Toronto Star

Plagued with delays

The city's new $3.5billion Finch West LRT was delayed the equivalent of two and a half hours a day during its first three weeks of operation — problems overwhelmingly caused by the line's inability to handle inclement weather. That's the snapshot...

Trump touts `forever' deal on Greenland

U.S. President Donald Trump says there are talks underway on a “forever” deal over Greenland, the Danish island he has said America must acquire to protect against national and international security threats. Trump revealed the discussions after a...

`The old order is not coming back'

The old “rulesbased” world order is dead, Prime Minister Mark Carney told a global elite audience Tuesday in a hardhitting speech that urged middle powers to form strategic new alliances to protect their interests, citizens and values. “The old...

Caught in the middle

U.S. President Donald Trump linked his aggressive stance on Greenland to last year's decision not to award him the Nobel Peace Prize, telling Norway's prime minister that he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of Peace,” in a text message...

Carney heralds global shift

Talk about a reset. Fresh off lowering tariffs on some Chinesemade electric vehicle imports in exchange for President Xi Jinping's reduction of tariffs on Canadian canola and seafood, Prime Minister Mark Carney departs China setting out a dramatic...

Family's legacy shines bright

The convocation ceremony was already underway when Liam Coles noticed movement at the side of the room. He was seated near the front in his gown, listening and waiting for his moment to cross the stage after some of the hardest months of his...

He just wants police to `leave him alone'

Dale James rarely leaves the apartment he shares with his mom. If he does go out, he prefers to take a drive to a family home in Barrie, away from Toronto, the city where police officers have been continually stopping the 42yearold Black man since he...

Death toll rises amid growing unrest in Iran

Nationwide protests challenging Iran's theocracy reached the twoweek mark on Sunday, as activists reported a rising death toll in violence surrounding the demonstrations. With the internet down in Iran and phone lines cut off, gauging the...

Minneapolis on edge

As anger and outrage spilled out onto Minneapolis's streets Thursday over the fatal shooting of a woman the day before by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, a new shooting by U.S. federal officers in Oregon left two people wounded and...

`I really shouldn't have lived'

For Nicole Grigorov, even the simplest of tasks — tying her hair back, sending a text, putting on clothes — now feel impossible. It's frustrating having to relearn how to use your hands and feet, Grigorov told the Star from her hospital bed in Niagara...

Defiant in captivity

A defiant Nicolás Maduro declared himself “the president of my country” as he protested his capture and pleaded not guilty Monday to federal drug trafficking charges that the Trump administration used to justify removing him from power in...

COURSE OBSTACLES

Each year, Sarah Groh would carefully plot out her undergraduate courses. Unlike her peers, she preferred early morning classes because they helped her get ahead of Toronto traffic and left her evenings free to run her custom cakemaking business. “It...

GOOD THINKING

Toronto is full of ideas. And we think we've found a great one. When we asked Star readers for ideas to improve this city, they sent their brainstorms by the dozens. And when we asked readers to vote on the submissions, thousands more responded. Now...

Diving into a new year

Out with the old, in with the cold DARE TO DIP The gusting winds and frosty 12 C temperatures on New Year's Day didn't hold back hundreds of brave people from running into the icy shallows of Lake Ontario from the beach at Sunnyside Park. Pardeep...

TCHC to save building corroding from inside out

When the brick walls of 300 Dufferin Street started to crack, the building owner didn't see an immediate cause for panic. In a city filled with aging brick, a crack or two wasn't unusual — a sign of water getting in and then freezing, hardly causing...

Behind schedule

Toronto in February 2020 hustled and bustled in blissful ignorance. The roads were clogged with cars, and the trains were full of people. The TTC logged 10 million weekly trips, a healthy bump from the year prior. Then, in the span of two weeks, that...

Fighting for a boy's legacy

In the throes of grief, Holly Roy had a singular request. “Anyone who's asked me if I need anything,” she wrote in a Facebook post, just over two months after her son, JahVai, was killed by a stray bullet that punctured the bedroom window of her Black...

`We're all forever changed'

Clayton Bouffard will bring it up every once in a while with his wife: What if they hadn't gotten on that plane? What if, when the Delta gate attendants offered to bump two people off that February flight to Toronto, they had taken the offer? What if...

