‘Hush little baby, don’t scream all day… Momma’s gonna buy you a Mocking Jay’. Etc.Read More »A lullaby for Vancouver babies
Tommy Gossland dives into the UBC Aquatic centre pool. Picture Copyright Geoff Lister/The Ubyssey.
Canadians need to start embracing the Summer Olympic Games like they embrace the Winter Olympics.
For a nation that professes to love sport, we are too often prone to ignore some of our best and brightest athletes.Read More »Summer Games athletes deserve support
Okapi at Marwell Wildlife Park.
Picture copyright David Connop Price.
Sadly, the project has been in the news this week for all the wrong reasons. Six people and 13 okapi were massacred by mai mai rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
According to reports from staff from the Institute in the Congo for Conservation of Nature (ICCN) headquarters and Okapi Conservation Project base, located in the Ituri Forest, these rebels attacked their complex, killing two of the rangers that patrol the area to prevent poaching.
The rebels, who are thought to be a a group of elephant poachers and illegal miners, also killed the wife of one of the rangers, an immigration worker, and two residents of Epulu, a nearby village. The gunmen also destroyed and looted the buildings on the site. Villagers and ICCN staff had to flee for their lives into the forest, or walk to the nearest city, Mambassa.
ANYONE who has lived abroad or travelled abroad for long periods of time will probably remember what it feels like to come back to Canada.
The sense of openness and the friendliness of the people is one of the first things that will hit you. But it’s the small things that you took for granted when you lived here that seem to really stand out and seem a bit … foreign.
A friend’s Facebook status update is a case in point. On return to Canada from a lengthy tour of Europe, she wrote: “OK, why is there so much water in the toilets here?” (Fresh water is a scarce resource in Europe, so toilets are designed to flush using much less water. In comparison, many Canadian toilets use what seems like buckets of water). It’s hard not to think it’s a big waste.
Plans are well under way for a plethora of patriotic street and garden parties as Britain and the Commonwealth prepare to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. THE… Read More »The British Monarchy… still puzzling people after all these years
THEY can interrupt a tense moment in a film, drive stage actors to distraction and set teachers’ teeth on edge. Still, more and more people seem to think it’s okay to leave their mobile phone ringtones on when they’ve been asked not to.IT was a Monday morning.
Like a lot of people out there, I’m keen on maintaining work-life balance. I believe a part of that is doing active, healthy things, like going for walks and heading to the gym every once in a while. It clears your head and puts you in a more positive mind-frame.
So last Monday I found myself lying on a mat at the LC2 in Swansea, feeling a zen-like calm after a yoga session. We had just done 45 minutes of stretches and I was starting to feel ready to take on the week ahead.
One of Marwell Wildlife Park's okapis. Picture by David Connop Price.
BECAUSE of their shyness, okapis are not necessarily a zoo favourite, but I became enamoured with them from the moment I set eyes on one – at London Zoo.
I was accompanying my sister, Kim, on one of her regular trips to London Zoo with the boys she was looking after at the time. We’d gone to the Into Africa exhibit where towering giraffes, beautiful zebras and strange-looking tapirs are housed.
Then we came across an enclosure which I’d not been to before.
Read More »It was love at first sight when I saw my first okapi
AS a modern journalist, I have been trained to have a short attention span. Twitter has taken that to a whole new level. It’s a self-styled “micro-blogging” platform and lets you share the interesting things going on around you in 140 characters in an instant.
But I have been thinking seriously about trying to write something more substantial than a tweet or a few paragraphs of a blog.