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Nauru selling citizenship for $105,000 to save itself from rising seas

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Citizenship of Nauru, an island nation spanning just 8 square miles in the southwest Pacific Ocean, can be yours for $105,000. The tiny, low-lying island has launched a “golden passport” initiative with the aim of raising money to fund climate action.

Nauru faces an existential threat from rising sea levels, storm surges and coastal erosion as the planet warms. But the world’s third smallest country lacks the resources to protect itself from a climate crisis disproportionately driven by wealthy countries.

The government says selling citizenship will help raise the funds needed for a plan to move 90% of the island’s around 12,500-strong population onto higher ground and build an entirely new community.

Golden passports are not new but they are controversial; history is littered with examples of them being exploited for criminal actions. Yet as developing countries struggle to get the money they need to deal with escalating climate impacts — a funding gap likely to be exacerbated by the US withdrawal from global climate action — they are being forced to find new ways to raise cash.

“While the world debates climate action, we must take proactive steps to secure our nation’s future,” Nauru’s President David Adeang told CNN.

The passports will cost a minimum of $105,000, but will be prohibited for people with certain criminal histories. A Nauru passport offers visa-free access to 89 countries including the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Few of these new passport holders are likely to ever even visit remote Nauru, but citizenship allows people to lead “global lives,” said Kirstin Surak, associate professor of political sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires. This can be particularly useful for those with more restrictive passports, she told CNN.

For Nauru, this program is being pitched as a chance to secure the future of the island, which has a difficult, dark history.

Nauru was strip mined for phosphate from the early 1900s. For nearly a century, the landscape was gouged by miners, leaving the center of the island a near barren landscape of jagged rocks.

It has left around 80% of the island uninhabitable, meaning most people now live clustered along the coastlines, exposed to sea level rise, which has been increasing here at a faster rate than global average.

Once the phosphate ran out, Nauru looked for new revenue sources. Since the early 2000s, it has served as an offshore detention site for refugees and migrants attempting to settle in Australia — a program scaled back after detainee deaths.

Now, the island is at the center of a controversial plan to mine the deep sea for materials for the green transition.

Nauru was even in the sights of now-disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who floated a plan to buy the island and build a bunker to survive an apocalypse, according to 2023 filings in a lawsuit against him.

For the people who live there, however, Nauru feels anything but future-proofed.

“A lot of people residing on the coast have already lost land — some have had their entire houses engulfed by king tides and they have lost everything,” Tyrone Deiye, a Nauruan national and a researcher at Monash Business School in Australia, said in a statement.

Selling citizenship has the potential to make “an absolutely enormous” economic impact for micro-states like Nauru, LSE’s Surak said.

Nauru expects to make around $5.6 million from the program in its first year, eventually scaling that to around $42 million a year. It will be built up gradually “as we assess for any unintended consequences or negative impact,” said Edward Clark, CEO of Nauru Economic and Climate Resilience Citizenship Program. Ultimately they hope the program will make up 19% of total government revenue.

The success of the program will depend on how “revenues are channeled into the country, and what they are used to do,” Surak said. That means vetting and transparency on where the funds go, and preventing people who would otherwise be prohibited from being granted passports from paying officials off the books to get one, she added.

An earlier program to sell citizenship in the mid-1990s was mired in scandal, including the 2003 arrest in Malaysia of two alleged Al Qaida terrorists carrying Nauru passports.

The government says the program’s vetting will be stringent and exclude those from countries designated as high risk by the United Nations, including Russia and North Korea. Partnerships with international organizations including the World Bank will provide “expertise and oversight,” said President Adeang.

Nauru is not the first country to look to fund climate action by selling passports. The Caribbean nation of Dominica, which has been selling citizenship since 1993, recently said it was using some of the proceeds to fund its “commitment to be the world’s first climate resilient country by 2030.”

It may be a route other countries consider as the burden of dealing with the costs of climate change far outweigh their economic resources, all while international climate funding appears to be drying up.

“Nauru highlights the opportunities for climate vulnerable countries to become testing grounds for climate innovation,” Clark said.

(CNN)

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Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain close airspaces

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Iran has launched missiles at a US airbase in Qatar in response to strikes on its nuclear sites on Saturday.

