Tourists

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -- Alarmed tourists jammed Caribbean airports for flights out of Hurricane Dean's path yesterday as the monster storm began sweeping past the Dominican Republic and Haiti and threatened to engulf Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. The Category 4 storm's effects could be felt yesterday in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, where a boy was pulled into the ocean and drowned while watching waves, the Dominican emergency operations center reported.

A Pennsylvania woman fatally stabbed two Canadian tourists, one of them an 80-year-old woman, during a botched robbery Monday in what apparently was a chance meeting on an Atlantic City street, authorities said. Sgt. Monica McMenamin, a city police spokeswoman, said Antoinette E. Pelzer, 44, of Philadelphia, was arrested around 10 a.m., just moments after the robbery occurred in the southern New Jersey resort community. Authorities said she may have recently moved to the Atlantic City area, but that remained unclear late Monday night.

The City Council has agreed to loan the Greater Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce as much as $30,000 to create a website to lure more tourists to the Port City. The site will offer information on area events and attractions and allow browsers to book hotels rooms. The five-year loan is expected to be funded through an Urban Development Action Grant. - Tom Long

Michael Wigge left Berlin without a penny and traveled 25,000 miles to Antarctica, hitchhiking, bartering and working his way by ship, plane, car and foot, from Europe to Canada and the U.S. and then through Latin America. A series about his project, "How to Travel the World for Free," is airing on some PBS channels throughout May and June, using video Wigge shot of his adventures. Here are some details on how he did the project and how it went. THE TRIP: Wigge, a travel journalist and videographer who speaks German, English and Spanish, left Berlin in June 2010 and traveled...

Is a $25 gas card enough of an incentive for you to book a trip to Florida? Skyrocketing gas prices have prompted one county to pony up free gas as an incentive for tourists. According to the South Florida Sun Sentinel , the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau will award $25 gas cards to anyone who books a two-night stay at select hotels through its website or Facebook page. The bureau is expected to spend up to $100,000 on gift cards, and another $100,000 on marketing.

NEW YORK - Five French tourists got a harrowing start to their New York visit: a wild police chase. As they looked for a ride at the Air France terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Tuesday morning, the visitors were lured to a van that was not licensed to provide taxi service, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spokesman John Kelly said. Plainclothes police recognized the man who enticed the tourists, Ian McFarland, as a repeat offender. A Port Authority officer reached inside the van to try to grab the keys, but the driver,...

Five foreign tourists were killed by unknown armed rebels in Ethiopia's restive Afar region in the country's north, Ethiopian state television reported on Tuesday. The Ethiopian Television, or ETV, cited the Ethiopian Ministry of Defense reporting a group of eight unidentified foreign nationals were attacked near the Eritrean border on Monday. ETV said two tourists were injured severely and have been brought to a health clinic by defense forces. They are in critical condition, the state television said.

BASSE-TERRE, Guadeloupe - Tourists stuck at hotels as violent protests swept this Caribbean island began flying out yesterday after police pulled down barricades following a third night of rioting. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France made a televised appeal for an end to the violence and announced a $730 million financial package to help development in the overseas parts of his nation, including Guadeloupe and Martinique. "I know that the current economic crisis has shown a light on longstanding problems, which we have never really tried to resolve," Sarkozy said in a televised address.

LONDON -- The 11th Duke of Devonshire, whose vast Chatsworth estate has one of the finest and most-visited houses in Britain, died late Monday at his estate. He was 84. The duke, known as an easygoing man, opened Chatsworth to the public in the 1950s and, with his wife, Deborah, made it a thriving business, attracting a half-million visitors a year to its art collections and acres of parkland. The house, largely built at the end of the 17th century, is surrounded by 35,000 acres of estate land in a national park in Derbyshire county, central England.

LOS ANGELES - Move over, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The hot new Southern California tourist attractions are the restaurants, boutiques, and tattoo parlors where some of reality television’s most popular shows are filmed. Tourists from as far away as Germany fly in to visit the West Hollywood tattoo shop featured in the Learning Channel’s “LA Ink.’’ Fans of the E! hit “Keeping Up With the Kardashians’’ stream into the Calabasas clothing stores run by the show’s stars.

