The discovery of a World War II amphibious vehicle on the bottom of an Italian lake is raising hopes among a group of American veterans that the remains of two dozen of their comrades will be found and possibly recovered for burial in the U.S.

The Italian volunteer organization that found the truck on the bottom of Lake Garda last December believes it's the same one that sank in 1945, killing 24 of the 25 U.S. soldiers aboard the open-topped vehicle known as a DUKW (duhk).

It may still have a small following, but one dance company is determined to bring ballet, with its roots in the Italian Renaissance, to urban South Africa.

Onstage pirouettes, jetes and turnouts are still very much a foreign concept for most Africans, but the South African Mzansi Ballet wants to change that.

They eat, sleep and raise their children beneath the stage floorboards and when dusk falls Thailand's travelling theaters come to life with ornate costumes, colorful face paint and high-pitched Chinese opera.

It is a generations-old way of life for the nomadic performers who tour venues ranging from sport stadiums to small Chinese shrines in back alleys. But faced with an uncertain future as the troupes struggle to attract younger audiences, supporters are turning to the Internet to widen their appeal.

German blacksmith Manfred Zbrzezny and his apprentices hammer, file and weld in a steamy, dark workshop on the outskirts of the Liberian capital Monrovia, surrounded by parts for AK-47s, bazookas and other deadly arms.

In another lifetime, these weapons were the cause of untold misery in a nation scarred by ruinous back-to-back civil wars, but now they are being transformed into symbols of hope for Liberians.

A cavernous museum on hallowed ground is finally nearing completion, far below the earth where the twin towers once stood.

Amid the construction machinery and the dust, powerful artifacts of death and destruction have assumed their final resting places inside the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

The northern Italian town where Antonio Stradivari and other master violin-makers worked will open a new museum celebrating the instrument.

Cremona will inaugurate the Museum of the Violin on Sept. 14. In a recreated violin-maker's shop, visitors can watch how the instruments are hand crafted. They can admire creations of Stradivari and other famous Cremona violin-makers, the Amati and the Guarneri families, with the instruments in protective showcases, and hear violins being played.

A Texas museum has acquired a full-length painting by John Singer Sargent of Edwin Booth, the renowned 19th-century actor and brother of President Abraham Lincoln's assassin.

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth announced the acquisition Friday. The portrait from 1890 was commissioned by members of The Players — a private club for actors founded by Booth and his friends. It remained there until 2002, when it was sold to a private collector. The painting will now go on view Friday in the Amon Carter's main gallery, the first time it will be on extended public display.

A South Korean cinema chain under pressure from conservatives on Saturday withdrew a controversial documentary film challenging government findings that a warship sunk in 2010 was torpedoed by the North.

It was the first time in South Korea that the screening of a film has been cancelled under political pressure, Yonhap news agency said.

Crematorium ovens, gas canisters and images of a gate emblazoned "Arbeit Macht Frei" instantly evoke the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in the West but many Chinese remain ignorant of the Holocaust, which for them is overshadowed by Japanese atrocities before and during World War II.

The first ever exhibition in China devoted to Nazi crimes against humanity has sought to draw more attention to it, with some success: in less than two months, more than 70,000 people visited "Auschwitz: death camp" in Beijing.

A prisoner's cap stolen from the museum at a former Nazi German death camp in Poland and put up for sale on eBay has been returned, a spokeswoman for the institution said Wednesday.

The blue and white striped cap was stolen from the museum at Majdanek more than 20 years ago and only turned up on eBay in the United States this year.