Tomb

South African import Ipi Tombe, who became an international star early this year with three dominating victories in Dubai, has been retired from racing after a training setback that would have knocked her out of a return trip to Dubai. Trainer Elliott Walden said the daughter of Manshood, who won the Grade III Locust Grove at Churchill Downs in June in her only start in the United States, would be bred in the spring. Plans call for the Zimbabwe-bred 5-year-old mare to be sold in foal in the Keeneland November Sale in 2004.

Racing's curmudgeons, of which far too many exist, decry the lack of stars in their sport. Actually, racing in America boasts at least four horses with star power. In addition to Funny Cide and Empire Maker, the top 3-year-olds on course to meet Aug. 23 in the Travers Stakes at Saratoga, the sport features a pair of 5-year-old mares who've won 18 straight races between them. One is North America's reigning Horse of the Year. The other is an international star who last weekend made her first start in this country.

The grandeur of the Great Pyramids of Giza may be best appreciated from afar -- from across the desert, perhaps on horseback. But to those drawn also by the labyrinthine mysteries within, there is bad news: One by one, their cramped passageways are being closed, at least temporarily, to tourists.The latest of the pyramids to be shut is Mycerinus (also known as Menkaure), the third and smallest of the behemoths on the outskirts to Cairo. Archaeologists had discovered that the moisture exhaled by the mounting number of tourists exploring the poorly ventilated chambers had raised humidity to dangerous levels, despoiling the structure by causing crystallized salt to line the walls and beginning to blacken them with fungi.

JERUSALEM -- Just off East Jerusalem's gritty Nablus Road, a busy thoroughfare filled with the choking exhaust of many buses and the cries of vendors hawking many wares -- cardamom pods, olive-wood Nativity scenes and much else -- lies a sylvan retreat off the beaten tourist track. Up a narrow street and through a stone archway is a tranquil, tidy, manicured garden that would make any Londoner proud. This is the Garden Tomb, revered by many Protestants as the site of the climactic events of Jesus' life and ministry.

JERUSALEM - Seven Jewish worshipers were wounded early yesterday when they came under Palestinian gunfire in the West Bank after praying at a holy site, despite Israeli government orders to stay out. The pre-dawn ambush in the city of Nablus came after the group - members of a Hasidic sect called Bratslav - visited a site that is said to be the burial spot of the biblical Joseph. The group considers Joseph's Tomb to be sacred and has made repeated visits to the site in defiance of an Israeli military ban on travel by Israeli civilians into areas under Palestinian authority.

WASHINGTON -- The remains of an unidentified American serviceman from the Vietnam War, buried beneath the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery 14 years ago, are no longer unknown.They belong to 1st Lt. Michael Blassie of the Air Force, a pilot whose attack jet crashed on May 11, 1972, near a village in South Vietnam called An Loc. He was 24 at the time and ever since has, officially, been considered missing in action.A new type of genetic test -- not available when President Reagan honored the "Unknown Soldier" from the Vietnam War at a solemn, symbolic state funeral on Memorial Day in 1984 -- has matched DNA taken from the remains with DNA from Blassie's mother, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic - It has been nearly two years since Spanish scientists asked to examine the contents of this Caribbean nation's most celebrated tomb to determine whether the centuries-old bones are those of Christopher Columbus. They've been told yes, no and maybe. The protracted deliberation through two Dominican administrations has deepened suspicions that authorities here don't really want a definitive answer for fear that the mammoth lighthouse mausoleum they've built into a tourist draw isn't the bona fide resting place of the explorer.

What could you say about a Broadway season in which a play by a dead American playwright and a musical that closed in February garner the most Tony Award nominations of any new shows? You could say that, at least for new work, it was a relatively lackluster season.Tennessee Williams' long-lost 1938 drama, "Not About Nightingales," received six nominations in yesterday's Tony announcement in New York. These included a best actor nomination for Corin Redgrave, who portrays an evil prison warden in Williams' early play about a real-life tragedy in a Pennsylvania prison.

TEL AVIV, Israel - Kathleen Kennedy Townsend ended a two-week trip to a tense and anxious Israel yesterday with a tribute to the slain Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, whom she likened to her assassinated father as a leader who inspired courage in his citizens. Defying the U.S. State Department's travel warnings to the public, Maryland's lieutenant governor came here with her husband and three of her four daughters for a family vacation followed by a series of official meetings, where she was joined by a group of Baltimore and Washington-area Jewish leaders.

At Wealth Management Services, the job isn't only about managing money. For its wealthiest clients, the investment adviser has negotiated car purchases, supervised a home construction project, paid cellular phone and other bills and even worked with young heirs to teach them the potential pitfalls of significant wealth. Wealth Management Services partners Martin J. Eby, Timothy W. Chase and David M. Citron drew upon lessons from the 1800s, when American industrialist families such as the Carnegies, the Rockefellers and the Phippses would each create an in-house adviser known as the "family office" to manage everything from their investments to their social calendar.