Thirteen years after he bought it, Uri Geller, a master of the grand gesture, has decided to elevate Lamb’s status from a private Scottish island to that of a country, with a flag, constitution and anthem. Settlement on the island itself is not allowed, its only inhabitants being puffins, guillemots and an assortment of other seabirds - and until recently a solitary rat.

New tensions erupted over Nagorno-Karabakh on Wednesday as three soldiers were killed and Azerbaijan said it had taken control of several strategic heights in the disputed region.

From her first days in Congress, Nancy Pelosi was willing to confront China’s leaders. As she looked toward her legacy, the California Democrat was not about to back down this time.

Kosovo’s government has postponed the implementation of new rules that would force people in majority ethnic Serb areas to swap their Serbian-issued car number plates for Kosovan-issued ones. This decision follows on clashes in protest over the new rules.

De Facto explores the realm of unrecognized states, fictional countries and curious border zones. On July 13 we had a great evening with talks, art and film at De Roode Bioscoop in Amsterdam.

In 2006, Gerard Beukeveld declared the independence of a piece of land less than three thousand square meters in size — a sovereign state on an industrial area in Coevorden (the Netherlands). Support poured in, but in short order the battle intensified. An interview with the founders.

Since they first separated from Ukraine in 2014, a nexus of crime, corruption and rebellion has flourished in the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’ as well as Russian occupied Crimea, a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime found.

In a statement, the space agency said it ‘strongly rebukes using the International Space Station for political purposes to support its war against Ukraine’.

Mustafe decides to leave his quiet life in Finland when copper and gold are discovered in his ancestral land, Somaliland.

Coinbase’s former chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan wants to use social networks to create states. What doesn’t fit into his vision are things like poverty, illness and ageing.

The death toll among those who attempted to scale the fence into the Spanish enclave of Melilla last week continues to mount. With 29 dead, mostly sub-Saharan African, the figure, if confirmed, is among the worst-ever disasters for the Spanish enclave on the north Moroccan coast.

De Facto explores the realm of unrecognized states, fictional countries and curious border zones. On July 13 we organize a live evening with talks, art and film at De Roode Bioscoop in Amsterdam. Join us!

Canada and Denmark resolved a half-century-old border dispute, splitting the ownership of Hans Island, a 1.2-square kilometer mound of rock halfway between Nunavut and Greenland. The new border will divide the island roughly in half, following a natural ravine from north to south.

China has warned the US that any attempt to make Taiwan independent from China will trigger military action by Beijing’s forces. Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe met his US counterpart Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of an Asian security summit in Singapore.

Cyprus will lodge a complaint with the United Nations over Turkey’s new financial assistance deal with breakaway Turkish Cypriots that demonstrates Ankara’s “complete control” over them, the president of the ethnically divided island nation said Monday.

The small African state of Somaliland legally doesn’t exist. But Taiwan has spied an opportunity to make its mark.

After two years of Covid, De Facto could finally go live again. It was a great evening, with talks, art and music.

As the ripples of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pulse outward, they have left one region especially volatile: the South Caucasus. The Ukrainian conflict has paradoxically raised the likelihood of both further fighting and a negotiated peace in this area between the Caspian and Black Seas.

Indian security forces have killed six militants in Kashmir in the past 24 hours while militants shot dead a female TV performer and a police officer, officials said on Thursday, following the conviction of the region’s best-known separatist.

Our De Facto LIVE #3 in De Roode Bioscoop (Amsterdam) is sold out. We are looking forward to this evening with talks, art and music. No tickets? Don’t worry, the next event will be on July 13. The program will be announced soon. Stay tuned!

A wealthy American wanted to build an island republic. The king of Tonga had other ideas.

Photographer Mustafa Saeed sees the potential of all art forms as therapy in a post-war nation, moving towards collaborative efforts to make this happen in Somaliland.

Moldova raises concerns over suspected destabilisation campaign in Russia-backed breakaway region.

A look inside at how the artist Robert Alice and their team pulled off an exhibition of NFTs and crypto art in the wildest setting imaginable, while at the same time taking these stories out of the confines of the screen and into the world.

Artist Tamuna Ianvarashvili uses the dioramas as a form of peaceful protest against Russia’s occupation of Georgian regions and its brutality in invading Ukraine in February.

A small hotel in the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh unites several families who fled their homes during the recent war and provides a space to rekindle their hopes of finding a place to call home again.

Reporters of The New York Times traveled inside Transnistria, a Moscow-backed breakaway state in Moldova, to find out how Russia’s disinformation campaign stretches beyond its borders.

Shakhtar Donetsk was forced from its home city and then its country by Russian invasions. Its next stop? A series of exhibition games drawing attention to Ukraine’s plight.

How the Western Sahara conflict is fuelling new tensions between Morocco and Algeria.

In the audiovisual performance Europadorp/Europadorf, theater maker Silas Neumann takes us to the border area between Germany and the Netherlands. With video fragments, live soundscapes and augmented reality, he reconstructs the twenty year old utopia of a borderless village.