In university, my subscriptions to the Times Colonist and the National Post left me with a herculean amount of recycling. It's a lot of paper for just one person.

Cpl. James Dalton, 21, of the Canadian Scottish Regiment in Victoria was deployed to Afghanistan on Thanksgiving weekend. He will be writing monthly dispatches from the Canadian Forces base at Kandahar. This is his third column.

No fuel was spilled when a cargo ship was blown onto a reef in Plumper Sound off Mayne Island this week, says a coast guard official.

I lined up three hours for a flu shot yesterday. Ended up seeing the new Twilight movie by mistake.

The Vancouver Island Health Authority has put up a "for sale" sign on Oak Bay Lodge and Mount Tolmie Hospital, both long-term care facilities. The health authority has issued a request for proposals to build and operate a replacement facility. The deadline for proposals is Jan. 13.

H1N1 shots are now available to anyone.

Three-year-old Simon Baker has one question that he asks over and over again: Why? Why is the big television gone? Why are my books all wet? Why can't I touch anything?

More members of our community will need a helping hand from Times Colonist readers or they'll go without this holiday season.

B.C.'s privacy commissioner has launched his own investigation into how sensitive information from 1,400 income-assistance clients ended up at the home of a government employee.

Richard J. Dalton Jr., Vancouver Sun Comox Valley RCMP are treating the death of a Hornby Island poet and singer as a homicide following results of a forensic autopsy, RCMP said Friday.

With news that the death of local singer, poet, and artist Tempest Grace Gale has been ruled a homicide some Hornby Island residents now believe the "live-and-let-live" culture of Hornby Island may have changed forever.

A wind storm with gusts of more than 70 km/h blew through Greater Victoria on Saturday night.

It's been just over 10 years since Victoria's annual Island Farms Santa Claus Light Parade was turned into a nighttime affair, and no one seems to be tiring of the change.

A man living in a Langford care facility was hospitalized with burns to his feet Saturday after a minor fire. Only one suite was involved in the fire, but there was considerable smoke and the Langford Fire Department decided to evacuate all of the building's elderly residents.

No one has claimed the property of 48-year-old Jeff Hughes, who was shot and killed by police outside his Selby Street apartment in Nanaimo on Oct. 23.

A drunk driving teen hit and seriously hurt a woman walking down Sooke Road last night, say West Shore RCMP. Before 8:40 p.m. Friday night a woman walking across the road at the intersection of Sooke and Kelly Roads was hit by a vehicle driving westbound, break her leg and lacerating her head.

Saanich residents returned to their home Thursday evening to find nearly every room ransacked.

The 35th annual Island Farms Santa's Light Parade will light up downtown tonight starting at 6 as it makes its way along Government Street. Organizers expect 40,000 to 50,000 people to brave the soggy weather to see St. Nick along the route, and then later at Capitol Iron on Store Street.

NORTH COWICHAN, B.C. -- Emergency crews ran pumps through the night and into the early morning Saturday in an effort to combat massive flooding that had prompted the communities of North Cowichan and Duncan on Vancouver Island to declare a state of emergency.

There was much conflicting testimony at this week's hearing into allegations that Victoria investment adviser Carolann Steinhoff altered client documents.