TORONTO - At 20 Tarak has been divorced from everything — his family, his home, his childhood and a future that once seemed assured.

Thousands of refugees who fled Mosul, Iraq, six months ago, now living in tents near the border with Turkey, will get more stable and winter-ready housing thanks to an extra $2.4 million in government funding given to the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace.

TORONTO - Catholic refugee sponsors stand ready to do their part in bringing 10,000 Syrian refugees to Canada, but they want to hear more from the federal government about its plans.

TORONTO - It’s not easy being Syrian, especially if you’re the forgotten minority caught in the tsunami of sectarian massacres and ethnic cleansing referred to as the Syrian civil war.

WARSAW, Poland - Ukrainian Catholic leaders have warned their Church is being driven underground again, a quarter-century after it was re-legalized with the end of communist rule.

More than 840,000 Canadians got food from a food bank in March this year. That isn’t the number who needed food they couldn’t afford. It’s just the number who swallowed their pride and figured out when and where they could collect a box of groceries consisting for the most part of stuff grocery shoppers didn’t want for themselves.

Four months after its health care policy for refugee claimants was ruled unconstitutional, Ottawa has grudgingly relented to a judge’s order and returned many — but not all — benefits to the needy people it had previously abandoned. We say grudgingly because the immigration minister remains determined to continue a court battle in defence of a policy that a federal court has already — and quite rightly — denounced as “cruel and unusual.” 

BEIRUT - Syrian children who have seen their houses bombed and family members killed are using string, glue, socks, beads and other odds and ends to help put their lives back together.

AL-UM-KUNDUN, JORDAN - Iraqi refugees who fled Islamic State violence and theft of their property in Mosul said it will be difficult to ever return home, despite concerns by the Church that more Christians are fleeing their ancient homeland in the Middle East. 

The film is called The Good Lie but if offers a lot of truth. 

AMMAN, Jordan - Ask Syrian refugees sheltering in neighbouring Jordan about the advent of U.S.-led strikes against Islamic State militants in their homeland, and the reactions will be mixed.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis called for the "globalization of charity" through an international network to fight human trafficking and ensure the rights of migrants and refugees.

TORONTO - Mahir Aboudi’s aging mother and father — on the run from the Islamic State and holed up with thousands of refugees in Irbil, Kurdistan — can’t join their son and his family in Canada as refugees because they haven’t yet crossed an international border, Conservative cabinet member Jason Kenney told Aboudi and his family. 

Despite her comfortable life in Hamilton, Ont., fourth-year MacMaster University student Sherly Kyorkis comes from a long line of refugees.