Belfast

The town grew up on medieval origins as a Victorian seaport where the River Lagan becomes Belfast Lough. It is a smaller Baltimore, a center of industry that was export-driven, like ships and linen, or import-driven, like cigarettes, and is going out of style. It has dignity and gritty charm. But as elsewhere along the industrial coasts of the world, what remains of the port moved downriver, leaving derelict banks and quays.Does Belfast need a Baltimore Inner Harbor? You bet. Does it have material to work with?

As of 9 a.m., traffic is slow on I-83 southbound near Belfast Road, due to cleanup from an accident involving two vehicles. All lanes have reopened after an earlier accident involving a passenger van and an SUV. Accidents were slowing traffic on southbound York Road at Loveton Circle in Baltimore County and Washington Boulevard at Hammonds Ferry Road in Baltimore. The Hammonds Ferry Road incident involved a pedestrian who was struck.. Emergency roadwork caused all eastbound and westbound lanes to be closed on Route 450 near Rutland Road in Anne Arundel County.

Hugh Smyth woke up, looked out the window at the sprinkly, leaden skies yesterday and was comforted."When I saw the rain, it made me think of back home," said the visiting lord mayor of Belfast, Northern Ireland.About six hours later, he found more comfort -- a possible strategy against a problem flowing from the cease-fire ordered by the Irish Republican Army in August."You've had people there involved in violence for 25 years," said the lord mayor, part of a delegation visiting Baltimore under the auspices of the U.S. Information Agency.

This wouldn't be just any pine tree. This pine tree would be the first of its kind in Baltimore County, poking its head a smidgen above other trees, its foliage and trunk immune to blight, rot and insect attack, its branches shedding no pine cones. Some of the neighbors are not happy about the prospect of such a tree standing in a rural area off Belfast Road, because this tree is really what's known in industry parlance as a "monopine" or "stealth application" - an 80-foot-tall cell phone tower in arboreal disguise.

James Rouse's Enterprise Development Co. is part of a team that has been selected to build Laganbank, a $200 million mixed-use complex that would be the largest single construction project in Belfast in Northern Ireland.Laganside Development Corp., a public development authority in Belfast, announced the selection of the consortium yesterday. Enterprise's partners include O'Hare & McGovern Ltd., a general contractor and developer from Northern Ireland, and Ewart PLC, a commercial developer from Belfast.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Downtown Belfast is modestly festive with Christmas trees and sparkling lights, glittering streamers and green and red wreaths, candles and creches. The restaurants, pubs, discos, movie theaters and bingo halls are full.But when they leave, Catholics still go to Falls Road and Protestants to Shankill Road. And judging by the talk of the town, not many expect to go home to peace very soon.A young man riding in the front of a cab brings the city sharply into focus: "You're talking to a person whose brother was killed two weeks ago."

LONDON -- As Britain increased its troop strength in Northern Ireland again yesterday, Prime Minister John Major flew unannounced into Belfast, toured bomb-wrecked areas of the city's center and threatened the "unspeakable" Irish Republican Army bombers with eventual capture.The bombers who killed seven Protestant workmen Friday, he said, would be "hunted and hunted and hunted for the rest of their days until we find them."His visit coincided with the third increase in British troop strength in two weeks as Northern Ireland edged closer to a state of prevalent fear and violence similar to that which it lived through in the early 1970s.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The black taxis on the Falls and Shankill roads began their lives 20 years ago as a temporary expedient and they are still rattling along.They reflect the way life is arranged here. They are among the instruments that maintain the separation of the people of Northern Ireland.The taxis travel up the Falls about four miles, then back down again. On the Shankill they run about the same distance, then back down again. The empty stretch of street that connects the Falls and Shankill, Lanark Way, has a spiked iron gate that closes each night.

In households that have been visited by great tragedy, there is often great humor. In neighborhoods where you would expect people to live in great fear, you find front doors left not only unlocked, but wide open. In a state of suppressed war, you are actually safe. Belfast is just the place for a curious traveler who thrives on an electric atmosphere, who enjoys a challenge to the heart and the intellect, and who delights in good company, humor and wit.The Northern Irish capital sits on a natural harbor in a river valley bordered by hills.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- It was a killing like hundreds of others over the past 25 years in Northern Ireland: A group of gunmen approached a man repairing a car on a Belfast street, shot him dead and fled.The victim was Roman Catholic; the killers were suspected members of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, an avowedly Protestant paramilitary group.But for politicians and church leaders here, the bluntly sectarian killing Thursday -- the first blood spilled since the Irish Republican Army declared its unilateral cease-fire 24 hours earlier -- was less a shock than a coldblooded reminder of how distant any real or lasting peace is in the divided province.

