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Lithuanian artist Jolanta Smidtiene designed this 42-foot-tall Christmas tree made of 32,000 plastic beverage bottles. It’s displayed in the town square in Kaunas, Lithuania. See more pictures at Laughing Squid. Link
Link to Lithuanian source.
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Arturas Zuokas, mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, had enough. The mayor was so fed up with illegal parking that he took a spin in a Russian armored personnel carrier, crushing an illegally parked Mercedes along the way.
He said: ”I wanted to send a clear message that people with big and expensive cars can’t park wherever they feel like and ignore the rights of pedestrians and bike riders.
”It shows a lack of respect and won’t be tolerated. Of course, you have to have a sense of humour in my line of work and I thought this would be a way of drawing attention to the fact that the city intends to be proactive in its fight against illegal parking.”
That’s at least one driver who won’t be parking in the wrong place anymore. Link -via Arbroath
Quick,
what comes to mind when we mention "Lithuania." Nothing (besides
a mayor who destroys illegally
parked car)?
See, that's the problem that three businessmen from the country is trying to fix:
"If I say chocolate and watches, what do you think? Switzerland. If I say Guinness and Leprechauns? Ireland. Fish and chips? England,” Mr Rutkauskas told The Guardian.
“But here in Lithuania we don't have an internationally recognised symbol of our identity. Yet.”
Their solution? A national scent:
They claim the “national perfume" – which is more an air freshener – was a crude attempt to create the “scent of Lithuania”.
The scent is a mix of bergamot, wild flowers, ginger, raspberry and grapefruit.
It is added with base notes of amber, cedar, sandalwood, patchouli and "tree moss and tree smoke”.The £25 scent was released on the market earlier this year and more than 1,000 bottles have since been sold.
What a great idea! New Jersey should jump at this opportunity: Link
To many wealthy Lithuanians, it was just a fancy horseback riding academy. But horses aren’t the only things kept in the barn: the CIA had built a secret prison there, where they interrogated (or tortured, your choice of word) suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.
ABC News has the story:
The CIA constructed the prison over the next several months, apparently flying in prefabricated elements from outside Lithuania. The prison opened in Sept. 2004.
According to sources who saw the facility, the riding academy originally consisted of an indoor riding area with a red metallic roof, a stable and a cafe. The CIA built a thick concrete wall inside the riding area. Behind the wall, it built what one Lithuanian source called a "building within a building."
On a series of thick concrete pads, it installed what a source called "prefabricated pods" to house prisoners, each separated from the other by five or six feet. Each pod included a shower, a bed and a toilet. Separate cells were constructed for interrogations.
Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara was stationed in Lithuania when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Thousands of Jewish refugees came to the consulate seeking travel documents in order to escape the Nazis. Sugihara’s superiors in Tokyo ordered him not to issue any travel visas.
Sugihara discussed the plan with his wife Yukiko and decided to risk his career and his entire future by defying his superiors. The couple then spent 29 days issuing travel visas, up to 300 a day, as thousands of refugees stood in line at his office. Yukiko would prepare and register the visas while Chiune Sugihara would sign and stamp them, hour after hour, without breaking for meals. They would work late into the night until Yukiko would massage her husband’s weary hands in preparation for the next day. Sugihara was under orders to leave, which he could no longer delay. The family departed on September 1st, but he kept signing visas even as he boarded the train. Sugihara then tossed his official stamp out to the crowd, as he hadn’t time to stamp them all.
Sugihara’s actions enabled around 6,000 Jewish refugees to escape the Holocaust. For his efforts, Sugihara was imprisoned by the Soviets and fired from his job by the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Read the entire story at mental_floss. Link
