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Toronto engulfed by wildfire smoke as US cities threatened

Toronto engulfed by wildfire smoke as US cities threatened

Monitor ranks Toronto as having the worst air quality on earth, surpassing Kinshasa, DR Congo, and New Delhi, India. By AFP and Reuters Published On 16 Jul 202616 Jul 2026 Toronto’s air quality has ranked the worst among all major cities in the world as smoke from wildfires in northwestern Ontario blankets the skies and spreads into the northeastern United States, triggering multiple health warnings and evacuations. Wildfires continued burning through sparsely populated areas hundreds of miles from Toronto, Canada’s largest city, on Wednesday, sending smoke over a wide area, although cities in the area are not being threatened. Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list Environment Canada reported an Air Quality Health Index reading of 10+, classified as “very high risk”, for Toronto. Forecasts suggested that hazardous conditions could persist through Thursday night. IQAir, a Swiss air quality technology company, ranked Toronto as having the worst air quality across the globe, surpassing the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Kinshasa and India’s New Delhi. “The biggest contributor to Toronto’s spike in air pollution right now is wildfires, though the higher-than-average temperatures are also playing a role,” Armen Araradian of IQAir told the AFP news agency. While this year’s wildfire season in Canada has been fairly muted compared with recent years, there are more than 800 active fires nationwide. A video that went viral on social media showed a Canadian National train surrounded by fire near Armstrong, Ontario. Canadian National employees in the area and residents of Armstrong were evacuated on Monday night, the railroad operator said in a statement. It suspended rail operations near Armstrong as a precaution. Smoke from the wildfires also worsened air quality across the border in the US, with the states of Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire particularly affected. Advertisement Authorities in New York City have issued an alert over unhealthy air quality, urging residents to reduce strenuous outdoor activity and take extra breaks if they are outside on Wednesday and Thursday. The National Weather Service said smoke could linger until the end of the week. “We probably haven’t seen the worst of it yet for New York City. We probably haven’t seen the worst of it yet for the Great Lakes and upstate, and New England yet either,” Dan Westervelt, Lamont associate research professor at Columbia University, told the Reuters news agency. More than 80,000 people are expected to attend the FIFA World Cup final at an open-air stadium in New Jersey on Sunday, with another 50,000 planning to watch the game from New York City’s Central Park, where skies appeared hazy. New York Governor Kathy Hochul urged people, especially those with health conditions, to exercise caution. A person puts on a mask as reflected in a souvenir shop mirror, as wildfire smoke from northwestern Ontario fills the sky, in Toronto on Wednesday [Carlos Osorio/Reuters] The Canadian government has said that wildfire season began more slowly this year than in 2023 or 2025 – the two worst seasons for wildfires – but warned that fires were likely, due to warmer-than-usual temperatures across the country. It said some 835 active fires were burning across the country on Wednesday, with 112 considered out of control, and most in the central provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario. They have burned 1.9 million hectares (4.7 million acres) so far. Greg Evans, a professor of chemical engineering and applied chemistry at the University of Toronto, said the city had been simultaneously hit with severe heat and wildfire smoke. “I expect that this will occur more frequently over the coming decades, so cities and residents need to prepare for this in the future,” he said. Adblock test (Why?)

