Via Foreign Policy magazine's Passport blog, a fascinating and sad episode of This American Life about the Republic of Nauru, one of the tiniest and most remote nations on the planet. It's an island in the Pacific with an area of 8.1 square miles. Nauru's size and location have apparently caused it to become involved in several bizarre incidents, some comical and some tragic, and mostly of an income-generating nature. They strip-mined the island of its only resource, phosphate. They tried to aid the US in accepting defections from North Korea by establishing a fake embassy in China. They became a money laundering center so attractive that it sucked up a sizable portion of the Russian economy.

In high school we laughed about this place after finding it in an encyclopaedia, and I had an intermittent fascination with it for a few years after that, but I don't think I ever knew most of these stories.

Interesting how the country's tribulations and exploits echo those of Tuvalu, which is in danger of sinking entirely into the ocean, and which raised money by selling it's top level domain name .tv for use by television-related web sites.