#Winners and #Losers: No Selfies Allowed

The Week in Bad Calls

Winner: North Korea—apparently South Korea’s Unification Ministry has been calling North Korea every day, twice a day (at 9am and 4pm) for the last 18 months, but no one has picked up. Not a good sign. #HotWarsAndColdShoulders

Loser: Latvia—Latvian intelligence services are investigating mysterious outages in Latvia’s cellular network, which coincided with Russia’s war games last month. One of these outages resulted in a 16-hour loss of 911-equivalent services. On the bright side, if you’re Latvian, you now have a great excuse for why you don’t call your mother more often. #DialRForRussia

The Week in Catalan Chaos

Winner: FC Barcelona—the Catalan football club has traditionally avoided taking sides on the secession issue, but it supports a free and fair referendum on Catalan independence. It demanded dialogue between Madrid and Barcelona to resolve the political stalemate, and joined a general strike on Tuesday over the weekend’s violence. The politicization of sports done right. #MoreThanAClub ? (their motto)

Loser: Spanish Prime Minister Marion Rajoy—rather than let the Catalan referendum go ahead and then challenge the integrity of the vote—which Spain has done before, with success—Rajoy’s aggressive crackdown on voters has breathed new life into the movement. Then again, if Rajoy was a savvier politician, it wouldn’t have taken him two inconclusive elections and 10 months to cobble together a minority government. #WritingWasOnTheWall

The Week in Surprise Russian Interventions

Winner: The Iran Nuclear Deal—Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, is urging the Trump administration not to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal. Put another way, Americans need Russians to talk sense into the US president. #ThatsJustWeird

Loser: Selfie-taking Russian Soldiers—Russia is considering banning selfies for its soldiers because (they say) the photos give away military secrets. #GetLotsOfLikesThough

The Week in Politicians Veering Into Other Lanes

Winner: South Korean President Moon Jae-In—Moon went on a local radio station this week to deliver a traffic report as part of his outreach to the South Korean people. The response was generally favorable (i.e. no embarrassing gaffes), and now he has a fallback career if his day job doesn’t work out. #ExpectTraffic

Loser: British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson—in hot water again this week for doling out tourism advice, saying that a Libyan city could become a business and tourist hub once they “clear the dead bodies away.” This comes on the heels of revelations that a visit to a Buddhist temple in Myanmar earlier this year inspired him to launch into a Rudyard Kipling poem that waxes nostalgic about the era of British colonialism. #BadBorisBad

The Week in Gift Giving

Winner: Russian Dissident Alexei Navalny—sentenced to 20 days in jail for planning protests, including one against Putin on the Russian leader’s upcoming birthday. It’s Navalny’s third jailing this year; Navalny described the court ruling as a “birthday present for Putin.” #GulagHumor

Loser: Kids Who Believe in Santa Claus—reported discovery in southern Turkey of the tomb of St. Nicholas, the historical inspiration for Kris Kringle, leading to the New York Post headline “Santa Found Dead.” #DontMeltFrosty 

---------

Be sure to sign up for Signal, arriving in your inbox first thing every Tuesday and Friday morning: eurasiagroup.net/signal.

Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group, foreign affairs columnist at TIME and Global Research Professor at New York University. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.