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In a breakthrough that will give the British people one more chance to weigh in on the tortured question of Brexit, the UK Parliament – after a series of baroque machinations – agreed late yesterday to hold a general election on December 12.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has pushed for this vote (four times now!) because he's gambling that his Conservative Party can win the majority he needs to push through his Brexit deal before the newly-extended deadline to leave the EU hits on January 31. Although his party leads in the polls (some even show the Conservatives up by double digits), there is no shortage of risks for him—the polls could just be wrong (as they were when his predecessor Theresa May tried to cushion her own parliamentary majority by calling a snap election in 2017, only to actually lose seats), or voters could hold Johnson, and his entire Conservative party by extension, responsible for the endless anguish of Brexit. Some Britons will even treat this as a de facto second Brexit referendum instead of a national election since there are no guarantees they will have another chance to make their voices heard.

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Syria is quickly turning into US President Donald Trump's most significant foreign policy blunder to date. It's looking like it might be for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, too.

On Monday, the Trump administration announced a fresh wave of sanctions on Turkey, in a bid to get Erdogan to halt his invasion of Kurdish-controlled territory in Syria. Yes, you may recall, that's the same invasion that the US green-lit last week by withdrawing American troops from the area.

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The speeches may be boring, but the annual UN General Assembly (UNGA) allows world leaders the chance, if they want it, to meet one-on-one to talk about sensitive topics. Crossing paths in UN corridors allows for freer conversation than formal bilateral summits with all their protocols and political pitfalls.

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When Donald Trump first started talking about buying Greenland last week, we figured it was a weird story with less legs than a Harp seal.

Signal readers, we were wrong. President Trump was so serious about purchasing the autonomous Danish territory that this week he abruptly cancelled a trip to Denmark after the country's prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, labelled the idea "absurd."

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European Parliament elections in May didn't go well for Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras as his radical-turned-mushy-left Syriza party was drubbed by the resurgent center-right New Democracy (ND) party by 9.3 points. The scale of the loss prompted Tsipras to call national elections early to staunch the political bleeding.

It didn't work. His party lost to ND and its US-educated, pro-market leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis this weekend by more than 8 percentage points; that's a large enough margin for New Democracy to secure a return to political power, as well as a comfortable majority in Greece's parliament.

Greece's New Prime Minister Is 'Cautiously Optimistic' 10 Years After the Debt Crisis

Some key points for consideration beyond the headlines you'll be reading this week:

This next one will be the most stable Greek government we'll see for a while. For years, one of the defining features of the Greek electoral system was the 50-seat bonus the first-place party received in Greece's 300-member parliament for, well, coming in first. The idea was that the bonus would help provide a political cushion for the governing party and the political space it needs to move its agenda forward.

But in 2016, Syriza abolished the 50-seat bonus, arguing that it's undemocratic (which has a certain logic to it). Changes to Greece's election laws must be grandfathered in though, so this round of elections kept the 50-bonus-seat system in place, and the next one will do away with it.

As it is, Greek governments have struggled to stay in power, particularly given the politically ugly choices they've had to make (this was the fifth snap election since 2012), and given the depth of Greece's crisis, plenty more tough decisions will be needed in the coming years. Structurally speaking, this new Mitsotakis-led government is looking like the last with any kind of political crutch to stand on.

The return of political protests? When Greece first started implementing austerity measures demanded by its international creditors (primarily the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, aka "the Troika"), it was beset by large-scale protests that caused millions in property damage in downtown Athens on a semi-regular basis. Those protests largely died down once Tsipras took office—his critics accused him of having been the driving force behind those original protests, while his supporters argued that the protests died down because the Greek people recognized they finally had a prime minister in Tsipras that was willing to fight for them.

It could also be that the Greek people just got protest-fatigue. Regardless, the return of New Democracy—one of the two establishment parties that first drove Greece into its current mess—has the potential to touch off the kind of political violence the country hasn't seen since Syriza took power in 2015.

The comeback kids. But if there's a bigger lesson for the world to take away from Greek elections this Sunday, it's this: even populist movements run out of steam. Syriza was one of the very first populist governments to come to power, though its electoral victory was mostly written off as a product of Greece's unusually dire circumstances rather than as part of a larger anti-Establishment movement rippling around the world.

Whatever the reason, Syriza was unable to deliver on its lofty promises of rolling back austerity measures and bending Brussels to its will. It's not enough to make promises; you also have to deliver.

And four years later, the Greek people decided to bring back the party in office before Syriza stormed to power (albeit one that's under new leadership).

It's a reminder that populism, like politics generally, is cyclical.

UPDATE: This text has been updated to reflect Mitsotakis' victory in the election.

7: US negotiators sat down with the Taliban for a 7th round of peace talks over the weekend, amid ongoing violence in the country. Two US special forces soldiers were killed in a firefight with Taliban fighters last week.

121: It's been 121 months since the US emerged from the steep recession that followed the financial crisis in June 2009. That's the longest economic expansion in US history.

31: Japan resumed commercial whaling on Monday, ending a 31-year hiatus. The move follows Japan's withdrawal from the International Whaling Commission, a global conservation organization that passed a moratorium on whale hunting in the 1980s. Japan insists it can whale in an environmentally responsible way, but the move has sparked criticism from activists.

72: Just 72 percent of people in North America (and 73 percent of Northern Europeans) think vaccines are safe. Contrast that with the 95 percent of South Asians and the 92 percent of East Africans who agree with that statement. Overall, 79 percent of the world believes vaccines are safe to administer. #FirstWorldProblems

40,000: The US beer industry has lost some 40,000 jobs since 2016, according to an industry study. The main driver seems to be the Trump administration's aluminum tariffs, which have raised the price of beer cans, cutting into companies' profits.

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Over the past eight years, crisis-wracked Greece has received around $360 billion from other European countries and the IMF in a bid to stave off economic collapse. In exchange, the country promised to drastically cut spending, in particular by slashing pensions and public-sector salaries.

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