With a steady hand, pilot John Bode pushes the big red throttles forward. Four radial engines roar in unison, and a living piece of World War II history takes flight.

Of the 12,732 iconic B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers built in the 10 years through 1945, only about a dozen are still flying, and Aluminum Overcast is one of them.

A band of Hong Kong art guardians are on constant standby at the city's sprawling protest site. Their mission: to swoop in and save a vast array of creative works -- including the towering "Umbrella Man" statue -- if the police move in.

Over nearly a month of protests calling for greater democracy in the southern Chinese city, a kilometer-long stretch of highway opposite the government headquarters usually choked with traffic has been transformed into a riotous open air exhibition.

A top-level sacking, harsh words from the artist's son, delays and a huge budget overrun -- Paris's Picasso museum reopens its doors on Saturday amid the fallout from a fraught $71-million renovation.

Just over five years after it closed for what was intended to be a two-year refurbishment, the museum -- housed in a 17th-century baroque mansion in Paris's historic Marais quarter -- has been extensively modernized and is more than twice its previous size.

Archaeologists in Greece have uncovered a rare wooden statue preserved in the muddy depths of an ancient well in Piraeus, the port of Athens.

A Culture Ministry statement said Tuesday that the roughly half-meter (20-inch) high dressed male figure was found without its head, hands and feet, together with broken pottery dating to about 100-86 B.C. It was unclear who the statue might depict.

The head of a near-intact marble sphinx has been discovered in the largest tomb ever unearthed in Amphipolis, northern Greece, the culture ministry announced on Tuesday.

Discovered in the fourth chamber of a burial mound at the site in the northern region of Macedonia, the sphinx is more than half-a-meter (18 inches) high and was marked by "traces of red", according to a statement from the ministry.

Wyoming stood poised Tuesday to become the latest U.S. state to allow gay marriage, bringing the national wave of expanded rights for same-sex couples to a state where the 1998 beating death of Matthew Shepard still influences national perceptions.

The state was scheduled to file a legal notice saying it won't defend a Wyoming law that defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

The Oscar-winning Hollywood comedy "Death Becomes Her" has lent its name to a New York exhibition that reveals nothing was more becoming to a 19th century widow than black crepe.

With dozens of dresses, jewelry, hats, accessories and magazine prints, the exhibition, which opens Tuesday, looks back on a time when European and American women had to conform to rigid norms of outward grief.

The number of Mexican children abducted, recruited by organized crime, mutilated and murdered has surged alarmingly, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said Monday.

The grim report from the OAS-affiliated rights body comes as Mexican authorities are scrambling amid a massive scandal over 43 college students missing and feared dead.

Islamic authorities in Malaysia are conducting a probe into a controversial "dog patting" event aimed at removing the stigma regarding men's best friend in the multi-ethnic Muslim-majority country.

The event, titled "I want to touch a dog" and held in a park on the outskirts of the capital Kuala Lumpur Sunday, encouraged patting dogs -- seen as unclean in Islam -- and reportedly drew hundreds of Muslims, raising the ire of religious leaders.

Queen guitarist Brian May on Monday launched an exhibition from his collection of Victorian 3D photographs, united for the first time with the famous paintings they tried to recreate.

Staged using props and actors, the "stereoscopic" cards were a British middle-class craze from the 1850s to the 1870s -- giving anyone with a viewer a three-dimensional glimpse of the era's celebrated but rarely seen artworks.