South Korea’s international adoptees seek justice, not homecoming

South Korea’s international adoptees seek justice, not homecoming

Seoul, South Korea – In 2023, Marie Wang began digging into her past for the first time. Growing up in Denmark, she had always known she had been adopted from South Korea in the early 1990s. Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list And for decades, she believed the story contained in her adoption records: her birth mother, a university student, had been forced by circumstances to give up her baby. But as South Korean adoptees around the world uncovered a pattern of fabricated records and irregularities in their original country’s overseas adoption system, Wang decided to request her own file. What she found upended everything she thought she knew. “It said my birth mother believed I was dead, and that it was the doctor at the birth clinic who facilitated my adoption,” Wang told Al Jazeera. “I think Korea Social Service [KSS], my adoption agency, sent me that document by accident because they’ve refused to provide any additional information since. Every time I ask, they say privacy laws prevent them from releasing anything.” Wang is among a growing number of overseas adoptees who have discovered evidence suggesting their adoptions were built on fabricated information. “My adoptive parents would never have adopted me if they’d known I had been separated from my family simply because everyone believed I was dead,” she said. Now 33, Wang has never returned to South Korea. A photo of Mia Lee Hansen that was included in her adoption file [Courtesy of Mia Lee Hansen] Mia Lee Hansen’s story follows a strikingly similar pattern. Also adopted to Denmark through KSS, Hansen spent years believing the account in her adoption papers until a visit to South Korea in 2011. Advertisement “My adoptive parents and I met with a representative from KSS, who told us my files had somehow been fabricated,” she told Al Jazeera. “They said these kinds of errors happened because record-keeping wasn’t very good back then.” Receiving little help from the agency, Hansen turned to commercial DNA testing in 2020. Months later she matched with a cousin in the United States. In 2022, she reunited with her birth family in South Korea. “My father thought it was a joke when he got the phone call telling him I was alive,” she said. “Everyone believed I had died.” According to one of her siblings, when Hansen was born prematurely in the southwestern city of Gwangju in 1987, doctors told her mother she had not survived. “My grandmother returned the next day because she wanted to give me a proper funeral,” Hansen said. “Instead, hospital staff became angry and told her to leave.” Her adoption file offers conflicting explanations for why she was given up, including poverty and her sex. Even the hospital listed differs from the one where her family says she was born. “When you’re adopted, you experience one separation after another,” Hansen said. “You’re separated from your birth mother and moved to the other side of the world. People think babies are too young to remember, but the body remembers.” Overdue recognition For years, overseas adoptees and advocacy groups accused South Korea’s adoption agencies and government of enabling fraudulent overseas adoptions. But last year marked a turning point. In a public statement, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung offered a “heartfelt apology and words of comfort” to overseas adoptees and their birth and adoptive families, saying he felt “heavy-hearted” thinking about the “anxiety, pain and confusion” many had endured after being sent abroad as children. His apology followed findings by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which concluded last year that the government had played a central role in facilitating overseas adoptions through widespread human rights violations. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung addresses the media in Seoul, on June 19, 2026 [Jung Yeon-je/AFP] After a nearly three-year investigation into 367 cases, the commission uncovered fabricated records, identity tampering, fraudulent registrations portraying children as abandoned orphans, and failures to obtain legal consent from birth parents. Its conclusions echoed a landmark 2024 investigation by The Associated Press news agency and TV documentary series PBS Frontline, which found South Korea’s government, adoption agencies and Western partners had helped send about 200,000 children overseas despite mounting evidence that many had been separated from their families through deception or coercion. Advertisement The investigation also found adoption agencies paid hospitals and orphanages for newborns and young children. South Korea’s overseas adoption programme began after the 1950-53 Korean War as a welfare initiative for war orphans. As the country’s economy developed during the 1970s and 80s, however, international adoptions accelerated dramatically, earning South Korea the reputation of being the world’s leading “baby-exporting” nation. The government has since begun confronting that history. Following Lee’s apology, South Korea formally joined the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, transferring responsibility for overseas adoptions from private agencies to the state. It has also pledged to end intercountry adoptions by 2029. Yet many adoptees say the government’s actions have not been accompanied by accountability. Advocates say tens of thousands of overseas adoptees remain without answers because many lack the documentation needed to pursue their cases. That tension was in the background of this year’s Overseas Korean Adoptees Gathering (OKAG). The annual conference, organised by the governmental Overseas Koreans Agency, brings adoptees from around the world to South Korea to reconnect with their birth country. Anne Kim Loesch, who lives in Luxembourg, returned this year as one of the programme’s community leaders. “I’ve always wondered what my birth mother looks like,” Loesch told Al Jazeera. “When I see parents with their children, they resemble each other. I wonder whether I look like her. Is she tall? Is she small like me?” The gathering has also become one of the few places where adoptees feel fully understood. “My closest friends back home aren’t adopted,” she said. “They care about me, but they can’t fully understand what we’ve lived through. Among adoptees, we don’t have to explain.” Anne-Kim-Loesch attends the