British Columbia

Bruce Fairbairn, 49, a record producer who started as a musician and produced some of rock's most successful acts, including Aerosmith, AC/DC, Van Halen, Kiss and Bon Jovi, was found dead Monday in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The cause of death was not immediately known.Pub Date: 5/20/99

Marjorie R. Ferguson, 69, UM journalism professorMarjorie R. Ferguson, University of Maryland professor of journalism and internationally known media scholar, died Monday of cancer at the home of a daughter in San Francisco. She was 69 and lived in Washington.In 1988, Dr. Ferguson joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park, where until recently she was director of the doctoral program in the college of journalism.She taught graduate and undergraduate students and was a mentor for numerous graduate students who became faculty members, scholars, media policy makers and journalists here and abroad.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- As night approaches, the view from Vanier Park in West Vancouver is majestic.Glance to the left across the English Bay, and in the distance you see the glow of the setting sun seemingly bouncing atop the snow-capped North Shore mountains. Off to the right, where the Burrard Bridge crosses False Creek, there's a view of a magnificent downtown skyline that is as impressive as any city."How can you not appreciate this?" says Quentin Antoine, 24, who takes in this view every time he comes to shoot hoops at Vanier, whose outdoor courts are some 50 yards off the beach.

Arthur K. Marshall, 88, the Los Angeles Superior Court judge who presided over the first palimony case, which involved actor Lee Marvin and former live-in lover Michelle Triola Marvin, died Sunday of cancer in Santa Monica, Calif.The California Supreme Court's landmark Marvin vs. Marvin decision legalized suits for palimony by unmarried couples.Ian Messiter,79, the creator of Britain's longest-running comedy game show, died Monday in London. Messiter devised several game shows for the British Broadcasting Corp.

MONTREAL -- The hunter appears to have come to a horrible end.A slip of the foot on a frozen trail -- perhaps just as he was about to hurl his spear into the flank of some thick-furred quarry that would have fed his wandering clan -- and the hunter plummeted to his death in a deep glacial crevasse.The prehistoric drama might have occurred several thousand years ago, though, for now, scientists eager to study the human remains, discovered this month at a receding glacier in British Columbia, will only speculate that the hunter died before the arrival of Europeans to the Pacific Northwest.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Loewen Group Inc., North America's second-largest funeral services company, said it expects to spend up to US$350 million on acquisitions this year.That's about 31 percent less than the US$507.7 million it spent buying funeral homes and cemeteries in 1997. Company officials last month said spending would drop this year and next because of rising purchase prices in the United States.The Burnaby, B.C.-based company is struggling to rein in costs and stabilize its deteriorating finances.

"Girlfriend in a Coma," by Douglas Coupland. Regan Books. 284 page.$24.It's worth remembering that the works of novelist Douglas Coupland, like "The X-Files," are produced in Canada. British Columbia, to be exact. And even though the supernatural conspiracy theory television show and Coupland's fictional expositions of the banalities of life in the 1990s are tied in various ways to the promise and products of Hollywood and Washington, there's still an evergreen scent floating around both bodies of work.

KHUTZEYMATEEN GRIZZLY BEAR SANCTUARY, British Columbia -- Clouds drift up against steep mountainsides. Eagles ride the updrafts overhead. Otters and seals backstroke alongside a rare sailboat gliding by. The only other signs of humanity are the occasional fluorescent orange buoys marking the prawn traps of commercial fishermen.And then the largest grizzly bear in the neighborhood emerges from the tangle of spruce, hemlock and huckleberry and onto a beach alongside the river.Biologists who study this area have named him Buffalo, and from the safety of a quarter-mile offshore, he does look as big as a bison.

BURNABY, British Columbia -- Amid all the flag-waving, chants of "U.S.A." and general postgame bedlam, some U.S. national soccer team players wanted assurances that they'd qualified for next summer's World Cup."Everyone was running around hugging each other," Claudio Reyna said. "I said, 'Are we in?' "Yes, he was told, he could wrap himself in a flag. They were in.Reyna scored the game-winner in yesterday's 3-0 victory over Canada, and the United States got the help it needed in two other qualifying games.

I would like to visit the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, touring some of the historic sights as well as visiting contemporary Haida artists.Long before the archipelago off the western coast of British Columbia was called the Queen Charlotte Islands -- it was given that name by a British explorer in the late 18th century -- the islands were known as the Haida Gwaii, meaning Haida Islands. There are still some 2,000 Haida living there today; the old unoccupied Haida villages, some with giant totems, in the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site on southern Moresby Island are among the major attractions of the archipelago.

