'Still in shock'
Tuesday's devastating explosion in Beirut, Lebanon - which led to at least 135 dead, 5,000 injured and 300,000 displaced - left the country reeling.
But the shockwaves were also felt in many East Coast communities.
Here are a few stories about how the Atlantic Canadian Lebanese community is coping with the tragedy:
“Our hearts just stopped and I bursted out into tears,” Rima Saba of Greenwood, N.S. tells the Chronicle Herald's Noushin Ziafati.
P.E.I.'s Fouad Haddad tells the Guardian's Dave Stewart that seeing the news reports of the explosion was like watching the Twin Towers in New York fall on 9-11.
The Cape Breton Post's Sharon Montgomery-Dupe spoke with Fr. Albert Maroun, a former Maronite Catholic priest, whose parents came to Sydney in the early 1900s from villages outside of Beirut.
Haunting decision
Daniel Joseph Paul is still haunted by the decision to take his seven-year-old son off life support in 1997.
“I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t rest, my mind was like a train getting ready to derail. I tried to sleep using those other things,” the 61-year-old, who is known as Danny Paul in Membertou First Nation, tells the Cape Breton Post's Oscar Baker III.
“What was haunting me was did I make the right choice? What if I didn’t do this? All these ‘what ifs?’ It caused me a lot of doubt and a lot of pain.”
After his son Mise’l Paul's first day at a new school, the little boy was excited to see his mom and bolted to her.
He was struck by a pickup truck.
After a week on life support, the doctors explained to his father his brain functions were diminishing, and Danny Paul had to grapple with the decision. After agonizing for hours, Paul made the decision to take his son off life support.
Serving up diversity
It is one small food truck, but on any given day it can hold 13 different countries — or at least the cuisine from them.
Inside the Global Eats food truck in St. John's are people who arrived in Canada as refugees from all over the world, studying with one Canadian-born person, Riley Hendrickson Pike, who works as the sous chef.
The food truck is part of a project that started last year as a social enterprise by the Association for New Canadians to help train newcomers in the restaurant industry., reports the Telegram's Andrew Waterman.
Click/tap here to learn more about the program and see what the chefs-in-training are cooking up.
In the pipeline
To say Mike Vickers' life has been interesting, as he puts it, would be an understatement.
The former Cape Breton resident, 31, left North Sydney for a career in the Alberta oil industry about 10 years ago.
Work was plentiful until the boom went bust, which spurred Vickers to create a Facebook platform to make it easier for energy sector workers to find jobs.
Later this month, Vickers will be on the set of “Pipe Nation”, an in-development dramatization about the men and women who work on the oil and gas pipelines that criss-cross Western Canada.
But he won’t be just looking on — he's one of the leading characters in the production. Its creators hope it will be picked up by a major television network.
Read the Cape Breton Post's David Jala's story on Vickers, and find out why the Pipe Nation team wanted to include him in their series.
Best wishes ... from the world
Brenda MacCaull doesn't remember the airbags going off or feeling any pain after she and her husband Roy were involved in a June 9 collision.
The Ellerslie, P.E.I., couple's vehicle was rear-ended by another driver, causing it to flip and land upside-down in a nearby property's driveway. The driver fled the scene.
Brenda would soon learn she had 10 broken ribs and three fractures in her sternum, reports the Guardian's Daniel Brown.
Needless to say, her 85th birthday was going to be a little different later that month.
As a way to help cheer her up, her daughter, Sandra, put out a request for people to send "happy birthday" and "get well" cards to encourage her, as she loves to hear from the many people she's met over the years and to take a stroll down memory lane.
Read on to find out about the overwhelming response to the request from people around the world.
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