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The Republic of Nauru, formally known as Pleasant Island, is an island country located in Micronesia in the South Pacific. Nauru's population is approximately 10,000. For a country of only 21 square kilometers, it is known worldwide as one of the three great phosphate rock islands of the world. The mining of phosphate deposits provided substantial wealth to the island's inhabitants in the late 1960s and into the 1980s. For some of this period, Nauru had the highest per capita income of any sovereign state of the world. After exhaustion of the phosphate deposits in the 1980s, Nauru became well known in Australia when the Australian government opened a center there from 2001 to 2008 in order to assess asylum-seekers arriving by boat. The most recent center remains open and is known as an "off-shore processing center". |
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