Why Indonesia Moved Its Capital to a Jungle Hundreds of Miles Away, and more

Why has maximum pressure not worked? Hadi Kahalzadeh, a research fellow at Brandeis University, has authored a careful study that comes to an important conclusion:
“The expanded sanctions regime … has had adverse consequences for the Iranian middle classes … causing them to lose faith in the reformist politicians who supported a new round of diplomacy. Iranian hard-liners invoked the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal to show that they had been right all along to dismiss the negotiations as a sham. As European and other international companies began to withdraw from Iran … the hard-liners opened the door to Chinese investors and called on their own loyal business interests to fill the vacuum.”

NATO’s Weak Spot Against Russia Facing a Choice to Take Up Arms  (George Grylls, The Times)
Nearly 7,000 islands compose this autonomous region of Finland. The vast majority of them are uninhabited skerries, small outcrops of red granite visited only by seals and birds.
The islanders’ unhurried existence has been complicated, however, by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since 1856, the Aland Islands have been demilitarized, a status that exempts locals from national service and prevents Finland from maintaining a garrison on one of the most strategic parts of its coastline.
Undefended, the islands, which control access to the Gulf of Finland and the Gulf of Bothnia, represent a peculiar vulnerability in the Baltic, which has otherwise been nicknamed the “Nato lake” after Finland and Sweden’s accession to the defensive alliance last year.
“Finland is the lock in the defense of northern Europe and the islands are the back door to Finland’s defenses,” says Pekka Toveri, a Finnish MEP for the governing National Coalition Party and a former major general in the Finnish Defense Forces.
“The demilitarized status only benefits Russia. Why would we do anything that benefits Russia in the current day and time?”