Features

A funny thing happened on the way to the coop. Officials at the Lucknow Zoo, in India, noticed that:

1. Their female Silver Pheasant was bulking up.
2. Her plumage was changing from dull brown to something a bit more flamboyant... and masculine.
3. She stopped laying eggs.
4. She, became he.

Clearly, a spontaneous sex change is mystifying, but it is not groundbreaking.

Listen to the curious case of Gertie to Bertie:

 

 

Listen to Gertie - Bertie: (Pop-up)

Zainab Al-Khawaja fears she may never see her father alive again. Her father is Bahraini rights activist, Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja. A year ago this week, in the midst of street protests against the regime, he was arrested by Bahraini security forces. Mr. Al-Khawaja is now serving a life sentence. And he's sixty-two days into a hunger strike. We reached his daughter Zainab in the capital, Manama.

Sharks are a tough sell. They are not cute and they are not cuddly.

But they are in dire need of our attention, according to conservation biologist and Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Gulf And Caribbean Sharks and Rays Program, Dr. Rachel Graham.

As many as 38 million sharks are killed annually, either as the inadvertant bycatch of industries such as the tuna fishery, or purposely slaughtered for their fins to feed demand for shark fin soup.

Listen to Dr. Rachel Graham: (Pop-up)

The violence in Syria has spilled over into Turkey. Early this morning Syrian forces fired across the border, into a Turkish refugee camp. It's the first time bullets have crossed the border, raising tensions in the region. Hivin Kako is a spokesperson for the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group opposed to the rule of Bashar al-Assad.

This running of the Boston Marathon will be the 40th event in which women are allowed to participate.
Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to officially enter the race. Interestingly, she did so five years before women were allowed, and her reception was decidedly mixed.
Listen to Ms. Switzer's recounting of her historic run, here:

The pictures are remarkable: it almost looks like a red river that runs through Sarajevo. Today, the city is marking the twentieth anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo. Eleven-thousand-five-hundred-and-forty-one red chairs are lined up in rows along Sarajevo's main street. The empty chairs represent all of the people who were killed in the war. Haris Pasovic, whom you may have heard on last night's program, part of our "Sarajevo Remembered" coverage, organized today's memorial.

The beautiful feathered tyrant turns up in China. It's not Axl Rose, it's Yutyrannus, a dinosaur cousin of the T-Rex and the largest feathered creature known to have ever roamed the earth.

You could call it a mammoth find. And you'd be right. A frozen mammoth carcass has been discovered in Northern Siberia. And the analysis of that carcass is shedding fresh light on the woolly giant

To be fair, it is called copy editing. A Calgary-area newspaper editor resigns after allegedly plagiarizing dozens of columns from other writers.

Today a plane carrying some West African leaders turned around mid-flight. They were heading for Mali, which is under military rule since last week's coup. The delegation was to negotiate with the coup leader to step down. But following protests on the tarmac, the leaders decided Mali was not the place for these talks. We speak to the director of an NGO called Mali Initiative who's worried that the outside world isn't taking into account what Malians actually want.