Search: “Terrorists”

To say that we in the West live in a sex-craved society is putting things mildly.  From TV shows where sexual humour is pervasive (for what it is worth, I think The Big Bang Theory would be a lot funnier without so many sex jokes and no, I am not a prude!) to advertising it […]

This piece appeared in the April 23 edition of The Hill Times In a very funny Monty Python skit John Cleese plays a drill sergeant who is trying to teach a bunch of skinny recruits to defend themselves against foes wielding fresh fruit (oranges, apples, grapefruit, pomegranates….)  with typical hilarious results.  Cleese gets the underwear-clad […]

I have a confession to make.  I am a huge New York Times fan.  I have read it religiously for decades and even in my retirement I buy a copy that a downtown Ottawa news seller sets aside for me on a daily basis (thanks Comerford Cigar Store!).  No one source is exhaustive or 100% […]

Now that Alexandre Bissonnette has pleaded guilty to killing six people (and wounding 19 others) at a Quebec City mosque in January 2017  and we are seeing at last some of the evidence mounted against him (largely his 911 call and his jail cell ‘confession’), we are getting a much clearer picture of why he […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This post appeared in The Hill Times on March 19, 2018   Remember Willy Horton?  No, not the former Detroit Tigers baseball player, the former convicted murderer.  He became famous (infamous?) in 1987 when, after he was released on a prison furlough programme, he raped a white woman and assaulted her fiance (Horton was African […]

This past week I had the opportunity to attend a fascinating workshop in Montreal sponsored by Concordia University’s Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies (MIGS) entitled ‘Tech Against Terrorism’.  A number of academics, private sector entities and think tanks all came to talk about the challenges behind identifying and removing terrorist content from the Internet and […]