Word: nauru
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Many a pygmy-size paradise of late has attained the badge of nationhood -such as Cyprus, Rwanda, Burundi, Zan zibar. But all stand as giants beside a midget that last week clamored to join the gang: the Pacific island of Nauru...
...coral-and-palm flyspeck 1,300 miles northeast of Australia, Nauru has an area of 8½ square miles and a population of 2,700. Only 100 years ago, it was a virtually unknown battleground of savages who guzzled coconut toddy and sported necklaces of human teeth; in 1852 the Nauruans inhospitably chopped up the entire crew of the visiting American brig, India. Since the turn of the century, however, life for the islanders has been one long enchanted evening...
...Taxes. In 1900 a British engineer assayed a Nauru rock being used as a doorstop in his Sydney office, discovered that the island was richly overlaid with phosphate. With Britain, Australia and New Zealand extracting the deposits, royalties have showered down on the Nauruans to the tune of half a million dollars a year. Today the dark-skinned natives pay no taxes but enjoy schools, hospitals, running water, electric lights and movies...
WITH her engines grinding at a rowboat's pace and her crew peering anxiously at debris in the water, the U.S. destroyer Boyd slipped in toward Japanese-held Nauru Island on the morning of Dec. 8, 1943. A U.S. fighter pilot had been- shot down within point-blank range of the island shore batteries, and the Boyd was bent on rescuing him. Suddenly, two 6-in. shells crashed into the forward .engine room, destroying half of the ship's power. Shellburst jets of water blossomed everywhere. The Boyd's skipper, Lieut. Commander Ulysses Simpson Grant Sharp...
...disease did not reach the U.S. islands until 1918: in 1930 there were only three cases; by 1950 there were 42, and now he claims to have traced 212. Dr. Donohugh painted an alarming picture of what might happen in American Samoa by analogy with the flyspeck island of Nauru, where one leprosy victim landed in 1912, and by 1927 the disease had infected 750 people (one-third of the population). And in a recent survey in the Manua group of outer islands, 153 out of 1,521 people showed suspicious signs, and they were so marked in 52 cases...