A new full-time voice for Canada’s diplomatic corps

Forty years ago, the Iranian Revolution ushered in Ayatollah Khomeini and, with him, an Islamic republic. Reflecting on Iran today, New York Times correspondent Thomas Erdbrink describes a country where society is changing faster than the current regime: “Iran’s leaders face a growing dilemma of whether to start translating the social changes into new laws and customs or try to hang on to the 40-year-old ideals of the revolution.”

In The Globe and Mail, Gloria Galloway reports on how Canadian troops’ work helping Rwandans to rebuild after the 1994 genocide was a “quiet success” — but you wouldn’t know it looking at the official history of Canada’s involvement on government websites. Twenty-five years later, veterans who were forever changed by their nightmare deployment are looking to be remembered.

This Reuters investigation by Christopher Bing and Joel Schectman reveals how ex-National Security Agency operatives helped the United Arab Emirates spy on human rights activists, rival leaders and journalists — even other Americans. “I am working for a foreign intelligence agency who is targeting US persons,” one member of the clandestine team called Project Raven said. “I am officially the bad kind of spy.”

Jason Rezaian, who spent 544 days imprisoned in Iran, has released a new project inspired by his own relationship (he is American and his wife is Iranian). Together, they were able to build a life in the US, but other couples affected by the Trump administration’s travel ban haven’t been so lucky. For The Washington Post, Rezaian investigates what it looks like when bureaucracy “splits husbands and wives across a continental divide.”