MONTEREY, CALIF. -- At first glance, recent developments in Northern Ireland offer signs of hope for mending Iraq. But the deepening peace in Belfast has taken four decades to craft, a sobering thought for those who want to see analogs with Baghdad. The lessons that can be drawn from Britain's longest-ever military occupation are many, but the element of time is the most brutal. The warring parties were all Christians, spoke the same language, were racially indistinguishable, and were all part of the same great Western "civilization."

Ninety-five years ago, the world awoke to almost unimaginable news. The giant ocean liner Titanic, on its maiden voyage to New York, had collided with an iceberg off the Grand Banks in the Atlantic and sunk, killing 1,500 passengers. The intervening years have not dimmed interest in the Titanic, which has been the subject of many books, including former Baltimorean Walter Lord's A Night to Remember, first published in 1955 and never out of print. It was also the subject of director James Cameron's 1998 blockbuster film.

LONDON - After hundreds of hard-line Protestants armed with gasoline bombs, homemade grenades and automatic weapons waged battle against police and British soldiers, Belfast seemed devoid yesterday of the peace that supposedly arrived in Northern Ireland two months ago. Carcasses of scores of charred vehicles were on Belfast streets while blackened shells of burned-out buildings still smoldered from the violence that began Saturday after a parade by...

BELFAST, Maine - Nearly a decade ago, with little advance notice, credit-card company MBNA Corp. dropped thousands of jobs into this one-stoplight city then poured millions of dollars into local schools and nonprofits - all because, according to local legend, a friendly resident lent money to the man who one day would be MBNA's chief executive when his car broke down. Almost overnight, as MBNA's work force exploded, Belfast was transformed. The city, once home to chicken factories that poured grease and guts into the Passagassawakeag River, began to teem with executives in business suits, talking on cell phones and riding around in black SUVs.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland - Five crying sisters each had a hand atop their murdered brother's casket as they walked to the altar of St. Matthew's Catholic Church, and the congregation sang "Here I Am Lord." And people who attended the funeral swore that enough tears flowed that the pews could have floated away. This funeral for Robert McCartney, killed in a bar fight with steel pipes to the head and a butcher knife slitting open his belly, followed a sad ritual well known to the people of St. Matthew's, the heart of the Short Strand, the tiny sliver of Catholic households in otherwise-Protestant East Belfast.

Joe Cahill, an Irish Republican Army figure who dodged the hangman and emerged from prison to lead the IRA into a long, bloody guerrilla war before persuading his comrades to embrace the peace process, died Friday in Belfast. He was 84. While British officials and Protestants in Northern Ireland considered him a terrorist, Mr. Cahill spent his latter years reassuring hard-liners in the republican community that the peace process was their best chance at ending the partition of Ireland.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Impressions of a city that could have been invented by Samuel Beckett:Breakfast takes an absurd turn when you look up from your sausage and eggs and see armed soldiers patrolling the pretty little square below.They wear camouflage fatigues and carry assault rifles. They move warily in a disciplined diamond formation.The rear guard occasionally walks backward, like a man who might expect to see a sniper in the second floor conservatory that is the hotel restaurant.

LONDON - After hundreds of hard-line Protestants armed with gasoline bombs, homemade grenades and automatic weapons waged battle against police and British soldiers, Belfast seemed devoid yesterday of the peace that supposedly arrived in Northern Ireland two months ago. Carcasses of scores of charred vehicles were on Belfast streets while blackened shells of burned-out buildings still smoldered from the violence that began Saturday after a parade by...

The organizers and participants of the Baltimore Irish Festival believed they had their priorities in order for the final day. Gather for God, then a good old time. Right as the vendors were setting up shop for the conclusion of the three-day event yesterday morning at the 5th Regiment Armory, a few hundred people showed up for Roman Catholic Mass, with a stage serving as a makeshift altar. "Mass is a driving force in an Irish Catholic family, and to have a festival and not have the Mass would be terrible," said Maureen Grant, 50, of Scaggsville, who attended with her husband, Gary, 51. "We love that part.

Vivien Hewitt asks all the singers to take a deep breath and then plunges into another rehearsal for Baltimore Opera's production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, which opens tonight at the Lyric Opera House. "We're going to clean up little messy corners, tiny little details," the director says. Moments later, she's refining the way two men carry items onto the stage, intently watching their every step, the placement of their hands. "It's got to be slow and imposing, as Japanese ceremonies are," she says.