ažubalis’s [...]
Continue reading about Dual citizenship is nought but a Jewish plot
The conservative Eastern European dogma of “dual genocide,” which argues that (take your pick) the hammer and sickle is equal to the swastika or that red is equal to brown, was denounced in a sympathetic Jonathan Freedland article in The Guardian a few days ago.1 Freedland tries to understand the Lithuanian motivation of trying to [...]
Continue reading about “Dual Genocide” condemned in UK paper; paper subsequently condemned
Tomukas asked on Twitter on Monday: 3M vėl be Marijono per krepšininkų sutikimą, per didelio honoraro užsiprašė? I didn’t really think about the question that much until I saw this morning’s post by Užkalnis on Marijono Mikutavičiaus “redemption.” Apparently Mikutavičiaus decision not to perform his (sports) anthem “Trys milijonai” at the celebration in Vilnius commemorating [...]
Continue reading about On Mikutavičius, not singing “Trys milijonai,” and cultural patrimony
I’ve been asked about a few updates to the dual citizenship project that was called about a year ago by outgoing president Valdas Adamkus. The idea was to figure out a way to grant dual citizenship to emigrants, whose foreign born babies would be dual citizens, without going afoul of the Constitutional Court’s decision back [...]
Other versions: VO [no subtitles] | YouTube | YouTube (VO) | Facebook | Soundcloud (Radio Edit) [mp3] After watching each permutation of the “East European Funk” video several times in order to write about the song in the lead up to the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest, I was rather infected by the song’s catchiness.1 So [...]
I don’t usually use this space to advertise things I’m doing, mostly since I tend not to do things that I think deserve attention. But since this project is closely related to some recent posts on this site, and since, well, this is my site, I think I can tease it here: The reveal from [...]
Today the news reported that the Vilnius municipal government, under pressure from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is renaming K. Sirvydo gatvė after Lech Kaczyński, who now everyone knows perished over the weekend in a surprising plane crash outside of Smolensk on the way to a memorial service of the Polish officers who were killed [...]
As the European Broadcast Union determines whether “Eastern European Funk,” in suggesting inequality between eastern and western Europeans, suffers from having political content, Lietuvos Rytas yesterday published an article by Andrius Užkalnis that argues a similar point of inequality, but from the entirely opposite direction. Užkalnis, the most famous Lithuanian living in England now that [...]
Continue reading about You are William the Conqueror, not Vilius the Vergas!
Because of the victory in Eurovision 2008 by the Timbaland-produced “Believe” (video of Dima Bilan’s semi-final performance, featuring ice skating by Evgenij Pljushchenko), the 2009 edition of the European Song Contest was hosted by Russia (the victor each year hosts the following year’s competition). Georgia, who had, of course, recently fought a brief war with [...]