One of Vermont's leading tourist destinations opens for the season this weekend. Shelburne Farms is a 1,400-acre working farm on the shores of Lake Champlain that uses its historic landscape and buildings to teach the stewardship of natural and agricultural resources. Founded in the 1880s, Shelburne Farms was turned 40 years ago into a non-profit dedicated to keeping its land in agriculture and sharing a message about stewardship of the land. Today it offers a range of activities, ranging from wagon and walking tours of the property to meals and lodging at its inn. It's a popular...

Police in Brazil say an American tourist was detained for several hours after trying to leave Rio de Janeiro without paying his hotel bill of more than $7,000, including $3,000 for "caipirinhas" — Brazil's national cocktail of sugarcane rum, lime, sugar and ice. Police inspector Marcio Mendonca says 63-year-old Robert Scott from Murietta, California, was detained Wednesday night at Rio de Janeiro's International Airport. He says Scott claimed he could not pay the hotel bill because his credit card had been cloned.

A woman turned herself in to police more than six weeks after they say she lost control of her vehicle and crashed into a poolside cabana in Fort Lauderdale, killing a pregnant tourist. The South Florida SunSentinel ( http://sunsent.nl/LWK9wP) reports 34-year-old Rosa Maria Rivera-Kim bonded out of the Broward County Jail early Thursday. She faces DUI manslaughter charges in the death of 27-year-old Alanna DeMella of Medford, Mass. DeMella and husband Michael were visiting the Riverside Hotel when the March 18 crash happened.

Police found 18 dismembered and beheaded bodies inside two vans in an area frequented by tourists near the city of Guadalajara in western Mexico, authorities said Wednesday. Jalisco state Prosecutor Tomas Coronado said earlier police found 15 severed human heads in the vans a few miles from Lake Chapala and his office confirmed later in a statement that three more heads had been found along with the other body parts. "The bodies are dismembered," Coronado said in an interview transcript provided by his office.

Flash floods from a mountain river swept away dozens of people along with their cattle and houses in western Nepal, officials said. Police official Shailesh Thapa said 13 bodies have been recovered from the Seti river south of Mount Annapurna in Kaski district. Police were searching for dozens of missing people, including three Russian tourists who were trekking in the area, Thapa said. The names of the Russians were not immediately available. The flooding reached the tourist resort town of Pokhara, about 200 kilometers (125 miles)

NEW YORK - Residents of Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom got a taste Tuesday of the United States' first marketing campaign aimed at boosting American tourism to people in other countries. The print, Web, and video ads were created by Brand USA, a partnership of government agencies and private companies. The consortium was developed to act like the tourism ministries of countries such as Ireland, Italy, or Israel. While tourism has increased globally over the last decade, the US share of those travelers has fallen, due in large part to complicated visa...

BRINKLEY, Ark. -- This time of year, ducks flock by the hundreds to the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, where bands of white-tailed deer graze under a canopy of 1,000-year-old trees. Near a cypress swamp, the sun warms the autumn air, making this bottomland a paradise for wild turkeys, foraging squirrels, and insects the size of kumquats. Somewhere in the wilderness probably lives a bird -- or birds -- once thought extinct: the ivory-billed woodpecker, with its 30-inch wingspan and distinctive white stripes on a coal-black body.

HYANNIS - The powerful storm that forced people away from Cape Cod a week ago switched course - economically speaking - on Labor Day weekend and turned into a warm wind that brought tourists looking for an escape to the Bay State vacation spot. The mostly sunny holiday weekend had shoppers crowding the streets of Provincetown and drivers clogging the roads heading to the Cape Cod Mall in Hyannis. "I think people just really needed to get away," said Wendy Northcross, chief executive of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.

A policy barring foreign tourists from buying marijuana in the Netherlands went into effect in parts of the country Tuesday, with attention focused on the southern city of Maastricht, where a cafe was warned over violating the ban and a buyers' protest is planned for later in the day. Weed is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but it has been sold openly for decades in small amounts in designated cafes known as "coffee shops" under the...

Soldiers from rival North and South Korea eye one another across a thin strip of no man's land that — just barely — keeps their armies apart. The tension, they insist on both sides, is palpable. So what's with the North Korean gift shop selling "See you in Pyongyang" T-shirts for 12 euros apiece? Or the South Korean border towns complete with amusement parks, souvenir blueberry-flavored North Korean liquor and a Popeyes chicken outlet? Is the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas the world's most dangerous place, or a tourist trap?