Almost the same picture taken near Rosenthalerplatz in two different seasons in Berlin.

Following my post yesterday, I kept digging into the data published by the Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg. I wanted to discover where most of the "Foreign" Europeans living in Berlin come from. Since the European Union agreement allows the free movement of people across member states, I was expecting that the number 1 slot would be taken by a country within the EU borders. Actually, it’s Turkey that has the most immigrants living in Berlin, with almost 100k people:

Now the second and third positions are from countries in the European Union: Poland and Italy. This is followed by one of the newcomers in the union: Bulgaria.

The Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg publishes some very interesting reports including: Einwohnerinnen und Einwohner im Land Berlin (Residents in the State of Berlin, 31 December 2014). One of the remarkable sections of this document is about the country of origin of the foreign residents living in Berlin. It offers a breakdown by continents, regions, and countries, so I was curious about the top countries in South America:

I'm not surprised to discover Brazil (3948 people) is #1 on the list, but I wasn't expecting that Colombia (1527) was going to be the second one in that region. Interesting.

I have to confess I had never heard about the Zika virus until I started reading about it in some Colombian newspaper articles a couple of weeks ago. The outbreak of this virus in South America and the Caribbean has been in the international news lately because infection in pregnant women is unfortunately associated with microcephaly.

The incidence of those malformations has increased substantially in Brazil and it is apparently related to Zika, so there are now travel warnings in place to the countries affected by this virus:

This morning I was reading the Corruption Perceptions Index 2015 published by Transparency International (transparency.org). This organization fights for a world in which government, business, civil society and the daily lives of people are free of corruption and publishes this report that quantifies perceptions of corruption in the public sector and normalizes the data from multiple countries in an index from 0 (the most corrupt) to 100 (the least corrupt).

In South America, Chile and Uruguay had the highest scores, while Venezuela had the lowest.

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