day one hundred seventy-five (13. 749)

The Revolutionary Guard reasserts that Iran retains firm control over the Strait of Hormuz, despite the American propaganda campaign to the contrary, crafted to deflate energy markets. The US continues its naval blockade of the gulf but diminished munition stocks remain a big concern regarding readiness on this and other fronts. The Supreme Leader, still not seen in public, bans “expressions of weakness” as harms to social cohesion as the IRGC fears more mass protests as the price of staple items double as the war drags on. Washington strikes a deal with Caracas that would secure American control over sixty-five billion barrels from Venezuela’s proven oil reserves. Trump noisily contemplates re-annexing formerly federated countries of the Marshall Islands and Micronesia, adding them to the list of US territories marked New—along with the Strait of Hormuz.

nru ≫ nro (13. 690)

Following moves by the Czech Republic, Swaziland and Turkey to change their exonyms to Czechia, Eswatini and Türkiye respectively, the world’s third smallest country, the remote Pacific atoll, facing an existential threat over climate change and rising ocean levels, has announced it will be henceforth called Naoero after a popular referendum. Whilst ditching the colonial name of Pleasant Island when Great Britain allowed the German Empire to annex it as part of the Marshall Islands Protectorate, its endonym was restored, though in sort of a backhanded, paternalistic manner by ethnographer and linguist Paul Hambruch who gave it the folk-etymology as a contraction of the phrase a-nuau-a-a-ororo, supposedly, “I go to the beach.” After the British retook the phosphate-rich island following the end of World War I to be administered by Australia, the name Nauru stuck but as a pronunciation of convenience since the native name was difficult for foreigners to say. The twelve thousand residents of the parliamentary republic is a member of the United Nations, the Commonwealth and the International Monetary Fund. Mineral resources mostly exhausted—which destroyed all arable land and all food is currently imported, Naoero has earned a significant portion of its revenue by alternating recognition for the ROC and the PRC under the One-China Policy, as well as the breakaway regions of Georgia of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and from housing refugees awaiting immigration requests for Australia and New Zealand to be processed.

castle bravo (11. 393)

Already subjected to a series of nuclear weapons tests as host to Operation Crossroads (see previously, see also), on this day in 1954 the United States conducted the first in the battery of design experiments with Operation Castle, detonating the a high yield thermonuclear, fusion bomb on an artificial island platform in the lagoon of Namu in the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands. The strongest tactile explosion in history, the bomb was more than one-thousand times stronger than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, exceeding expectations of developers and spreading fallout (the heaviest in the form of pulverised and irradiated coral) across the region and far beyond. Residents were not evacuated and the decision was made not to abort the test despite wind shear that imperilled the islanders as well as personnel involved in the research. Trace amounts of radioactive material detected as far away as Australia, Europe and North America turned Castle Bravo into an international incident, prompting worldwide monitoring of fallout levels and a ban on further atmospheric tests.