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Introducing Marshall Islands
The air is tangy with sea salt on the thousand or so slender, flat coral islands that make up the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). Living on these narrow strips of land between ocean and lagoon, the Marshallese are expert fishers and navigators, having long been reliant on the sea.
Local faces reflect the islands' history. In the late 1700s, after 2000 years of isolation, these Micronesian islands were variously visited, settled, colonised or occupied by British, Russians, Germans, Japanese and Americans (at first by missionaries, later by defence forces). Today the more developed atolls have a sense of all these influences, with well-stocked stores carrying international groceries, restaurants serving the food of several nations, and basketball courts on many street corners. On the quieter backstreets the Marshallese continue to live in family compounds, surrounded by flowers. The two main atolls have quite different characters. While it's Westernised, the capital, Majuro Atoll, retains much of the languid feel of the tropics. In contrast, Kwajalein Atoll is leased to the US military for missile testing and is virtually closed to nonmilitary visitors, its local workers shuttled to the wall-to-wall tenements of Ebeye.
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Latest headlines for Marshall Islands
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Madoff's luxury penthouse seized
2 July 2009 10:16PM
US marshalls seize the $7m Manhattan penthouse of imprisoned fraudster Bernard Madoff, forcing his wife to move.
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'Ghost village' to be demolished
23 June 2009 12:05PM
The site of an abandoned and decaying construction workers' village will begin changing within a year, its owner says.
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In search of Europe: Italy
2 June 2009 1:36PM
Immigration is a big election issue for Italians, the BBC's Jonny Dymond reports, on a tour of EU member states ahead of the European elections.
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