Search: “Islamic State”

The renowned US journal Scientific American put out a fascinating article today in which leading scholars were asked what the top 20 “big questions” facing humanity in the future.  The questions posed ranged from space exploration to medicine, but it was the following that caught my eye (reproduced in its entirety: for the complete list […]

One thing I find fascinating is the science of lie detection. There is a lot of research out there about which tools can pick up on an attempt to avoid the truth, ranging from eye movement (saccades) to vocabulary use.  As a former intelligence analyst I had to undergo periodic lie detector tests.  They were […]

As we still reel from the foiled terrorist attack  last week in Strathroy, Ontario, we can still rest assured that attacks, successful or not, remain a rarity in Canada.  In the period since 9/11 we have had no more than 8 such incidents: on average one every two years.   When we compare our experiences […]

Another video, another promise of terrorism. You would think that we’d be getting tired of these by now.  Every wannabe martyr goes online, films himself (or herself) – or gets someone else to film – rants on about how we in the West are the aggressor against Islam and Muslims, and threatens to kill us […]

Today in the small southwestern Ontario town of Strathroy a young man known to police for having terrorist connections was killed by security forces after he appeared to have exploded a device and had another in  his possession.  The victim, Aaron Driver, had been arrested in June 2015 after expressing support for Islamic State (IS) […]

There is no question that terrorism gets a lot of attention these days.  Nary a day goes by without a story of an attack somewhere in the world.  Most – not all, but most – of these attacks are carried out by some individual, some small group or even a large bunch with some tie […]

Media have one important job to do: report the news.  Sometimes they also bring in people to help us understand the news and speculate on what it means.  At times outside experts contribute much needed analysis and insight and at others provide little of value to the issue at hand. In reporting the news there […]

Another attack has hit France – this one is particularly heinous, the murder of an 85-year old priest – and the critics are out in full force, all of whom know what is wrong with France and what the French should do about it.  I certainly would not want to be French President Hollande or […]

In 1996 then First Lady Hillary Clinton published a book It Takes a Village which was essentially a tome on how to raise children.  The main argument centred on the responsibilities that everyone has to contribute to the shaping of productive, well-adjusted citizens and was a bit of a call to an earlier age where this […]

Although most countries cannot agree on what constitutes terrorism, if we judge by the number of definitions that are out there, they do seem to do a better job at determining what a terrorist group is.  There are so-called terrorist listings in the US, the UN, the EU, and the UK among other jurisdictions.  We […]