NASA officials say the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster "should never be trivialized" in response to a new song from Beyonce that features an audio sample recorded just after the craft exploded on takeoff in 1986, killing all seven crewmembers.

The space agency issued the statement late Tuesday after the pop star began to receive criticism from Challenger families and others for using the short sample that includes the words "major malfunction" as an allusion to a failed relationship.

A long-awaited rescue of passengers on board a research ship that has been trapped in Antarctic ice for more than a week finally got underway on Thursday, with a helicopter scooping up the first group of passengers and flying them to a nearby vessel, expedition leaders said.

The helicopter was originally going to airlift the passengers to a Chinese icebreaker, the Snow Dragon, with a barge then ferrying them to an Australian vessel. But sea ice was preventing a barge from reaching the Snow Dragon, and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority's Rescue Coordination Centre, which is overseeing the rescue, said the operation would consequently be delayed.

Morocco has launched an operation to empty an oil tanker that ran aground during a storm near the southern port of Tan Tan with 5,000 tonnes of fuel on board, an official said.

The fuel was being pumped into trucks, with the operation to last between five and seven days depending on the weather, M'Hammed Atmani, police chief at the national ports agency, was quoted as saying by the official MAP news agency late on Tuesday.

Archaeologists announced Tuesday that excavations for a Mexico City subway extension have turned up what appears to be an unusual Aztec offering: a dog's skull with holes that indicate it was displayed on a ritual skull rack normally reserved for human sacrifice victims.

Excavators also found a woman's skull and two men's skulls with similar perforations around the temple, which allowed them to be mounted on a public display rack known as a tzompantli.

One third of Americans utterly reject the theory of evolution and believe instead that humans "have existed in their present form since the beginning of time," a new survey has found.

About a quarter of Americans believe that evolution was guided by God while only 32 percent of those surveyed believe that evolution is due to "natural processes such as natural selection," the Pew Research Center found.

Strong winds and rain Wednesday prevented the helicopter rescue of passengers on a Russian ship stuck in ice off Antarctica, Australian authorities said, as those onboard rang in the New Year with a sing-song from the deck.

The Akademik Shokalskiy, carrying 74 passengers and crew, has not moved since it became trapped about 100 nautical miles east of the French base Dumont d'Urville on December 24.

An icebound Russian research vessel prepared to ring in the New Year in Antarctica Tuesday as blizzards delayed a helicopter rescue planned after several icebreaking attempts failed.

The MV Akademik Shokalskiy has been stranded 100 nautical miles east of the French base Dumont d'Urville for a week, hemmed in by impenetrable pack ice that three separate breakers have been unable to breach.

More than 19,000 people have been displaced by a volcano in Indonesia that has been erupting for months and shot lava into the air nine times overnight, an official said Tuesday.

Tanzania has been hit by a sharp upsurge in poaching, with at least 60 elephants killed in the two months since the government was forced to halt a controversial crackdown, a senior official said.

This month Tanzania's President Jakaya Kikwete sacked four top ministers amid accusations that the anti-poaching drive -- codenamed 'Operation Tokomeza', or 'Operation Terminate' -- had led to security forces carrying out a wave of killings as well as torture and rape.

More than 8 million acres of China's farmland is too polluted with heavy metals and other chemicals to use for growing food, a Cabinet official said Monday, highlighting a problem that is causing growing public concern.

The threat from pollution to China's food supply has been overshadowed by public alarm at smog and water contamination but is gaining attention following scandals over tainted rice and other crops. The government triggered complaints in February when it refused to release results of a nationwide survey of soil pollution, declaring them a state secret.