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 […]
Search: “Terrorists”
We found 1,667 results for your search.
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 […]
Categories
Stop the politicisation of terrorism
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 […]
Categories
Tech and terrorism – part 1
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 […]
Those of us in the intelligence community would often wonder what it would be like to have an NDP government calling the shots. Generally speaking, we did not see it is a good thing for Canada’s spies. Whether it was uncertainty over the need to have intelligence services at all or some misplaced sense that […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 26 I do not really want to flog the Jagmeet Singh/Sikh extremism story ad nauseum – many others have done that – but there is one thing that the leader of the NDP does that concerns me and needs to be addressed. In truth he has […]
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 […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 9, 2018 In the 1997 movie Rocket Man (starring Canadian actor Harland Williams), a comedy about the first manned mission to Mars, there is a scene where a senior NASA manager, played by Jeffery DeMunn, is trying to justify why he did not predict and […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on February 26, 2018 I still remember my first day at CSE. I had moved to Ottawa from London (Ontario) where I had been interviewed by CSE representatives and later offered a job. I knew little of what I was being asked to do since the poster […]
There is an interesting debate in Canada over what are called ‘mandatory minimums’, i.e. a government/court-imposed set of rules on how crimes are to be treated. This is an attempt to establish minimum sentences for certain offences, supposedly tied to how society views certain criminal acts. In jurisdictions that have such strictures judges are bound […]