Safari Notes

It is now being reported that Halliburton might be to blame for the Gulf oil spill that’s currently threatening the coasts, livelihoods, health, and seafood restaurants of many states along the Gulf of Mexico . As for Halliburton, this is what they claim on their site : Halliburton originated oilfield cementing and leads the world in effective, efficient delivery of zonal isolation and engineering for the life of the well. Operators consistently rank Halliburton Cementing No. 1 in total value provided to customers . 'Effective', 'efficient' and 'No. 1' Halliburton has been indeed! They have been so effective and efficient and made billions in profit from their own - Americans, and from many other countries; including from Iraq. Profits made, at any cost. Even if it meant 'selling' un-purified water to their own as they did in Iraq; even if it meant ineffectively and inefficiently cementing the deepwater drilling hole in the Gulf of Mexico. Even if ...

What a surprise! What a shock! The most talked and most researched slum in the world: Kibera , does not have a population of 1 million as always suggested and believed. In fact, Kibera does not have half of that many people; and not even a quarter of that. The 2009 Kenyan census puts Kibera’s population at only 170,070. A few quotes on what has been said about Kibera's incredible population census results: It is now official: Kibera is not the biggest slum in Africa. The 2009 Kenya Population and Housing Census shows that one of the world's most famous slums houses just 170,070 residents, not one million, as previously believed.......While many may dispute these figures, I find it highly unlikely that the margin of error in the census was so huge that the population of a settlement dropped dramatically to one-fifth of its previous estimate in just a few years - unless the drop can be explained by a natural disaster or epidemic.......The more likely scenario is that, in the...

Two adventuoruous wildlife phographers, Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas - during a visit to Kenya's rennowned and very popular Masai Mara, spotted a very unsusual sight: a pink hippo. Pink hippos are very rare and have reportedly been seen on only a handful of occasions, in Uganda. From Will and Matt's blog: We have just returned from a trip to the Masai Mara in Kenya where we were photographing the annual wildebeest migration. After a rather uneventful morning, we stopped on the banks of the Mara River for a picnic breakfast. It was then that we came across a truly exceptional individual… just as we started to tuck into our breakfast, we looked up and gawked, open-mouthed, as a pink hippopotamus emerged from the river! Hippos are usually dark brown in colour, so this individual was very conspicuous! We dropped our breakfast and reached for our cameras. The hippo was clearly a young one since it was much smaller than the others in the group. It was also very shy and tended to...