U.S. Chess Player Captures His Queen at Tournament

--With three rounds left in a world team chess championship in Salonica, Greece, the American team captain and a player on the Soviet women’s team completed their trickiest match--they married secretly and left for the United States. The wedding of John Donaldson, 31, and Elena Akhmilovskaya, 32, is “a real love match. A marriage, not a defection,” said Inna Izrailov, a Soviet native who plays for the American women’s team. Donaldson, an international master from Seattle, and Akhmilovskaya, a grandmaster, first met three years ago at a world championship qualifying tournament in Havana. She is ranked second among the world’s female chess players and her loss to the Soviet team could hurt it in the unfinished Olympiad competition, since it holds only a slight lead over Hungary. Yasser Sierawan, America’s top player and Donaldson’s closest friend, said the couple hoped that Akhmilovskaya’s daughter would eventually join them in the United States. The 7-year-old is staying with her grandmother in the Soviet Union. As for reaction from the American team: “We really do mind losing our team captain, but we couldn’t think of a finer reason why we should,” Sierawan said.

--Southeast England’s Ashdown Forest, perhaps better known as the Hundred Acre Woods, was bought for about $2.2 million by the East Sussex County Council, sparing the home of Winnie the Pooh and his friends from being split up and sold to private owners. The 6,500-acre parcel, heath with pockets of forest, was put on the market last year by the executors of the estate of the 10th Earl de la Warr, and a British Petroleum plan to drill there was defeated by Pooh fans and conservationists last year. Among those who worked with the council to prevent the woods’ sale to private owners was Christopher Milne, 67, who had provided his father, the late Pooh author A.A. Milne, with the inspiration for Christopher Robin.

--A piece of parachute found in the Columbia River near Vancouver, Wash., is not part of the one used by hijacker D.B. Cooper 17 years ago, the man who packed the chute said. Earl Cossey said: “It looks like one of those GI Joe parachutes.” Cooper disappeared with $200,000 in ransom money after leaping on Nov. 24, 1971, from the Northwest Airlines plane he had hijacked. In 1980, $5,800 of the money was discovered about a mile from where the piece of parachute was found last week.