4 Shocking Recent Events

By Anna Fahlberg on July 9, 2016

4. Britain voted to commit economic suicide, then immediately regretted it.

The day June 23, 2016, will go down as the date the British took one look at their reputation for stability and rational thinking and decided: “Forget it.” In a nationwide referendum, the country voted by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent to leave the EU, tearing up 40 years of political consensus and redefining Europe.

David Cameron resigned, only a year after enjoying one of the biggest surprise wins in British electoral history. Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of Scotland, called for a new independence referendum, her nation having overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU. The leader of Plaid Cymru in Wales called for an independence referendum, despite Wales voting to leave. Sinn Fein called for a referendum on reuniting Ireland and Northern Ireland, and Spain gleefully floated the prospect of taking back Gibraltar (something they were unable to do as long as both Spain and the UK were EU nations).

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Unsurprisingly, many Brits are now having second thoughts about their decision. Polling by firm Opinium has found as many as 1.2 million leavers would now vote to remain. This leaves the country split almost exactly 50/50 on whether to follow through with their referendum or not.

3. Columbia ended one of the longest wars in history.

Everyone heard about Brexit, but know what should have been front page news on June 24? The Colombia peace deal. On June 23, Marxist rebel group FARC signed an accord with the Colombian government, ending over 51 years of continuous warfare.

The Colombian civil war, a five-decade insurgency, claimed the lives of over 250,000 Colombians and turned around eight million people into refugees — the highest number of anywhere on Earth outside the maelstrom that is Syria and Iraq.

A lot of this is down to FARC being one of the best-funded, most terrifying terror groups on Earth. At their height in 2000, they controlled an area of Colombia the size of Germany. In the 1990s, they were kidnapping 3,000 people a year. They assassinated Colombian leaders, indiscriminately bombed the civilian population, recruited child soldiers … and have now given up their arms for good. To call this a historic achievement would be like calling Muhammed Ali a “good” boxer. For Colombia, this is an epoch-defining event.

Yet many Colombians are unhappy. The peace deal is considered by some to be too lenient on FARC, whose members will serve light sentences for atrocities committed. There’s also the fact that FARC’s smaller rebel cousins ELN are still active, meaning the war is still technically ongoing. But however you slice it, getting one of the largest terror groups in the world to voluntarily disarm can only be a good thing.

2. Two major assassinations almost happened.

On July 30, 1990, British politician Ian Gow got into his car, and was engulfed in a gigantic fireball. A victim of the IRA, he was the last sitting British MP to be assassinated … until June 2016. Over 25 years after Gow’s death, Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death by an English nationalist who shouted “Britain first!” as he butchered her.

The senseless killing was attributed to the febrile atmosphere surrounding the EU referendum (Cox was a pro-EU campaigner; in court, her killer gave his name as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain”). It was the first time a female MP had been assassinated in the UK and marked the return of political killings to a country that thought they had vanished with the Irish Troubles. The attack was so despicable that global politicians from Hillary Clinton to Mexican President Felipe Calderon paid tribute to Cox, turning her death into a major news event.

Yet Cox’s killing was very nearly overshadowed by another political assassination, once again involving a British killer. Only a couple of days later, a 19-year-old Englishman at a Trump rally in Vegas tried to grab an officer’s gun to shoot the GOP candidate. He was arrested without firing a shot. Yet it’s interesting to think that, had things gone slightly the other way, June 2016 would have seen two major political killings carried out by English assassins.

1. ISIS lost traction.

On June 12, an ISIS-inspired gunman entered Pulse nightclub in Orlando and mowed down 49 innocent people. It was America’s worst modern mass shooting. About two weeks later, ISIS bombers attacked Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, killing 41 and injuring over 230. This was followed immediately by staggering attacks in Dhaka and Baghdad. To anyone glancing at the news, it must have seemed like the jihadist group were on a terrible roll. But these attacks disguised a much more fundamental truth: ISIS spent June 2016 suffering sound defeats.

On June 26, the ISIS city of Fallujah fell to Iraqi security forces. Around the same time, Kurdish troops advanced on the city of Manbij, in an operation still ongoing. If Manbij falls, it will leave the Caliphate holding only four of the 10 cities they originally took. While that’s still four too many, it shows the tide may have finally turned against the world’s worst terror threat. Following the Fallujah operation, ISIS are almost certainly finished in Iraq. Syria may be trickier, but it’s starting to look like the Caliphate is doomed to collapse.

The downside is that ISIS responds to territorial losses by staging massive attacks. The Istanbul Airport attack was a show of strength, just as the Paris Attacks in November 2015 were a response to the group losing the key city of Sinjar. We may see more horrifying attacks on our soil in the near future, but it’s important we recognize them for what they are: the last gasps of a diseased ideology that’s thankfully dying.

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