They call it “code orange” in Toronto hospitals. And trauma surgeon Najma Ahmed found herself in the middle of it late one night in July last summer. When she received the code signal, she said she dashed to St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto in minutes. She passed a long line of ambulances on her way to the emergency ward and immediately began conducting triage of injured civilians.
“There was a sense of shock,” she told the CBC. “We’re Canada. This does not happen here.” (more…)
It’s an image that endures. It’s not old enough for us to call it historical yet. It only goes back about 30 years. But the frames of video taken by an amateur videographer show a man in a white shirt, dark pants, facing a column of military tanks. It was June 4, 1989. It was the final day of the student-organized, non-violence demonstration at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, just before China’s People’s Liberation Army gunned down hundreds of civilians for protesting government corruption and lack of free speech.
“Tank Man,” they called him. But the Sunday Express newspaper in Britain later claimed the man was Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student, who’d joined the weeks-long protest, despite the threat of annihilation. (more…)