There’s a list for everything. Here’s one of top Brexit figures I found in a Guardian article by Dan Roberts:

1. Theresa May, British prime minister.
2. Angela Merkel, German chancellor.
3. Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish first minister.
4. Michel Barnier, chief Brexit negotiator for the European Commission.
5. Donald Tusk, European Council president.
6. François Hollande, French president.
7. Philip Hammond, British chancellor.
8. David Davis, British Brexit secretary.
9. Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission.
10. Guy Verhofstadt, MEP and lead rapporteur on Brexit for the European Parliament.

The one person I’m surprised by in this list is Nicola Sturgeon. Brexit has really made her the face of a confident Scotland. I wouldn't be surprised if she were to succeed in quitting the United Kingdom and re-entering the European Union.

French president François Hollande announced live on television tonight that he will not be running for re-election next spring, The Local reports.

The no-camp seems to be ahead as Italians tomorrow go to the ballot boxes. In this referendum, voters will be asked whether they approve of amending the Italian Constitution to reform the appointment and powers of the Parliament of Italy. Despite this being a very domestic issue, Europhobes everywhere want a “no” to be about the European Union and the euro.

Collection of data from the latest opinion polls (Wikipedia).

Date	Hofer	Van der Bellen
17/11	49%	51%
16/11	52%	48%
11/11	51%	49%
4/11	51%	49%
3/11	52%	48%

“Austria’s long and ugly presidential campaign drew to a close Saturday, with a confident far-right aiming to emulate Donald Trump and Brexit campaigners by dealing a hammer-blow to Vienna’s centrist establishment,” The Local reports. “A victory on Sunday for Norbert Hofer from the anti-immigration and EU-critical Freedom Party (FPÖ) would make him Europe’s first far-right elected president since 1945.”

“The leaders of Italy’s most popular political party, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, have built a sprawling network of websites and social media accounts that are spreading fake news, conspiracy theories, and pro-Kremlin stories to millions of people,” Alberto Nardelli and Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed write.

“Austria’s Freedom Party conceded defeat Sunday in its bid to elect Europe’s first far-right president, as projections showed its candidate Norbert Hofer lagging behind in a bitterly fought election re-run,” The Local reports. “Greens-backed independent Alexander Van der Bellen, 72, swept 53.6 percent of the votes, while his rival of the anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPOe) received 46.4 percent, projections showed.”

Exit polls predict defeat for Italy’s prime minister in today’s constitutional referendum, The Local reports.

“It is believed that the size of women’s pelvises and the size of babies’ heads were finely balanced over millions of years of human evolution, with hips unable to dip below a certain width if babies were to survive,” Sky News writes. “But the increased use of caesarean sections means all that is changing because women with hips of any size can now give birth to babies of any size.”

“Everyone, including EU nationals, will have their IDs checked against police databases under new draft rules every time they enter or exit the EU,” Nikolaj Nielsen of the EU Observer reports.

“I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not fall into—no offense intended—the sickness of coprophilia, that is, always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things, even if they are true,” the Pope has told Belgian magazine Tertio according to William Cummings of USA Today. “And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, a lot of damage can be done.”

The interview is available in full English version at the Vatican’s website.

Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller of the Washington Post report:

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

Forget President Trump, King Putin soon rules the White House.

“President-elect Donald Trump said in an interview airing Sunday that ‘nobody really knows’ the facts about climate change,” Ryan J. Reilly of the Huffington Post reports.

Sher Watts Spooner of Daily Kos brings on the dystopian mood.

“Without doubt, abstinence on one day in the week, so far as the exigencies of life permit, from the usual daily occupation, though in no respect religiously binding on any except Jews, is a highly beneficial custom” (On Liberty, p 170).

“Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference,” Brady Dennis of the Washington Post writes.

“The European Union needs to act fast to meet a coming onslaught of Farage, Trump, Putin and Johnson,” Adrian Taylor of EU Observer writes.

He’s right.

“FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. are in agreement with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the presidency,” Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima od the Washington Post report.

Russia is winning Cold War 2.0 on walkover.

This article by Stephanie McCrummen of the Washington Post somehow makes a top politician very humane.

In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the river Styx that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead.

