Jesse Rosenfeld, 26, activist journalist
A few days before the G20, Mr. Rosenfeld appeared at a Toronto café and spoke about the difference between mainstream and alternative media.
At a protest at the Novotel on Saturday night, that difference came into sharp focus for the freelancer Mr. Rosenfeld, who reportedly took a policeman's fist to the gut and an elbow to the back as mainstream broadcaster Steve Paikin looked on.
"He was completely defenceless," said Mr. Paikin, host of TVO's The Agenda, who reported the assault on Twitter after he was escorted from the same protest in far gentler fashion. He later learned Mr. Rosenfeld has only one kidney and suffers asthma.
Normally based in Israel, where he writes for The Daily Nuisance, an independent site that reports on issues in occupied Palestinian territories, Mr. Rosenfeld himself had a foot in both journalistic camps. He was to produce three G20 comment pieces for Britain's The Guardian, while also working with a collective of alternative reporters in his native Toronto.
"We're examining questions like how power works," Mr. Rosenfeld, a McGill graduate in international development, was reported as saying last Monday, at an event to launch the collective.
By Mr. Paikin's account, that question was answered in brutal fashion for the young scribe, whose whereabouts were unknown to his family until late Sunday afternoon.
After several hours spent at a bail court on Finch Avenue, his father, Mark Rosenfeld, learned Jesse had been charged with breaching the peace, and would be released from detention on Eastern Avenue late Sunday night.
The family has hired Julian Falconer, a high-profile human-rights lawyer.
Alex Hundert, 30, anarchist
Hours before his arrest in a pre-dawn police raid Saturday, Alex Hundert issued what would be his last G20 rallying cry, via Twitter: "tomorrow is gonna be even bigger. they never should've brought that twisted circus here."
Saturday certainly was big, but as Black Bloc activists smashed their way through downtown Toronto, Mr. Hundert - who had supported their militant tactics online and in speeches for months in the summit lead-up - stood in a courtroom with three co-accused.
All were denied bail on charges of conspiring to commit indictable mischief. The charges were the product of more than a year of an undercover police investigation.
There's been nothing covert about Mr. Hundert's views, on which he expounded at length in a March 1 posting to rabble.ca, a non-profit news forum where activists often gather.
"The Black Block [sic]is a wrecking ball tactic that makes space for more mainstream or creative tactics," Mr. Hundert wrote in defence of the "diversity of tactics," including violence, employed during anti-Olympic protests in Vancouver.
Mr. Hundert, who works with a "community-based radical direct action group" in Kitchener-Waterloo, which he helped initiate at Wilfrid Laurier University, called Bloc anarchists "for the most part solid community organizers." He wrote dismissively of those who insist on only peaceful action, saying "It is a zealous adherence to dogmatic 'non-violence' that shuts down any meaningful dialogue."
In follow-up comments online on June 20, one of his former professors, Adam Davidson-Harden, took his erstwhile student to task.
"You think you're right, and others can line up behind you, or 'get out of the way'," the professor of peace and conflict studies wrote. "That is the kind of thinking that got us colonialism in the first place, Alex. That is the essence of violence."
Emomotimi Azorbo, 30, deaf kitchen worker
For all the sound and fury of the G20, Mr. Azorbo heard none of it, but his total deafness proved no guarantee of a peaceful weekend.
Mr. Azorbo, a Montreal-born bachelor of Nigerian descent who works in the kitchen of a Swiss Chalet, walked into a melee on Friday and wound up in jail, charged with assaulting police and resisting arrest.
"Our defence is he did absolutely nothing wrong," his defence lawyer Howard Morton said Saturday, after Mr. Azorbo was freed on $1,000 bail. "He was there and he was entitled to be there."
Mr. Azorbo was at College and Yonge streets when police and about 500 protesters confronted each other. Friends said he was merely curious about what was happening, but that his deafness kept him from hearing police commands to get off the street, and he was arrested.
To make matters worse, they said, he was not given proper access to a sign-language interpreter at the G20 detention centre. This led to a sit-in outside by a few dozen protesters, who drummed and chanted in support of the deaf man.
On Sunday, Mr. Azorbo was back at his modest west-end apartment, relieved to return to previous activities like watching World Cup soccer, but he still faces an Aug. 23 court date to answer to his charges.
"He's never had any kind of a criminal record," said his good friend and neighbour, Saron Ghebresellassi, a doctoral student in social sciences at York University. "He's always just been a very responsible citizen."
Farzad Fatholahzadeh, 39, CTV field producer
Mr. Fatholahzadeh spent the day on the streets, helping Canadian television viewers keep up with the anarchists and the police response to them.
He never imagined he'd be caught in the middle.
On Saturday evening, he was at Queen's Park as protesters retreated there, when he was suddenly tackled by plainclothes police. "They told me to relax, which was weird because I was totally relaxed," Mr. Fatholahzadeh said. "They told me I should know better than to be here."
He informed police that he was a member of the media, but was ignored. He was cuffed and arrested, and taken in a busload of prisoners to a makeshift jail on Eastern Avenue , where he spent the night.
"When we drove in everyone started cracking Guantanamo Bay jokes," Mr. Fatholahzadeh said. Some of the arrested, he said, were also given orange jumpsuits.
He spent the night in a cold cell with about 20 other people. Around 4 a.m., he was let go.
"They realized who I worked for, fast-tracked the release and dropped the charges," he said.
Colin Freeze