Search: “Al Qaeda”

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on May 7, 2018 Pop quiz!  What is Canada’s ‘national game’?  Duh it’s hockey of course (or ‘ice hockey’ as the rest of the world knows it as if it needed to be distinguished from ‘field hockey’).  What with the NHL playoffs on and one Canadian team still […]

We have just celebrated Mother’s Day in Canada, a chance for children to recognise and give thanks for their mothers.  Mothers are, after all, often the bedrock of families. It is they who give birth to the next generation, nurture their sons and daughters through the early years of life and usually act as confidantes […]

The news is full, every single day, of reports of violence from a number of actors: murders, sexual assaults, shootings, etc.  Occasionally we read of a terrorist attack somewhere in the world – depending on where you live the frequency of this particular form of violence will vary.  Not surprisingly, if you live in Somalia […]

One of the most difficult challenges for governments around the world is what to do with their citizens who left to join Islamic State (IS) or other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq from 2013ish to 2017.  As we all know, IS is a shadow of its former self. It has lost swaths of territory.  […]

Look, I get it. I know why defence lawyers try to get their clients’ cases thrown out on technicalities or by feigning outrage that anyone could harbour any suspicion that the individual they represent could possibly in a million years be guilty of the offences alleged by the Crown.  That is, after all, why we […]

I would like to announce the creation of a fund for Canadian pedophiles.  Not those in prison or getting treatment but those languishing in squalid jails pending trial in southeast Asia after they were caught abusing young children, having traveled intentionally to that part of the world with the sole intention of having sex with […]

In January 1842 the British army suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in its history, a defeat memorialised in a painting entitled Remnants of an Army (shown above).  The British were massacred in retreating from Kabul in what is now known as the First Anglo-Afghan War, part of the ‘Great Game’ between Imperial Russia […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 22, 2018 If there is one thing we have learned about Joshua Boyle it is that he is an odd duck.  He apparently made over 62,000 edits and contributions to Wikipedia over a 13-year span (if my math is correct that makes 15  a day) on […]

The Globe and Mail featured a fascinating story in its weekend edition (August 12) on suicides in Toronto in which people throw themselves in front of subway cars. This has to be a particularly gruesome way to take one’s life and I really feel for the drivers of the subway.  I have heard that they […]

In November 2015 my eldest daughter and I were in northern France at a B&B near Beaumont-Hamel, the site of a day of infamy a century ago. On July 1, 1916 members of the Newfoundland Regiment went ‘over the top’ in the first action in what we know as the Battle of the Somme, a […]