ARTICLES

Toronto Star Miko Coffey Toronto Star Miko Coffey

On the front lines to save an old-growth forest in B.C.

Polar Bear pulls up his scarf to hide his face and paces to keep warm. The 30-year-old protester has just hiked down to Fairy Creek headquarters from a stint watching over the trees in the old-growth forest. It has been raining and snowing for days and the drifts are knee-deep on the mountain near the protestors’ headquarters, a rough assembly of tents, tarps and vehicles abutting a barrier to local logging roads.

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Toronto Star Katharine Lake Berz Toronto Star Katharine Lake Berz

Canadians help Surfside Florida condo collapse survivors rebuild their lives

Raysa Rodriguez remembers being tossed out of bed by the force of her condo building heaving. Running out of her ninth-floor apartment in the dark, she saw that both elevators were missing. She knocked frantically on the door of her neighbour Oren Cytrynbaum. With no answer, she sprinted to the stairwell, opened the door and saw “the whole building was gone,” she says. “I heard women screaming in the pile.”

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Toronto Star Katharine Lake Berz Toronto Star Katharine Lake Berz

Swimming upstream: For B.C.’s Cowichan Tribes, life by the river fraught by climate change and a fight for return of their chinook salmon tradition

North Saanich, B.C.—Larry George is working flat out helping his Cowichan Tribes community on Vancouver Island cope with devastating flood damage. The Cowichan River, heartbeat of the First Nations community, breeched its banks after heavy rain this month, forcing many families from their homes.

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Toronto Star Katharine Lake Berz Toronto Star Katharine Lake Berz

‘My hope was taken away’: For some, like Katie Dudtschak, pandemic delays in gender affirmation surgeries made the pain even worse

Katie Dudtschak was not comfortable being a boy from the time she was five years old. She remembers spending hours rummaging through her mother’s jewelry box and clothes drawers, putting on her sister’s bra and panties and wearing them under her clothes to play outside — preferring skipping with the girls to soccer with the boys.

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Toronto Star Katharine Lake Berz Toronto Star Katharine Lake Berz

Afghan women desperate to escape Taliban rule: ‘We don’t know how long we can hide’

Maryam Said Anwar’s says her body still bears the scars from the beatings with a screwdriver she endured at the hands of her husband. Forced to marry when she was 13, Anwar says she was drugged, beaten and tortured by her husband. “Even as l lay full of pain and blood on the ground, he would hit my face and remove my nails with heavy-duty pliers.”

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Toronto Star Katharine Lake Berz Toronto Star Katharine Lake Berz

Trauma and the Taliban: How their return to power has thousands of Afghans in Canada reliving horrors of the past

Ahmed Fadozai can still remember the moment the knife was plunged into the man’s neck.Fadozai, now an entrepreneur in Houston, was in Kabul’s Ghazi soccer stadium in 1998, waiting to watch a soccer match with friends. Instead, military trucks rolled in, soldiers jumped out, hoisted up a man and then decapitated him.

Warning: This story contains descriptions of violence.

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