The river wild: New park draws species not seen for a century to mouth of Don

When the black and white, bluntbilled creature floated into a river valley just east of downtown Toronto, birdwatching web pages buzzed and birders flocked to witness and record the amazing visitor. While any razorbill visit would be special, this...

City shifts course as market slump threatens coop development

A multimilliondollar land sale city hall is banking on to help fund Toronto's largest new coop development in decades has been delayed in getting across the finish line. Toronto is now crafting backup plans to ensure the marquee housing project in...

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Oh, 2025. You housed the best of times and the worst of times (some more than others). As the city gears up for the ring of Santa's sleighbells and the arrival of a new year, the Star looked back, picking ornaments to mark some of Toronto's most...

`Just a new normal'

The little girl with a tiny blond ponytail sticking up from the crown of her head is fearlessly padding around the living room, barefoot, with her bottle — “baba” — greeting strangers who have come just to see her. At 18 months, SkylaRose is...

Liberal `yute' caucus

Minutes before the House of Commons rose for the holiday break, four rookie Liberal MPs huddled in one of their offices and debated a surprisingly difficult question: how they wanted to pose on camera. Should they look serious? Make a funny face? Or a...

WHEN THE CAMERAS STOPPED

Jordan Mendez doesn't flinch as the jury foreperson reads the verdict. Guilty of firstdegree murder. He stands, expression unreadable, as his coaccused lowers his head and the victim's mother rocks in her seat, before rising and glaring at the two...

Innocence restored

Prosecutors will not pursue a second trial against Timothy Rees after his 1990 conviction in the death of 10yearold Darla Thurrott was quashed by Ontario's top court in light of new evidence, thought to have been buried by police for years. The...

The fast and the festive

Cruising through Toronto's downtown core, Chris Demaras dials down his radio playing Christmas tunes as pedestrians cheer, wave and hurry to snap a photo of his GMC truck decked out in holiday themed lights. A young kid shouts, “I like your car!” and...

Thorncliffe residents face indefinite wait

StaceyAnne Bistak was eating Thanksgiving dinner in late November in Ohio with her husband's family when she learned the apartment building she lived in was on fire. Now, Christmas is only a week away, and Bistak, a resident at one of the two...

`We need these answers'

Lang Choy now knows her brother died inside his Black Volkswagen as it sat parked outside the entrance of Humber River Hospital for three days. What she doesn't know is when. From the little Lang has been told by police, the vehicle came to a stop...

CUT OFF

The corner of Broadview Avenue and Queen Street East sits a stone's throw away from the busy Gardiner Expressway. And yet, were you to call up your phone's traffic app and map a route, you might well be told to do the following: Drive west to Bayview...

Losing Liam

One Tuesday night, 11 days before she was due to give birth, Katherine Cribbs took a bath. Usually, Cribbs could feel her baby son moving and playing inside her womb when she was in the water. But that night, she felt only heaviness. She crept...

Three murders solved

It was a summer evening in June 1982. Christine Prince, a 25yearold nanny from Wales living in Toronto, got on a streetcar after a night out with friends. Her body was found the next day in the Rouge River. After entering a beige vehicle on Jarvis...

SLUSH PUPPY

A snowfall warning for the Toronto area was lifted as temperatures plummeted Wednesday evening into Thursday following a wet, snowy and slowgoing day in the city and on roads. And the region can thank visitors from the Prairies for the...

Finch West LRT off to a slow start

The TTC and the city of Toronto are scrambling to speed up the Finch West LRT after the new line — six years and billions of dollars in the making — opened on the weekend with slowerthanpromised service. Mayor Olivia Chow said Tuesday she plans to...

In her own defence

Her voice trembling, a woman on Monday described the final moments of the 12yearold boy she's accused of murdering — a child she was planning to adopt and insisted she always loved, despite referring to him in numerous text messages by terms such as...

NOW ARRIVING

Kevin Wang has waited much of his life for this moment. The 12yearold first saw the Finch West LRT trains at a train yard when he was seven. On Sunday, he waited nearly two hours — in the dark morning hours of the weekend and in the frost and snow —...

