Islander

Times Colonist reporter Katie DeRosa is on leave in England, where she is completing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics.

If the Scots in the Hotel Grand Pacific ballroom felt threatened having their legendary whiskies upstaged on the world stage last year by a Canadian competitor, they weren’t showing it.

Local volunteers, including Langford Fire Chief Bob Beckett, are appealing for donations for their upcoming trip to help an orphanage in Haiti.

It can be lonely and dangerous living on the streets. It comes as no surprise that some of the city’s homeless find comfort and companionship with a pet.

A hundred years ago, my grandfather went to war and upon his return obtained land in Langley to start a farm. A hundred years ago, First Nations formed the Allied Tribes of B.C. to stop such encroachment on their lands.

Maybe it’s because the Commons, the airy, industrial-chic new venue that arose from Pescatore’s massive makeover last year, is a more spacious Victoria Film Festival launch party venue than Oyster once was.

When history professor Barry Gough retired to his native Victoria, he ended up surrounded by watery echoes of the Royal Navy’s first attempt at globalization.

Dec. 26, 2015, was the 100th anniversary of one of the strangest naval battles of the First World War, when an eccentric British officer who had married a woman from Victoria took on the German navy with two little boats on Lake Tanganyika.

This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Jan. 7, 1939. A day like this would stir anyone’s heart.

Dunno, but the poor old world was pretty black and blue in 2015. A devastating earthquake in Nepal. Terrorist attacks from Kenya to California. A German pilot who deliberately crashed an airliner into the Alps. So many mass shootings in the U.S.