Poor Nauru. First, the source of their fabulous 20th-century wealth, the Pacific island’s massive phosphate deposits. (Those deposits had supported one of the developing world’s highest per-capita incomes. Nauru only has about 12,000 people, one of the smallest countries in the world.) Then corruption and mismanagement pisses away all the island government’s savings, despite efforts to turn the place into a tax haven for the Russia mafia.

Then, on top of all that, they lose their one plane. “The impoverished Pacific island of Nauru will throw itself at the mercy of the U.S. to try to recover its only passenger jet, which was lost in a court case last week. The loss of the Air Nauru 737 to a U.S. government credit agency has forced the struggling airline to charter planes from other Pacific airlines to prevent the island’s 10,000 residents from being cut off from the outside world.”

Read that link from The Australian for a bizarre tale of espionage, hidden terrorists, and North Korean defectors. Poor Nauru.

19 December 2005

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