Tourists

ATLANTIC CITY — The stabbing deaths of two Canadian tourists outside a casino hotel left tourism officials stunned and dismayed Monday, casting a shadow over the formal opening on Memorial Day weekend of the newest gambling palace and tripping up a $30 million-a-year campaign to rebrand and revive the sagging resort town. The two victims, women ages 80 and 47, were stabbed and killed during a robbery Monday morning outside Bally's Atlantic City casino hotel, just steps from where a police officer was sitting in a patrol car. Police declined to provide the names of the victims, or precisely where they were from, pending notification of family.

Worker dismantles the media platform and other structures at Independence Square where key events of the Presidents' Summit were held. Tourists will once again have full acess to the mall this afternoon.

Visitors to Independence Mall at Fourth and Chestnut Streets found yesterday that they weren't exactly at liberty to view history as they had intended. A sign posted on the Liberty Bell pavilion said: "Closed due to lack of appropriations. " It was the sixth day of a tense budget standoff between the Republican-controlled Congress and the Clinton administration. Last night both sides declared victory as a compromise was announced that would send nearly 800,000 federal workers back to their jobs and satisfy hordes of tourists.

New Hope's upscale stores, art galleries and antique shops have always appealed to affluent older tourists. Members of the local chamber of commerce and the Borough Council want to make sure it stays that way while the borough still attracts younger tourists. Tourists in their 20s, and even teenagers, seem to be visiting New Hope in increasing numbers, said Councilman Grover Stults. The council's Community Affairs Committee met with members of the chamber last week to discuss the trend, Stults said.

Just because you can't touch the crack in the Liberty Bell doesn't mean you can't have fun in Philadelphia. Even though budget problems shut down many federal sites and monuments, visitors yesterday found attractions with other-than-federal funding, including the Art Museum, the Betsy Ross House and the Franklin Institute. "Thank you, Philadelphia, for keeping the Betsy Ross House open," said Dorothea Ricketts of Yuba City, Calif., on a tour visiting the historic sections of East Coast cities.

A Brandywine Valley Sampler Package with free tickets to major tourist attractions is being offered to guests of participating hotels, inns and bed and breakfasts in the area. Tourists will get free admission to the Brandywine River, Hagley and Rockwood Museums, and Longwood Gardens - among the most popular destinations in the valley where southeastern Pennsylvania meets northern Delaware. In addition, the sampler offers special discounts for the Longwood and Kennett Square Inns and the People's Light and Theatre Company.

It's no small wonder that Delaware is searching for the right tourist. A paltry annual tourism advertising budget of $175,000 explains it all. That's not much when compared with the roughly $4 million that New Jersey and Pennsylvania each shell out to radio, television and newspapers to lure tourists. But Delaware, which promotes itself as the small wonder, isn't complaining. It simply has decided to become more savvy in the way it uses funds. For one thing, the state is in the throes of its first in-depth study of its tourism potential.

There is no art museum in Germantown, no symphony hall planned for Frankford. Don't look for interactive arcades on the corner of 5th Street and Lehigh Avenue, or for Planet Hollywood at 52nd and Spruce streets. But that doesn't mean that Philadelphia tourism has to be restricted to Center City. As the city attempts to repackage itself as a premiere destination for conventions and family trips by pouring millions of dollars into developing and marketing visitor hot spots, Philadelphia's neighborhoods, - with their ethnic enclaves and storied histories - could distinguish this city from most others.

It was a fight with her boyfriend that brought Italian tourist Giulia Altera to the Big Apple for the first time and landed her in the middle of the Republican convention. "I was staying in Miami and we had a fight, so I came here, said Altera, 20, who arrived here three days ago. "I heard it was not a good time to come here, but I feel very safe. There are so many police here. " Indeed, as Altera stood in Times Square with a small digital camera capturing memories of Broadway and the big billboards of capitalism, she was surrounded by throngs of New York's finest.

DESTINATION TEHRAN. After more than a decade of self-imposed isolation, Iran is taking steps to jump-start its tourist industry. Mahdi Hashemi, tourism director of the charitable Mostazafan Foundation, said that the first group of foreign tourists would arrive from Italy this spring, according to a radio report monitored early this month in Nicosia, Cyprus. He said the country was ready to handle 300,000 tourists, who are expected to generate more than $210 million a year under the first stage of the plan.