Qatar confirms the attack on the US-run Al Udeid base, calling it a “flagrant violation” and says it reserves the right to respond directly.

The country has temporarily closed its airspace and US and UK citizens have been advised to shelter in place.

Meanwhile, Kuwait and Bahrain have also closed their respective airspaces.

(Agencies)

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Suicide bombing at Damascus church kills 22

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At least 22 people have been killed and 63 others wounded in a suicide bomb attack at a church in Damascus, Syria’s health ministry has said.

A man opened fire with a weapon at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Prophet Elias in the Dweila neighbourhood during a service on Sunday evening before detonating an explosive vest, according to the interior ministry.

It said the attacker was affiliated with the jihadist group Islamic State (IS). There was no immediate claim from the group itself.

Photos and video from inside the church showed a heavily damaged altar, pews covered in broken glass and blood spattered across the walls.

Witness Lawrence Maamari told AFP news agency that “someone entered [the church] from outside carrying a weapon” and began shooting. People “tried to stop him before he blew himself up”, he added.

Another man who was in a nearby shop said he heard gunfire followed by an explosion that sent glass flying. “We saw fire in the church and the remains of wooden benches thrown all the way to the entrance,” Ziad said.

It was the first such attack in Damascus since Islamist-led rebel forces overthrew Bashar al-Assad in December, ending 13 years of devastating civil war.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch said in a statement: “The treacherous hand of evil struck this evening, claiming our lives, along with the lives of our loved ones who fell today as martyrs during the evening divine liturgy.”

According to initial information, the bomb blast occurred at the entrance to the church, resulting in the deaths of people who were both inside the building and in the immediate vicinity, it added.

The patriarchate called upon Syria’s interim authorities to “assume full responsibility for what has happened and continues to happen in terms of violation against the sanctity of churches, and to ensure the protection of all citizens”.

Interior Minister Anas Khattab said specialised teams from his ministry had begun investigating the circumstances of what he called a “reprehensible crime”.

“These terrorist acts will not stop the efforts of the Syrian state in achieving civil peace,” he added.

The office of UN special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, condemned the attack and urged Syrians “to unite in rejecting terrorism, extremism, incitement and the targeting of any community”.

US special envoy Tom Barrack said: “These terrible acts of cowardice have no place in the new tapestry of integrated tolerance and inclusion that Syrians are weaving.”

Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa – whose Sunni Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is a former al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria and is designated as a terrorist organisation by the UN, US and UK – has repeatedly promised to protect religious and ethnic minorities. However, Syria has been rocked by two waves of deadly sectarian violence in recent months.

IS has frequently targeted Christians and other religious minorities in Syria.

In 2016, the group claimed a series of blasts near the Shia Muslim Sayyida Zeinab shrine in a southern suburb of Damascus, which killed more than 70 people.

IS once held 88,000 sq km (34,000 sq miles) of territory stretching from western Syria to eastern Iraq and imposed its brutal rule on almost eight million people.

Despite the group’s military defeat in Syria in 2019, the UN has warned that the threat posed by IS and its affiliates remains high.

A report published in February warned that the group might take advantage of the transition in Syria to surge attacks and make the country a renewed hub for recruiting foreign fighters.

It estimated that IS had between 1,500 and 3,000 fighters in Syria and neighbouring Iraq, with most of them, including key leaders, based in Syrian territory. About 300 fighters were based in the central Badia desert, which served as a centre for planning external operations, it said.

More than 9,000 IS fighters are being detained prisons spread across north-eastern Syria and 40,000 other people linked to IS, mostly women and children, are held in several camps.

(BBC News)

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China strongly condemns US attacks on Iran

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China strongly condemns the U.S. attacks on Iran and bombing of nuclear facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said on Sunday.

The spokesperson made the remarks when asked to comment on U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States carried out strikes on three nuclear facilities in Iran.

The actions of the United States seriously violated the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and international law, and have exacerbated tensions in the Middle East, the spokesperson said.

China calls on the parties to the conflict, Israel in particular, to reach a ceasefire as soon as possible, ensure the safety of civilians, and start dialogue and negotiation, the spokesperson said.

China stands ready to work with the international community to pool efforts together and uphold justice, and work for restoring peace and stability in the Middle East, the spokesperson said.

(Xinhua)

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