It's less than 100 days until the Winter Olympics take place in Vancouver. The games begin Feb. 12 with opening ceremonies at BC Place Stadium. Many of the sporting events will take place at Whistler ski resort, ranked as the top resort in North America for 13 years in a row by readers of Skiing magazine. The last round of Olympic tickets, about 100,000, to events including curling, hockey and the ceremonies go on sale this weekend. 1 Be on the lookout. : Tourism officials suggest making your first stop at the Vancouver Lookout, a 430-foot outpost where visitors can ride a glass elevator to the top for a 360-degree view of the city, mountains and even Vancouver Island.

Cities with highest quality of life 1 Zurich, Switzerland 2 Geneva, Switzerland 3 Vancouver, British Columbia 4 Vienna, Austria 5 Auckland, New Zealand 6 Dusseldorf, Germany 7 Frankfurt, Germany 8 Munich, Germany 9 (tie) Bern, Switzerland, and Sydney, Australia From a survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting Co. based on interviews with residents.

Somali pirates release S. Korean cargo ship SEOUL, South Korea : Pirates who seized a South Korean cargo ship off the coast of Somalia more than a month ago freed the 22 sailors and the vessel yesterday, a South Korean official said. The crew members - eight South Koreans and 14 citizens from Myanmar - were heading toward a U.S. Navy vessel in the area after being set free, Foreign Ministry spokesman Moon Tae Young told reporters. Moon said the sailors were all safe but declined to comment whether a ransom was paid.

My Best Shot A quiet oasis In September, my husband and I, along with two couples, visited the Northwest and parts of Canada. This photo was captured at Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia. Sally Lederer Grasonville

WASHINGTON -- The United States banned poultry from mainland British Columbia yesterday because of a case of bird flu, though Canadian officials said it wasn't the virulent form in Southeast Asia blamed for more than 60 human deaths. The governments of Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong indicated they would take similar action. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Sunday that a duck at a commercial poultry farm in British Columbia had tested positive for bird flu. The virus was a low-pathogenic North American form that doesn't kill poultry and is not a threat to people, officials said.

Entrepreneur Chad Stevens thinks he's found a way to help the well-heeled enjoy a footloose retirement. Stevens launched the Signature Destinations Club to give members access to luxury vacation homes around the world. "Many baby boomers won't be content to find that perfect retirement place and settle down for the rest of their lives - they'll want to be on the go," he said. The private residence club, which is based in Kirkland, Wash., is opening the first of nine regional hubs of homes in the Pacific Northwest in August.

Gary and Paul Gait are among 10 new inductees to the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame. The Gait twins, from Syracuse, are members of the hall's 48th class announced yesterday by US Lacrosse, along with Mildred Barnes, Jack Emmer, Norm Engelke, Susie Ganzenmuller, Tom Haus, Dottie Hayden, Mandy (Moore) O'Leary and Gillian Rattray. The honorees will be enshrined on Nov. 12 at the Grand Lodge in Hunt Valley. Their plaques will be in the Lacrosse Museum and National Hall of Fame at US Lacrosse headquarters at Johns Hopkins University.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Twenty years after a bomb on an airliner from Toronto to New Delhi blew up off the Irish coast, killing 329 people, a judge has acquitted the two Indian-born Canadian Sikhs charged in the explosion. After 19 months of testimony, the worst case of mass murder in Canadian history and the bloodiest attack on civilian air aviation before Sept. 11, 2001, remains an unsettled mystery. Yesterday's decision by a British Columbia Supreme Court judge that the government had not made a conclusive case after two decades of investigations costing more than $80 million represented a stinging rebuke to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canada's federal intelligence agency.

Life hands you only so many opportunities to see a ghost, so I hang my head out the window and start calling for one. "Here, modie, modie, modie," I yell. There's no proof this kind of thing works, but I have to try. The man I met last night said that he'd seen ghosts standing right by the side of the road. I didn't know whether to believe him. He was being paid to sit in the middle of nowhere and count salmon -- just under 200,000 so far, with a lot of summer yet to go as the fish moved upstream to spawn, their silver fins cutting ripples -- and that might have made him a bit off. On the other hand, if I were a ghost here, where the Yellowhead Highway hits the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, in northwest British Columbia, I'd certainly hang out around salmon streams, so a guy counting fish would be a natural to be on the end of a manifestation.

Maybe it's just good, old-fashioned reactionary-ism -- the natural byproduct of a culture that's been saturated and subsequently weighed down by too much self-obsessed hip-hop and shrieking, aggressive rock. But a softer, gentler side of music is coming to the fore, one that's as traditional as it is contemporary. Call it the new folk. More of a shared sensibility than a formalized genre or movement, it's being woven together by a growing collection of young artists from strains of bluegrass and jazz, country and blues and even vaudeville into stripped-down songs that sound strangely outside the present era. Unwittingly nudged into the light by plaintive singer-songwriters like Cat Power, this new folk, or avant-folk as it's sometimes called, is now being propelled by a diverse crop of artists.