This amusement park started as Minitalia in 1971, with only the mini Italy, and is now in a somewhat larger park for children called Leolandia, with the original part still called Minitalia (Google's label MiniItalia is wrong).

My wife and I are from Georgia. We lived through the 2008 war, so hearing people suggest that Ukraine should give up its territory for “peace” feels painfully familiar.

russia occupies around 125,000 km² of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova combined. That's roughly half the United Kingdom.

We built an interactive map where you can choose your own country and see what losing 20% of it would look like.

We hope it helps people understand that these aren't just lines on a map. They're people's homes, towns and lives.

You can try it here:
https://russianoccupation.netlify.app/

This amazes me how much humans can be able to chart down line on a sand down to the meter.

Source

If you believe in the "butterfly effect"—the theory that an insect flapping its wings can trigger a hurricane on the other side of the planet—geopolitics has its own version. It is the story of how a 15th-century papal signature meant to separate Iberian galleons ended up erecting an abandoned train station in the middle of the Australian desert and creating a passive-aggressive feud over time zones.

Welcome to one of the most fascinating quirks of modern geography.

It all started with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. With the Pope's blessing, Portugal and Spain took a ruler, drew a straight line on the map of the Atlantic, and said: "Everything to the left is Spanish, everything to the right is Portuguese." A perfect, brilliant, foolproof plan. The kings were happy, the navigators had their routes, and peace seemed guaranteed.

There was just one small, almost insignificant design flaw in our planet's blueprint: it is stubbornly round.

The Iberians discovered this the hard way. While the Portuguese happily sailed east, rounding Africa toward Asia, the Spanish explored the west, crossing the Americas and the Pacific. Until, in the early 16th century, the inevitable happened. Somewhere in the middle of the Maluku Islands (modern-day Indonesia), the global paradise of nutmeg and cloves, the two fleets bumped right into each other.

It was that awkward cartoon moment where two rivals walk backwards away from each other and end up bumping heads. The Tordesillas line had wrapped around the globe and collided with itself on the back of the planet. Now what? Whose expensive-spice-filled island was it? To resolve the spherical panic, in 1529, they signed the Treaty of Zaragoza, essentially drawing a "zipper" on the other side of the world, an antimeridian to settle the score.

The legacy of this head-bumping is printed on the map to this day. Even before we get to Australia, try this: open a map and look at the island of New Guinea, just above the Australian continent. You will find a bizarre straight line cutting the island perfectly from top to bottom, dividing the Indonesian province of Papua from the independent country of Papua New Guinea. At first glance, you might not understand why it's there in the middle of mountains and dense jungles. The answer is simple: that colonial ruler (the 141st Meridian East) is, in practice, the exact opposite of the Treaty of Tordesillas inherited by the Dutch. If you zoom in really close, you will notice that the geometric perfection suffers a slight hiccup, making an awkward little curve to follow the bed of a small river called the Fly River—but that is a hilarious cartographic problem for another text.

What matters is that, in the 19th century, the British Empire was organizing its colossal and wild colony in Australia. Looking at an empty map in a luxurious London office, officials decided to create the province of South Australia. To avoid the hassle of inventing an eastern border to separate it from New South Wales and Victoria, they simply looked north and "pulled" the straight line from New Guinea downwards, slicing through the Australian continent all the way to the ocean. The border of a country that wasn't even a country yet had been drawn.

But drawing a straight line with a ruler in London is one thing; measuring the stars and driving stakes into the unforgiving Australian outback in 1847 was another entirely.

The surveyors of the time miscalculated and marked the border 3.6 kilometers further west than they should have. It seems like a small amount, but this slight deviation created a strip of thousands of hectares called "The Disputed Territory." For nearly 70 years, the state governments of Victoria and South Australia fought fiercely over this slice of land, threatening to arrest rival topographers for trespassing.

The dispute generated such a picturesque situation that when the two states decided to build a railway connecting their capitals, the line had to pass through this "no man's land." Unwilling to concede, both split the bill and built the Serviceton station exactly on the disputed border. It was an imposing, three-story station, erected in the middle of absolute nowhere solely as a neutral ground so locomotives and crews could be swapped without one state stepping on the other's pride.

Although the Crown in London finally resolved the feud in 1914 by handing the strip of land to Victoria, the legacy of this Iberian-British mess persists in everyday oddities for those who live there.

If you cross this border today, you will feel the bureaucratic jolt: South Australia has a fractional half-hour time zone (UTC +9:30), while Victoria adopts the full hour (UTC +10:00). Crossing the street in Serviceton means having to advance your car clock by exactly 30 minutes. Furthermore, due to strict state agricultural laws, there are inspection checkpoints on the roads along this border where inspectors stop cars just like at an international customs office, searching trunks to confiscate apples and bananas before the fruits "cross the line."

In the end, it all comes down to the butterfly effect: the Portuguese and Spanish just wanted to avoid going to war while trying to figure out how a round Earth worked. As a result, centuries later, Australian farmers had to go to the Supreme Court to find out whose land they were standing on, while eating sandwiches in a ghost train station, adjusting their clocks by thirty minutes, and hiding fruit from the neighboring state's inspectors.

In 2001 the British Columbia NDP was reduced from a major government to just 2 seats (welcome back 1993) the BC liberals won every other seat. Also fun fact the NDP premier Ujjial Dosanjh who was elected leader of the party following the previous premier Glen Clark resigned, was the first ever person of Indian ancestry to become premier of a province in Canada and the only one still to this day. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Source: https://defence24.com/defence-policy/polands-strategic-partnerships-we-have-the-full-list