Mass torture in Syria

Ahmet Alrahmo sat awake in his apartment in Waterloo, Ont., eyes fixed on the news coming out of Syria, the country he once called home. It was December 2024, just hours after the fall of Bashar alAssad's regime. Alrahmo watched as the gates of the...

City reeling after Algoma layoffs

In households across Sault Ste. Marie this Christmas, the usual holiday cheer will be mixed with fear and uncertainty. “Sitting around the Christmas table not knowing if you're going to have a job is just awful,” said Bill Slater, president of USW...

`They have lost hope'

Refugees from Africa continue to face longer wait times for resettlement to Canada than applicants from other regions, two years after a government audit identified inequities in immigration processing, says a new report. “The persistence of...

Wish upon a baseball star

Five years ago, George Springer was one of Major League Baseball's most prominent free agents. As a highly touted outfielder and proven playoff performer, just about every team was interested in acquiring him, but only a small handful could afford his...

Trust and reconsideration

OTTAWA Prime Minister Mark Carney sought to assure hundreds of First Nations chiefs Tuesday that the federal government will not impose a pipeline or other resource projects over their objections after they unanimously called for the withdrawal of his...

A fatherson double play

John Bains became a magnet for homerun balls at the Rogers Centre during the Blue Jays' playoff drive — even the ones he didn't want — and it paid off big time for him last week. The longtime baseball fan and his son Matthew watched from their...

Hope hits the light rails

Growing up in the JaneFinch neighbourhood, filmmaker Paul Nguyen felt like he lived in a forgotten corner of the city. His community was a world away from the downtown core and overlooked by urban developments. “In the past, when people would ask...

Province takes control of realty regulator

Ontario's real estate regulator is getting a new boss. The province has appointed an administrator to oversee the Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO) in the wake of the iPro scandal, which raised widespread concerns about the regulator's ability to...

`I've been labelled a killer, and I'm not'

Ontario's top court has quashed the conviction of Timothy Rees, formerly sentenced to life for the murder of 10yearold Darla Thurrott, in light of new evidence alleged to have been “buried” by police for years. A new trial was ordered for Rees, 62,...

Horror in Hong Kong

Firefighters battled one of Hong Kong's deadliest modern blazes for a second day Thursday, fighting to control the fire that blackened several highrise towers and killed at least 44 people. Three men from a construction company were arrested, and...

Training centres could bypass planning rules, municipalities warn

Premier Doug Ford is making sweeping exemptions to planning rules — all for the benefit of operators running worker training facilities built with money from the Skills Development Fund, warns the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. In the...

Daughter buys site of Sherman home

The daughter of slain billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman has purchased the vacant lot in North York that held the house where her parents were murdered. A group of neighbours are concerned it will become a memorial park. A spokesperson for Sherman...

Scorching conditions

By the time Leeanne Harvey was faced with a decision she considered to be life or death, the injuries at her workplace were already mounting. June 2018 had been exceptionally warm. Already on a single day earlier that month, two workers at Grenville...

Honouring our veterans

The sun defied the bleak weather forecast Tuesday morning to shine on Remembrance Day processions across Toronto. At Old City Hall, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the streets were choked by hundreds of people bracing...

Mixed precipitation

A rare and recordsetting early snowstorm swept across Toronto and much of southern Ontario on Sunday, causing chaos on roads and kickstarting the city's winter cleanup crews. Toronto's Pearson Airport reported 9.8 centimetres of snow on Sunday,...

Soap opera on Conservative benches overshadows debate on budget

Former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer insisted Friday that no one is interested in palace intrigue. But after his party saw a floor crosser, a resignation, allegations of bullying and threats levied against MPs, and rumours of more Conservative...

Digital drug dealers

The gram of cocaine arrived in a Canada Post package. So did the Oxycodone, each 20 mg pill sealed in its own baggie emblazoned with green dollar signs and gold crowns. Inside each package, no attempt was made to conceal the drugs before shipment....

The hunt for Toronto's ONE GREAT IDEA

Where do the best ideas come from? Sometimes they come from the long study of a seemingly intractable problem. Some come from a spark of random inspiration. Toronto is a city that's in need of ideas. That's part of what's been driving the Star's...

Conservatives to lose second MP

Canada's minority Parliament was again the stage for high drama Thursday night, when an Alberta Conservative MP — whom the Star has learned met with Prime Minister Mark Carney this week — said he will resign his seat mere moments before the Liberals...

