Toronto psychiatrist Dr. Yusra Ahmad’s infectious laugh belies the stress she is feeling. The single mother and survivor of domestic violence worries about her 12-year-old daughter learning virtually.

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.

Conlin McCabe placed fourth in men’s pairs at the Tokyo Olympic Games — capping an Olympic rowing career that saw him win two medals over three games. But upon his retirement from the sport, the 31-year-old Brockville native faced an uncertain future.

Talking Taboo was created by the Dalla Lana Fellows in Global Journalism at the University of Toronto. Katharine Lake Berz is a co-anchor and contributor of Afghan Taboos. Women who live without a man or work outside the home in Afghanistan are breaking Taliban laws some of which are punishable by death.

Canada has committed to resettle forty thousand Afghan refugees, yet fewer than four thousand have arrived so far, and Canadians hoping to help them once they arrive are stuck waiting for the government to keep its promise.

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.”

I will never forget the image of Emel Hemo and her family arriving at Toronto’s Pearson Airport in the wave of Syrian refugees arriving in Canada in the fall of 2016 — all of their belongings piled onto a single cart.

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.

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.

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.”

Glenda’s voice falters as she remembers the day her son was laid-off from his airline job and her taxi business was shuttered.

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.

Last week, the Winter Olympics were taken offline by a cyberattack. This week, hackers breached the German government's computer network. Every day, the volume and velocity of cyberattacks are increasing. From threats to our democratic processes to theft of credit-card information, managing cyberrisk is a necessary priority for all public and private organizations.