Global News

Will Canada’s Syria mission bolster Assad’s regime?

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March 27, 2015 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News

The federal Conservatives have extended Canada’s anti-ISIS campaign to include airstrikes on Syria. This is necessary, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says, because the group “must cease to have any safe haven in Syria.”

But in doing so, Canada may be helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has, evidence indicates, cluster-bombed and gassed his own civilians, contributed to a massive humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of people – far more than the so-called Islamic StateCanada has vowed to defeat.

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Going hungry: Why millions of Canadians can’t afford healthy food

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March 25, 2015 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News

Pay the rent, or put food on the table?

It sounds like an unthinkable choice. It’s one Priscilla, a Winnipeg mom with two young kids, both under 8, faces daily.

It’s one the growing number of people Laurie O’Connor sees streaming through Saskatoon’s Food Bank keep asking themselves.

It’s one faced by more than a million Canadian households, a Statistics Canada report revealed Wednesday.

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‘I needed to know it wasn’t my fault’: When rapists are those you trust most

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March 9, 2015 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News

We’ve been inundated with the stories — personal, frank, harrowing — of sexual assault survivors since publishing this story about how difficult it is to get justice for rape.

Among the people we spoke with were survivors who wanted to go public with the abuse they suffered and the way they feel Canada’s court system failed them, and wanted to put their names to their stories.

But because of rules imposed by the same court system that in so many cases fails the victims of sexual violence, we believe their names remain under publication ban – ostensibly for their own protection – long after cases are closed or alleged abusers no longer living.

We wish we could honour the wishes of these individuals to be named. Out of an abundance of caution, we have not.

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What Supreme Court’s assisted suicide decision means for people in pain

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Feb. 6, 2015 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News

A quarter-century ago Sheila Noyes watched her younger sister die of breast cancer that spread to her spine. “It really did chew it up.”

She watched her mother die of a brain aneurysm and successive strokes that left her paralyzed — “trapped in a body that wouldn’t let her go.”

Now Noyes, riding a wave of optimism after chemotherapy to treat her own breast cancer appears to have done the trick, is exultant in the knowledge she won’t die the same protracted, painful deaths of these two women she loved.

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