Dolls a Greek woman made during World War II. Ice cream bowls and wooden spoons from a 1940s Greek candy store. Thousands of record albums filled with Greek music.

These items and many other beloved objects and family heirlooms have found their way from around the country to the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, which has a new place to store and exhibit them all, in a four-story 40,000-square-foot environmentally friendly building of limestone and glass that opened in early December.

A hard-line Israeli group said Tuesday it was launching plans for a new tourist center at the site of a politically sensitive archaeological dig in a largely Arab neighborhood outside Jerusalem's Old City, drawing fire from Palestinian officials.

The project's sponsor, the Elad Foundation, said the new visitors center and parking garage will be built above a section of the excavation area known as the City of David, leaving the ruins below accessible. The foundation said no additional land beyond the current excavation site would be used and that construction, which must pass several zoning committees, was still several years away.

Forrest Gump's oft-imitated line, "My momma always said, 'Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get' " will be immortalized among the nation's treasures in the world's largest archive of film, TV and sound recordings.

The Library of Congress on Wednesday announced that 1994's smash hit "Forrest Gump" starring Tom Hanks was one of 25 films chosen to be included this year in the National Film Registry.

The Colosseum lost another piece on Tuesday as Rome's most famous monument deteriorates further ahead of a long-delayed restoration funded by an Italian billionaire now scheduled to start in March.

The chunk of volcanic tuff fell from one of the iconic arches of the nearly 2,000-year-old structure -- just two days after a similar incident reported by a group of concerned tourists on Christmas Day put local staff on alert.

Helen Frankenthaler, an abstract painter known for her bold, lyrical use of color who led a postwar art movement that would later be termed Color Field painting, died Tuesday at her home in Connecticut, her nephew said. She was 83.

One of Frankenthaler's most famous works is "Mountains and Sea," a 1952 painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which she created by pouring thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the studio floor.

Unbeknownst to many, Turkish diplomats on duty around Europe saved hundreds of Jews during World War II by giving them Turkish passports, enabling them to travel to safety in Turkey.

This little known episode is told in an independent documentary entitled "Turkish Passport", being promoted as finally revealing "a secret kept for 66 years".

For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized "cleanroom" where the equipment was stored.

Cambodian workers on Tuesday began dismantling a notorious bridge where 353 people lost their lives in a stampede last year, following the completion of two new crossings nearby.

The country's annual water festival ended in tragedy in November 2010 when crowds panicked on the narrow crossing leading to Phnom Penh's Diamond Island, one of the main event sites.

After his release from an Israeli jail, Barakeh Taha could finally marry and held the wedding at a disputed West Bank site holy to Muslims and Jews where tension once led to a massacre of unarmed Palestinians.

No random choice, Taha aimed to back a Palestinian campaign to claim heritage rights over an ancient burial cave in the heart of Hebron's Old City.

Escaping a city wracked by incessant violence, Syrian Christians from Homs flocked to a nearby monastery on Sunday to celebrate Christmas away from a place that "has gone mad."

The Saint George de Mishtaya monastery, parts of which were built in the sixth century, lies in a lush valley some 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Homs which has become a major frontline in the uprising against the regime.