Tapestry of remembrance

When Claire Laporte began receiving poppies from all over Canada, she remembers feeling “dumbfounded.” The 61yearold retiree created the Legion 101 Poppy Project on Facebook in an effort to gather enough poppies to create one tapestry, which would...

Liberals bet big with budget

OTTAWA The Mark Carney government is betting its political fortune on a $581billion budget that will slash the ranks of the federal public service and add billions for national defence, housing and tradeboosting infrastructure, while nearly doubling...

A desperate timeline

For more than three days in late 2022, selfdescribed “Crypto King” Aiden Pleterski was threatened and tortured by three men who kidnapped him off the streets of downtown Toronto in a desperate attempt to collect on a massive, unpaid debt. The details...

Feeling blue

Bottom of the 11th inning, Blue Jays trailing by one run, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. stepped into the batter's box. On the mound, the Los Angeles Dodgers' Yoshinobu Yamamoto was pitching in relief after throwing 96 pitches as the Game 6 starter the...

The loss hurts. But these Jays did us all proud

A sweet and sour debate

We asked readers what treats make their Halloween haul a hit — or a miss

Happy Hallowin!

As the city pulses with excitement for the Blue Jays in their bid to win the World Series, Toronto looks to have been born ready. Bars are preparing for record crowds, Blue Jays merch is flying off store shelves, the TTC is ramping up service for a...

STRIKING DISTANCE

The Blue Jays defeated Blake Snell in Game 1 of the World Series by making him work early and getting to the Los Angeles Dodgers bullpen. In Game 5, they switched up the approach and ambushed him instead. Before Snell even had time to settle in on...

Halloween data reveals sweet spots

Your neighbourhood is the best at Halloween. Your street has an army of 12foot Home Depot skeletons with those creepy blinking eyes. Gary next door has a fog machine! Reports of fullsized KitKat bars travel by text. Problem is — Toronto has a lot of...

No regrets over ad blitz, Ford says

An unrepentant Premier Doug Ford has no regrets about Ontario's antitariff advertising blitz that derailed trade talks with U.S. President Donald Trump, who accused Canada of playing “dirty pool” and iced Prime Minister Mark Carney's hopes of meeting...

Coveting all the bases

At the end of the third inning, the grounds crew rushed onto the field and Michael Posner perked up. “All right, here we go,” said Posner, a vicepresident with Major League Baseball, who was at the Rogers Centre on Saturday night to oversee the...

Good cop, bad cop ploy with Trump backfires

A new rule may be emerging in CanadaU.S. relations — it's a risky business, mixing politics and baseball. Prime Minister Mark Carney admitted this week that he had no luck so far tempting Donald Trump into placing a wager on the World Series....

Judge throws out murder charges

Three men accused of committing an executionstyle murder will not face trial after a judge ruled the abuse they suffered at the Maplehurst Correctional Complex in December 2023 — and the attempts by jail staff to cover up what happened — was such an...

A generation of fans awaits a reason to party like it's 1992

The police closed Yonge Street from Queen to Bloor. The fans decided that wasn't enough. So in the early hours of Oct. 25, 1992, as a clubhouse filled and champagne flowed 1,200 kilometres to the south in Atlanta, the fans spread out. From the...

Woman's suspected killer faced charges in earlier incident

The man believed to have fatally shot the mother of his child before abducting their daughter was already facing trial for an earlier intimate partner violence case involving the same woman, the Star has learned. Anthony Deschepper, who was killed in...

`Magic ball, magic jersey'

Michael Angeletti says he knew he would catch George Springer's homerun ball before it actually happened. The Toronto native was sitting in the front row out in left field at Rogers Centre — wearing a Springer jersey — during Game 7 of the American...

Touch 'em all, George!

Step aside José Bautista, there's a new postseason hero in town. Ten years after Bautista's bat flip punched the Blue Jays' ticket to an American League championship series, George Springer oneupped him with a dramatic threerun shot that secured...

JAYS STORM BACK

With their backs against the wall and facing elimination, the Blue Jays should have been the ones feeling the pressure. Instead they played loose and free while it was the Seattle Mariners who appeared to be under duress. Every aspect of the Jays'...