Vancouver Canada

The latest mayhem started at the end of March, when 21-year-old Sean Murphy, a popular former high school hockey player, drove into a withering blast of gunfire near Bateman Park. He was probably dead before his car coasted to a stop in the weeds. That same night, Ryan Richards, 19, abruptly left a friend's house after getting a cellphone call. His body was found the next morning behind a rural produce store. The stab wounds on his hands told the tale of a furious fight for his life.

Vancouver 2010 Winter Games officials say they are instituting safeguards to help limit the kind of online fraud that resulted in hundreds of Beijing Games-bound tourists being sold what turned out to be bogus tickets to athletic events and the opening and closing ceremonies. The failure to deliver promised tickets has prompted at least one civil lawsuit in the U.S. against a Canadian company. And, while the U.S.

The residential skyscrapers in downtown Vancouver, Canada, are already covered with green. Rooftops and balconies overflow with ornamental vines, shrubs, even midsize magnolia and maple trees. And now, there's more. Vancouver is launching a novel green initiative aimed at bringing food-producing gardens to the city's high-density developments.

Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that it would open a software development center in Vancouver, Canada, giving it a place to employ skilled workers barred by U.S. immigration quotas. It may signal the start of a new hiring trend, with other U.S. high-tech firms following in Microsoft's footsteps to Canada, where lawyers say it is easier for foreign nationals to obtain work credentials. U.S.

Sometimes, there comes upon the world stage that unusual soul who exemplifies the strength to overcome adversity. Sam Sullivan, the mayor of Vancouver, Canada, is one such person. He broke his neck in a skiing accident when he was 19. The accident left him a quadriplegic, with limited use of his hands. He spent years wallowing in self-pity. He had, he said, vivid dreams of what it would be like to put a gun to his head.

To avoid a repeat of a strike that idled Canada's busiest port for five weeks last summer, officials in Vancouver have borrowed a strategy pioneered in Southern California: extending the hours that terminal gates are open. The idea is to keep truckers happy by reducing congestion so that drivers can make better money hauling even more steel containers crammed with imported goods. But so far, Vancouver has found the extended hours to be a tough sell.

The only other time the Winter Olympics have been in Canada, at Calgary in 1988, the U.S. team did so poorly the U.S. Olympic Committee called on volatile and voluble George Steinbrenner to fix the mess. The Yankees owner, then a USOC board member, calmly and quietly headed a commission that a year later issued a report reducing the USOC's previously amorphous mission to this bottom line: "Winning medals has always been the primary goal." And the U.S.

Patricia Rose Johnson was the original heroine. She came stumbling out of a doper's alley behind a Vancouver pawnshop, looking in her brazen, self-destructive beauty like a young Courtney Love. Johnson was "tweaking," a street term for a symptom of cocaine psychosis, picking at the pavement for unused bits of rock cocaine. Lincoln Clarkes is a portrait photographer who sees grace in the most unlikely places, in the living and in the dying.

In the live-from-New York special he filmed last year for HBO, comedian Robin Williams launched into an extended riff about Canada and the Winter Olympics and made it sound as if there's no there there up beyond the United States. Canada, he said, "is like a loft apartment over a really great party."

A rumpled Wayne Gretzky, Southern California family man, part owner of a professional hockey team in Phoenix, appeared Tuesday in front of a fawning group of Canadian reporters, it being Canada Day, proclaiming himself a proud Canadian and avid booster of Vancouver's bid for the 2010 Winter Olympics.