Way back in 1929, in the depths of the Great Depression, seven members of a Chicago gang were lined up and shot to death by members of another gang, probably tied to the infamous Al Capone. The incident, now known as the Valentines Day Massacre, was probably part of Capone’s attempt to control organised crime […]
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This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 2, 2018 Is it just me or is it strange that an independent, secular democracy cannot make simple decisions on whom it wants to allow to stay in the country? We are speaking here of immigrants, of course, since those lucky enough to have been […]
According to the standards of witches and warlocks in the Harry Potter series there were three curses or spells that were ‘unforgivable ‘. These three are the Imperius curse (it forces one to do the bidding of the caster), the Cruciatus curse (it subjects the victim to excruciating pain) and the Killing curse (which does […]
Have you ever been to a baseball game or a hockey game? If so, then you know that there are risks at both from flying balls or pucks. Some people get hurt, sometimes seriously, when they are struck by a horsehide ball or a vulcanised rubber puck traveling at very high speeds. Hockey made changes […]
I have just had the pleasure of seeing Steven Pinker give a talk at the Ottawa Writers’ Festival about his new book Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress. Picking up where he left off in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined, Mr. Pinker makes a compelling case […]
If there is one thing that people consistently get wrong it is the certain belief that violent crime is on the increase. We are convinced that the situation is getting worse, not better, and the depth of this certainty is probably due, in no small part, to the constant media feed over acts of violence. […]
The debate over the links, if any, between mental illness and terrorism never seems to get resolved. Many people default to the position that anyone who dons a suicide vest or who can wantonly kill innocent men, women and children must suffer from some kind of psychological sickness. These folks belong to the school that […]
We spend a lot of time worrying about terrorism in this country – disproportionately to the actual threat level in my honest opinion – and the flavour of terrorism that occupies most of our attention is Islamist extremism. This is of course for very good reasons since the vast, vast majority of plots, successful or […]
Hands up anyone who uses Google. Or FaceBook. Or Twitter. Or LinkedIn. Or just about any other social media platform. Now, hands up anyone who has to pay for the use of those sites. Not too many I would imagine. Why do you think that these platforms give you access for free? Is is because […]
There are a few things that hold a place of note in my memory whenever I think back to the start of my career in intelligence in 1983. As a wet-behind-the-ears multilingual analyst fresh out of university I had joined CSE – Canada’s SIGINT agency – with little to no clue as to what intelligence […]