Two events will make this date a black one in future history books:

• Truck drives into crowd at Berlin Christmas market, several injured and at least one person, Deutsche Welle reports.
• At least nine people have died and more than 50 were injured after a truck drove into a Christmas market in Berlin, The Local reports.
• Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, was assassinated at an art exhibition in the Turkish capital of Ankara, Hürriyet Daily News reports.

“If you, a straight guy from the country, once in a while have sex with other straight guys from the country, it doesn’t threaten your straight, rural identity as much as it would if instead you, for example, traveled to the nearest major metro area and tried to pick up dudes at a gay bar,” Jesse Singal of New York Magazine writes.

“The Scottish government has unveiled plans to stay within the EU single market after the UK triggers Brexit,” Deutsche Welle reports.

“There’s a lot of evidence that there are now targeted attempts to massively attack Merkel, including with bots,” says Simon Hegelich, a political scientist at Munich’s Technical University who has studied the manipulation of social networks, according to Stefan Nicola of Bloomberg. “A lot of accounts that pretty obviously are pro-Trump bots are now joining the anti-Merkel debate.”

“The Prince of Wales has warned that the rise of populist extremism and intolerance towards other faiths risks repeating the ‘horrors’ of the Holocaust,” Matthew Weaver of the Guardian writes.

The prince is absolutely right. There are significant differences between what is happening in Europe now and what happened in the 1930s, but the idea that people are collectively responsible is the same.

Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast writes that no one knows what the soon-to-be president of the United States means by this tweet:

@realDonaldTrump: The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes. (2016-12-22 08:50)

“Pop superstar George Michael has died peacefully at home,” The Telegraph reports. “The 53-year-old, who was set to release a documentary in 2017, rose to fame as a member of Wham!, known for their hits Club Tropicana and Last Christmas.”

Ben Jacobs of the Guardian writes:

Assange, who briefly hosted his own talkshow on the state-owned television network Russia Today, has long had a close relationship with the Putin regime. In his interview with la Repubblica, he said there was no need for WikiLeaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there.

“In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs and Kremlin critics, such as [Alexey] Navalny, are part of that spectrum,” he said. “There are also newspapers like Novaya Gazeta, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks.”

Dozens of journalists have been killed in Russia in the past two decades, and Freedom House considers the Russian press to be “not free” and notes: “The main national news agenda is firmly controlled by the Kremlin. The government sets editorial policy at state-owned television stations, which dominate the media landscape and generate propagandistic content.”

I cannot understand how so many are still fooled by this Putin-puppy of a man.

Pete Dexter and Jeff Nale of The Daily Beast trash Bill O’Reilly’s new book—and I love it:

The book is a mess. O’Reilly and his co-writer Martin Dugard write sentences without life—flat, passive, riddled with clichés, sometimes four or five of them crammed into a single short paragraph. O’Reilly moves mindlessly from the present tense to the past and then back again, possibly it was someone’s idea of a cure for dead sentences.

His research—what he calls “the truth”—isn’t fresh, but then, real historians and writers have spent years studying and dramatizing the war in the Pacific. What O’Reilly has done is read the Cliff’s Notes and written your term paper for thirty bucks.

“Opponents of same-sex marriage yesterday vowed to continue their fight and put the issue to a referendum, after a legislative committee gave preliminary approval to Civil Code amendments that would legalise gay marriages,” Shelley Shan of Taipei Times reports. “Both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage gathered outside the Legislative Yuan in Taipei early in the morning as the Organic Laws and Statutes Committee reviewed proposed amendments to the Civil Code.”

Britain’s Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström all made it to Simon Wiesenthal Center’s top ten list. Well done, bigots!

“Those who glorify the young today do them a great disservice, when this sends inexperienced young people out into the world cocksure about things on which they have barely scratched the surface” (Townhall, 2016-12-27).

“We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish” (The Road to Serfdom).

Another year comes to an end. Somehow, many of us delude ourselves into thinking that next year will be better or, at least, different. But time just moves on. Anyhow, I wish whomever reads this a happy new year. The new year, 2017, will have some interesting events. There are elections coming up in several European countries, some of which could have a devastating effect on the EU; and we still have to see what Trump in the White House will actually mean for America and the world. It could be one hell of a ride…