WITH its backdrop of snow-capped mountains facing the Pacific Ocean and relaxed life-style, Vancouver was once bracketed among the world's most desirable cities. It has been ranked with Zurich and Vienna as having the highest quality of living and sits alongside Cape Town and Sydney for its natural beauty. Not any more: with shootings on the rise and drug gangs fighting over turf, the city's image is suffering just before it hosts the Winter Olympics. Criminologists are calling it Vancouver's "year of the gun". [continues 638 words]
Young ravers are to be sent to Amsterdam courtesy of the National Health Service and the European Union for what critics claim is a course on drug cocktails, write JOHN HARLOW and SENAY BOZTAS. The NHS and John Moores University, Liverpool, whose chancellor is Cherie Blair, are jointly paying pounds 10,000 to send 40 lecturers and 20 students to attend a conference on drug culture and clubs in the Dutch city this week. The EU is also subsidising the visitors. [continues 180 words]
ELIZABETH Barrett Browning, Britain's most beloved woman poet, feared that an attempt to shake her morphine addiction by going "cold turkey" cost the life of her unborn baby, newly released letters have revealed. The hitherto censored family letters detail for the first time her efforts to give up the opiate she had been using for seven years to cope with depression following the early death of her brother. Barrett Browning was at the heart of the most romantic scandal of Victorian England. The traditional version tells that, having suffered a spinal injury at the age of 15, she was confined to a bedroom by her tyrannical father for 25 years. Then Robert Browning, the fashionable poet six years her junior, fell in love with her published verse and wooed her secretly until in 1846 she fled with him to Italy, where they lived happily. [continues 435 words]
by John Harlow Arts Correspondent HIS absence from British shores became one of the great mysteries of rock'n'roll: why did Elvis Presley turn down millions of pounds to play a single concert in London during the 1970s? Over the years, biographers have repeated the official excuse that health problems and a fear of flying across the Atlantic kept him at home in Memphis, Tennessee. Fear of flying never answered all the questions, though: he bought a Boeing 707 and at least one corporate jet in which he flew around the United States. Nor did his health problems, officially represented as either glaucoma or liver infections, stop him from appearing in lucrative Las Vegas shows. [continues 381 words]