ATLANTIC CITY — Two Canadian women on vacation here were stabbed and killed Monday during a robbery outside Bally's Atlantic City Casino Hotel, just steps from where a police officer was standing. Police declined to provide the names of the victims, or precisely where they were from, pending notification of family. They also would not say how the women are related. Atlantic City Police Officer Jacob Abbruscato was patrolling the area where the attack occurred — at Pacific and Michigan Avenues, located inside the newly created Atlantic City Tourism District — when he noticed what was happening and ran to assist the victims.

ATLANTIC CITY — Noel Malave saw it all in the 11 years he roamed the streets of this gambling resort as one of a small contingent of paid greeters in the city's old Special Improvement District. The homeless. The hustlers. The hookers. And the lost — tourists who had no idea where they were going, and locals who didn't know how to get from here to there. Dead bodies washed up on the beach, and women in labor were hustled to maternity wards. Children wandered off and were retrieved.

CHANTILLY, Va. - NASA turned over space shuttle Discovery on Thursday to the Smithsonian Institution, the first in its orbiter fleet to be transferred to a U.S. museum. The U.S. Marine Drum and Bugle Corps, astronauts including former Sen. John Glenn, and several thousand visitors with American flags greeted Discovery. It will retire as an artifact representing the 30-year shuttle program. The world's most traveled spaceship had been lifted off its Boeing 747 carrier and towed to the National Air and Space Museum's massive hangar facility near Washington Dulles International Airport.

SARASOTA, FLA. - A Florida teenager received a life sentence Wednesday after a jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of two British tourists last April 16, a case that generated blaring tabloid headlines in the U.K. press. Shawn Tyson, 17, sat stone-faced as the jury's verdict was read. When Judge Rick De Furia asked Tyson if he wanted to say anything before being sentenced, Tyson mumbled, "No. " The verdict came after two hours of deliberations and the sentencing about an hour after the verdict.

MOGADISHU, Somalia - A British tourist freed Wednesday by Somalian pirates after six months in captivity said she did not know for weeks that her husband was killed in the raid on a luxury beach resort on the Kenyan coast. "I just assumed he was alive," Judith Tebbutt said, speaking haltingly in a video broadcast by the BBC, adding that her son, Oliver, told her of the killing. "That was difficult," she said, her head and body cloaked in long gray headscarf with a pink floral print and her face marked by grief.

BRUGES, Belgium - Many claim this picturesque canal-threaded city is the chocolate capital of a country obsessed with bonbons. And the thrill of wandering its ancient cobblestoned streets is to discover, bite by sweet bite, the many true artisans along with the larger companies. Famous names such as Godiva, Neuhaus, Galler, Guylian, and Leonidas are prominently situated along main shopping thoroughfares like Steenstraat. But with an astounding array of 52 chocolate shops scattered across the medieval center of the tourist-rich historic district, there are plenty of unique addresses to sample.

SOCHI, Russia - If he were alive today, Joseph Stalin wouldn't recognize the place. This subtropical Black Sea resort of nearly 350,000 residents at the foot of the snowcapped Caucasus Mountains is on the verge of becoming a major international destination since being designated the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2018 World Cup. More than 100 building projects are under way, as a capitalist fervor grips the city, fueled by...

LOVE Park, the symbolic heart of the city and a destination for tourists and skateboarders from around the world, is expected to undergo a $20 million renovation starting in 2013. Mayor Nutter will announce the plans for the iconic park, officially known as John F. Kennedy Plaza, in his budget address Thursday morning, several sources said. Few details were available Wednesday, but broadly, the proposal calls for bringing the elevated park to street level and removing walls that block entrance from many of the surrounding sidewalks.

CHIANG RAI, Thailand - No one asked the elephants, or their mahouts. In 1989, to halt the rape of its thick forests, Thailand banned the centuries-old industry of logging. The result: Logging was stopped (legal logging, anyway) - and thousands of elephants suddenly found themselves jobless. This was less of a problem for the elephants than for their gobsmacked mahouts (owners), who faced the challenge of providing their elephants with about 500 pounds of food a day with no source of income.

Leopold Hawelka, 100, who served steaming hot coffee and Viennese cafe flavor to princes, paupers, playwrights, poets, and untold thousands of tourists, died Thursday. In the city of 1,900 cafes, Mr. Hawelka was an icon, as much part of Cafe Hawelka as its tables - scarred by burned-out cigarettes, their marble tops worn smooth by the elbows of four generations. He once served the neediest of the needy - the ragged Viennese masses who crowded his establishment over a free glass of water to escape the cold of their bombed-out city after World War II. Cafe Hawelka was never posh.