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He's the last man standing on refugee island and costs Australia £8m a year By Nick Squires in Sydney (Filed: 06/10/2006) He is possibly the loneliest refugee in the world and he is being maintained at a cost of £8 million a year. Mohammed Sagar has spent the past five years living in a detention camp on Nauru, a sun-baked rock in the middle of the south Pacific. He was one of 1,500 refugees from the Middle East and Afghanistan sent to the near-bankrupt republic under Australia's so-called Pacific Solution to boatloads of people fleeing their homelands. They were intercepted...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - America may dominate the world in sports and culture but in one arena where size doesn't matter, the "Geography Olympics," the United States was 88th behind minnows such as Madagascar and the Marshall Islands. More than 46,000 Americans have taken part in this online geography competition started by a man with a mission: Roger Andresen, who quit his job as a fiber optic engineer two years ago when he realized most Americans have never heard of Nauru and don't know Cameroon is in Africa. Working from his home in Georgia -- the U.S. state, not the...

DUBLIN, Ireland - Ireland has become the first country on earth to cut off direct-dialed calls to entire nations in a bid to crack down on Internet-based fraud. The crackdown, announced this week and due to come into force Oct. 4, will block calls to 13 locations — all but one of them far-flung islands — to deter fraudsters from breaking into people's computers and hijacking their modems for profit. The government-appointed Commission for Communications Regulation said it was obliged to act after receiving more than 300 complaints this year from Internet users who discovered that their connections had been...

Just for a change in the old columnar diet, I thought I'd weigh in on Britain's obesity epidemic. But, on closer inspection, the war on blubber seems to be the war on terror by other means. In the Guardian, for example, Polly Toynbee had no hesitation in deciding on the root cause: "America has by far the most unequal society and by far the fattest," she wrote. "Britain and Australia come next. Europe is better and the Scandinavian countries best of all. No doubt there are also social policy reasons for this: the best social democracies pick up family problems...

10.05.2003 By EUGENE BINGHAM He has been photographed with Prime Minister Helen Clark and posed with the head of the World Trade Organisation, Mike Moore. But this could be the photograph he is proudest of yet. With an arm around the then President of the United States, Jack Sanders, New Zealand's China-based international man of mystery, beams the smile of a man who has an impressive collection of photographs with famous figures. Weekend Herald investigations into Mr Sanders last week turned up photographs of him with Helen Clark and Mr Moore - who both denied remembering ever meeting him...

/start my translation German Human Right Activist Vollertsen: "Ready For A Massive Defection of High Ranking N. Korean Figures" Norbert Vollertsen(age 45: a doctor), a German human right activist, who has been actively helping N. Korean escapees confirmed on 6th (of May, 2003) that 20 high ranking N. Korean figures, including a N. Korean nuclear physicist Dr. Kyoung Won-Ha, did defect and that some of them are now staying in Washington D.C., U.S.A.. However, he refused to confirm whether Dr. Kyoung Won-Ha, known as the father of N. Korean nuclear development, himself is staying in Washington D.C.. Mr. Vollertsen is...

MELBOURNE, Australia, Mar 09, 2003 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- Nauru's President Bernard Dowiyogo, 57, has died in a U.S. hospital, a spokeswoman for the Pacific island nation said Monday. Dowiyogo died at 7:40 a.m. local time (2040 GMT Sunday) at the George Washington University Hospital in Washington, said spokeswoman Helen Bogden, who is based in Melbourne. Dowiyogo had undergone an 11-hour heart operation last Tuesday. Bogden said the U.S. Air Force had agreed to fly Dowiyogo's body back to Nauru later in the week for a funeral service. Dowiyogo is survived by a wife and four children. A...

The tiny Pacific island of Nauru has spent weeks completely cut off from the outside world after its telecommunications network collapsed. Its isolation is so complete that no one is even sure who the country's president is any more. Nauru, an isolated speck in the southwest Pacific with a population of 12,000, is in a "critical situation", according to the last message received by the outside world. That came via an address given three weeks ago by the man last believed to be running the country, President Bernard Dowiyogo, details of which were given on Friday by Radio Australia....