DARPA is developing a futures market for foreign politics which will include terrorism, overthrows, assassinations, etc. (or so says a NYTimes article. My econ background leads me to think this market, if open to global play, will be a good predictor of incidents. But to be a good predictor, the market has to be fairly liquid, which implies there's a good deal of money coursing through it. This money flow will create the moral hazard of someone buying a boatload of cheap forward contracts and then making that event occur (e.g. buy a million futures contracts that politician X is going to be assassinated for a penny each, then kill X, and turn the $10,000 investment into $1M).