Secession ain’t easy, but it sure is popular
The campaign supporting California’s secession opened its first embassy in, yes, you guessed it, Moscow. “Certainly it’s controversial,” the campaign’s leader told Vice News on the choice. “But we can’t become a country just by saying it. Countries like Russia need to help.”
↩︎ posted Dec. 24, 2016
The English-speaking secessionist movement in largely francophone Cameroon—known as the “Anglophone Problem”—is reaching a boiling point. Opposition politician Wirba Joseph gave an impassioned 11-minute speech on the floor of the National Assembly accusing the Cameroonian Army of acting like a “police state” and raping children.
↩︎ posted Dec. 20, 2016
This is not revenge. This is an adequate response to the aggression that comes from the US.
The head of a campaign pushing for California’s secession has deep ties to a Kremlin-funded group called the Anti-Globalist Movement of Russia—so deep that he lives in a Russian city you’ve never heard of.
↩︎ Bloomberg Businessweek, posted Dec. 16, 2016
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Though Scotland will not be able to exempt itself from the Brexit proceedings or have another independence referendum, its parliament drew up a new independence bill in October anyway.
↩︎ posted Dec. 16, 2016
A brief history of Rough and Ready, a small town northeast of Sacramento that seceded until it ran out of booze.
↩︎ posted Dec. 16, 2016
Where a wild country grows
The latest news out of the world’s newest country, South Sudan:
- New UNICEF figures put the total amount of child soldiers enlisted in South Sudan’s bloody civil war (since 2013) at over 17,000, some 1,300 this year alone. Around 2,000 have been released. “You either die, or kill your enemy. Everyone is treated the same way, whether young or old,” a 16-year-old soldier told Human Rights Watch last year.
- The UN mission in South Sudan provided arms to a rebel general whose troops committed some of the war’s worst atrocities, per a Small Arms Survey report. The UN Security Council later sanctioned him.
- Government agents forcibly removed an Associated Press reporter this month, putting him on a flight to Uganda.
- “There is already a steady process of ethnic cleansing underway in several areas of South Sudan using starvation, gang rape and the burning of villages,” a UN commission found last month.
↩︎ posted Dec. 16, 2016
The institutions of the [Spanish] state should know that they cannot silence the will of a majority of our people.
Spain’s constitutional court blocks a bill approved by Catalan’s parliament to hold an independence referendum.
↩︎ Financial Times, posted Dec. 16, 2016