Rebecca Walberg

But if the government does want to put its fingers into this particular thorny mess, there are better and worse ways to do it.  Quebec’s example is one of the poorer approaches to the issue, as borne out by an MIT study that found kids in Quebec’s universal daycare have more physical and psychological problems, their parents become less attentive parents who are more depressed and have more tense marriages, and the whole scheme is a net money loser for the province.  A longer discussion of this is in today’s Winnipeg Free Press.

Some North Americans are aware that the mess in Iran is a generation in the making, but the popular perception is that Iran really became a problem when American and Israeli ambitions put the Persian nose out of joint.  In fact, Israel and the USA once considered Iran a key ally, and the evolution of this relationship is well documented in Ronen Bergman’s The Secret War with Iran, which I review here.  Bergman has a doctorate in politics from Oxford, and has been a respected analyst within Israel for years.  This is his first book to be published in English, and it’s well worth the read.