Word: islanded
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Residents of Samoa are bracing for chaos this month as the Pacific island nation becomes the first country in decades to order motorists to start driving on the opposite side of the road. On the morning of Sept. 7, drivers will switch from the right side of the street - where about two-thirds of the world's traffic moves - to the left, in order to open the nation to low-cost used autos from left-driving Australia and New Zealand. It will mark the world's first road switch since Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone changed sides in the 1970s...
...managed efficiently, the Commission says the resettlement scheme could ease the burden on some of the E.U.'s border states. Last year, more than 30,000 people are believed to have made the boat journey to the Italian island of Lampedusa, just 70 miles (113 km) from Tunisia. Earlier this year, Italy signed a controversial agreement with Libya allowing Italian authorities to automatically send would-be immigrants back to Libya without screening them for asylum claims - a move that arguably breaches the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention...
...Dalai Lama was invited by local opposition leaders in southern Taiwan to come and visit the victims. Morakot hit Taiwan on August 8th and left at least 568 dead or missing and over 7000 homeless. The island has been angry at the government's slow relief efforts and is in pain from the loss of their loved ones and homes. For Ma, whose approval ratings have hit an all time low in Morakot's aftermath, rejecting the Tibetan leader's visit - as he did last December - would have been political suicide. A recent poll shows that sixty percent of Taiwan...
...Tibetan leader got a taste of the island's raucous democracy immediately after he arrived. Holding up banners and the Chinese flag, dozens of pro-unification protestors shouted lines like "Roll back home!" and tried to prevent him from boarding the high-speed railway to the south. The next morning, across from his hotel, aborigine protestors held banners saying he was just doing "lip service," unlike other religious volunteers who were helping them rebuild their homes. When reporters asked him what he thought of the protests, the Dalai Lama cheerfully responded, "Wonderful. These people enjoy freedom of expression and thought...
...Harappan script - have been attempted over the decades, none with great success. Some archaeologists spied parallels with the cuneiform of Mesopotamia. Others speculated an unlikely link between Harappan signs and the similarly inscrutable "bird-men" glyphs found thousands of miles away in the Pacific Ocean on Easter Island...