39-year-old Hungarian Pál Dárdai has been elected as top coach of the autumn season in the first division of the German football (soccer) championship Bundesliga. He finished ahead of André Schubert (Mönchengladbach) and Thomas Tuchel (Dortmund).

Cherishing a German tradition adopted in Hungary in the 1990s, two representatives of the Budapest municipal chimney sweep service visited Hungarian President János Áder in the Sándor Palace to wish him and the Hungarian nation Happy New Year.

On behalf of all the staff here at Diplomacy & Trade - and Budapest Week Publishing - we wish a very Happy and Prosperous New Year for 2016 to our readers - print and online - wherever they may be in Hungary or anywhere else in the world!

Mild winter has ended in Hungary and temperatures have dropped by 8-10 degrees Celcius due to an anticyclone arriving to the Carpathian Basin from Scandinavia. As a result, the minimum temperature will be under freezing point for the new few weeks.

Hungarian-Serbian striker, Nemanja Nikolic has been named by Canal Plus of Poland as the best player of Ekstraklasa, the Polish football (soccer) first division in the autumn season. Playing for the club Legia Warsaw, Nikolic scored 21 goals in 21 matches.

A lot of foreigners spend Christmas in the Hungarian capital. Hotels in Budapest are full in this Christmas season. According to tourism experts, the city is visited this time of the year by people mainly from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Austria.

The first Hungarian lung transplant operation - that took place on December 12, 2015 - was successful. The news was announced this Saturday in the National Istitute of Oncology in Budapest by the Director-General of the Institute, Dr Miklós Kásler.

The Hungarian government instructed its ministries to cancel their contracts with Magyar Telekom after the company broke its sponsorship contract with pop singer Ákos Kovács for his words on women in a television interview.

The Hungarian Olympic Committee (HOC) celebrates the 120th anniversary of its establishment on December 19th this year. On this occasion, a gala evening took place in the Hungarian Opera House with the participation of IOC President Thomas Bach.

Hungary, drawn from pot 3, will play in Group F against Portugal, Austria and Iceland at the European Football (soccer) Championships in France in the summer of 2016, according the results of the draw that took place in Paris this Saturday.

Sporting Kansas City forward Krisztián Németh won the 2015 AT&T Goal of the Year award in the Major League Soccer (MLS), the United States football (soccer) championship. Just two moths ago, he was was named his club's best newcomer this season.

An investigation of Hungary’s central tobacco distributing company by the European Commission takes more time than it was originally expected, but it is not by chance the EU executive is taking its time to look into the matter, portfolio.hu quotes a local paper.

Thousands of people have gathered in the Hungarian capital this Sunday for the demonstration 'Climate March Budapest' ahead of the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change held in Paris between November 30 and December 11.

The City Park Ice Rink, the largest public ice rink in Europe opened its gates for the new winter season in Budapest this Wednesday. Originally opened in 1870, and reopened after renovation in December 2011, the rink offers 12 thousand square metres of ice surface.

This past week-end saw the first snow of the season on higher-lying areas of Hungary as temperatures dropping following an unseasonable mild weather lasting for the past few weeks. However, the 5-10-centimeter snow is not suitable for skiing.