Juan Convers

Finally 2016 is ending. As John Oliver mentioned in the last episode of his last week tonight show, 2016 has been a pretty shitty year. There were so many musical and movie legends passing away (David Bowie, Alan RIckman, Prince, Gene Wilder, Leonard Cohen, Carrie FIsher, Debbie Reynolds and George Michael) and Europe experienced terror in many cities including Nice, Istanbul, Brussels and Berlin.

On the other hand the populists and far right anti-immigrant movements gained a lot of traction in Europe and America. The popular vote brought many unexpected outcomes including the Brexit victory despite the Scottish and Northern Irish opposition, the Colombian plebiscite rejection to the peace agreement reached in Cuba and finally the astonishing Trump victory on the electoral college, even though he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots.

The only silver lining of this year was the historic Paris Agreement on climate change. Let's hope this doesn't change in 2017 (cough trump), since that will make it a horrible year as well.

Looking at the final 2016 US presidential election results, it's remarkable how bad trump lost in California. 8.7 million vs 4.4 million votes. It's not surprising that on the days after the election the #calexit hashtag started to trend. Clinton won the popular vote, so many Americans will feel underrepresented based on the electoral college system they have in place, but nowhere this is more dramatic than in California.

Interesting dataset from Eurostats regarding personal transfer inflow / outflow across the European Union. On one hand France has biggest negative balance and on the other side Poland has the biggest positive one.

This morning I was talking to my father in law and he mentioned he wanted to check out the Synagogue in Basel. I had no idea there was such a building in the city, but I checked online and discovered there is a neo-Byzantine domed structure indeed, originally constructed in 1868 and enlarged in 1892. Above there is a picture of this Synagogue.

This weekend I did a small city break to the Bulgarian capital. On my last day before coming back to Berlin I experienced my first snowing of 2016 and it was quite a big one as you can see on this picture of the Sveta Nedelya cathedral.

Next page