Four new films couldn't catch "Gone Girl" at theaters this weekend.
The Fox thriller starring Ben Affleck as a man whose wife goes missing is poised to top the box office for a second week with $26.8 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Chinese authorities are urging officials who have fled abroad to avoid corruption charges to turn themselves in before Dec. 1 in exchange for leniency or face stiffer punishment.
Corruption is rampant in China, and a large number of government officials and executives of state-owned companies have absconded overseas for safer havens of their ill-gained wealth because China lacks extradition treaties.

Barbie has long been an icon, just not a holy one.
A provocative art exhibit featuring Barbie fashion dolls as religious figures such as the Virgin Mary and her boyfriend Ken as a crucified Jesus Christ has been cancelled amid complaints and threats by angry believers, the artists behind the collection said Friday.

Italy remained perfect without Mario Balotelli. The Netherlands, meanwhile, still appears to be in a post-World Cup slump.
Giorgio Chiellini accounted for all three goals in Italy's 2-1 win over Azerbaijan in European Championship qualifying Friday and World Cup semifinalist Netherlands labored to a surprisingly hard-earned 3-1 victory over 10-man Kazakhstan.

Gay rights groups are cautiously cheering a shift in tone from the Catholic Church toward homosexuals, encouraged that Pope Francis' famous "Who am I to judge?" position has filtered down to bishops debating family issues at a Vatican meeting this week.
There is no discussion that church doctrine on homosexuality will change or that the Vatican will soon endorse gay marriage or even gay unions. It will not, as the Vatican's top canon lawyer made clear Thursday.

Archaeologists at the Petrified Forest National Park in the southwestern U.S. have discovered an ancient village that is unique for its size.
Park officials say 50 to 70 pit houses are organized in rings on about 66 acres (26 hectares). One village found last summer spanned about 14 acres (6 hectares).

The space shuttle Endeavour has been paired once again with a space lab and storage pod it used on some missions, as the countdown to its final exhibit continues at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.
A crew on Thursday delicately positioned the 3,000-pound (1,360-kilogram) portable lab and pod inside the orbiter's huge cargo bay, the Los Angeles Times reported (http://lat.ms/1BZn1mL ). Workers also installed a replica robotic arm, airlock and docking system.

Google is being swamped with demands from Europeans trying to erase humiliating links to their past from the world's dominant Internet search engine.
Nearly 145,000 requests have been made in the European Union and four other countries by people looking to polish their online reputations, according to numbers the company released Friday. That's an average of more than 1,000 requests a day since late May, when Google began accepting submissions in order to comply with a European court that ruled some embarrassing information about people's lives can be scrubbed from search results.

Finance officials from the world's largest economies are being urged to prevent the global economy from falling into a "new mediocre" in which growth remains stuck at subpar levels for years to come, trapping millions of people on unemployment rolls.
Finance ministers and central bank presidents of the Group of 20 nations, which include traditional economic powers such as the United States, Japan and Germany, and emerging economies such as Russia, China and India, were wrapping up two days of talks Friday with a joint statement of goals and a news conference expected in the early afternoon.

The punk trio Green Day, the short-lived British band The Smiths, "Lean on Me" singer Bill Withers and Sting are among the first-time nominees for enshrinement in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Six of the 15 nominees for the hall's Class of 2015 announced Thursday are on the ballot for the first time. More than 700 artists and other members of the music community will vote on the inductees, with the results announced in December.
