Viva Verdis: (British) Man declares country in unclaimed pocket of land between Serbia and Croatia

On a video call, 20-year-old Daniel Jackson, the self-proclaimed president of the Free Republic of Verdis, looks the part: He is sitting at a desk with the country’s flag to his right and a banner sporting the name of his country behind him. Instead of a presidential palace, he is speaking from a humble house in Dover, a port city in the south of England. And the Free Republic of Verdis, the country he claims to have founded in 2019, is nothing more than a small strip of uninhabited forest on the border between Croatia and Serbia, more than 1,000...