Terrorists want to undo everything we believe in and more: sometimes their targets are just inane. AFGHANISTAN — Do you remember Michael Vicks? He was a very talented football quarterback for the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons before his career came to a screeching halt in 2007 after he pleaded guilty to charges that he was part […]
Category: Perspectives
Intelligence agencies SHOULD remain non-partisan and ‘speak truth to power’. Is this being threatened in the US?
Sometimes terrorist attacks are merely a harbinger of something worse, much worse, to happen. NEW YORK, USA — Do you remember the feelings you had on 9/11? Do you remember the shock you felt on seeing the planes strike the World Trade Center towers, the buildings collapsing, the people fleeing the scene? Do you recall […]
On this day in 1997 a series of bombs that exploded in buses in Urumqi, coincided with the day of Deng Xiaoping’s funeral in Beijing. Nine people died.
There is no such thing as zero-risk: we need to have systems in place to measure danger as best we can.
On this day in 1978, police explosives expert tried to disarm a bomb placed outside a bank in San Cristobal de la Laguna in Tenerife: he died from wounds sustained in the detonation.
On this day in 2017, Adam Purinton shot two Indian men whom he had mistaken for Iranians, at a restaurant in Olathe, Kansas. He yelled “get out of my country” and “terrorist” before firing.
The 2015 Kharkiv bombing occurred on 22 February 2015, when a bomb hit a Ukrainian national unity rally in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, Kharkiv Oblast.
Today it is really hard to get a bomb on an airplane: this was not always the case.
Motive can be difficult to discern in acts that seem ‘terrorist’ in nature: can we trust what the terrorists themselves tell us?