An endangered whale that beached in New York City died on Thursday despite a day-long effort to keep the emaciated 18-meter (60-foot) finback alive by spraying it with water.

"We are on the scene and the whale has passed," Robert DiGiovanni, director of the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, told Agence France Presse.

Unilever, the maker of Vaseline, Axe deodorants and Dove soaps, among other cosmetic and hygiene products, says it will phase out the use of microplastics by 2015.

Many soaps, skin scrubs and shower gels contain microplastics, which are tiny polyethelene beads. Scientists and environmental groups are concerned that they contribute to polluting oceans.

South Korea has recovered what it believes to be debris from the engine of the long-range rocket launched by North Korea this month, the defense ministry said Friday.

"If it is confirmed to be engine debris, it will be very useful for analyzing North Korea's missile technology," a ministry spokesman said.

China has launched commercial and public services across the Asia-Pacific region on its domestic satellite navigation network built to rival the U.S. global positioning system.

The Beidou, or compass, system started providing services to civilians in the region on Thursday and is expected to provide global coverage by 2020, state media reported.

British scientists have called off the hunt for exotic life in an ice-bound Antarctic lake after their mission was hit by a technical hitch.

Researchers with the British Antarctic Survey had hoped to drill into Lake Ellsworth, which they believe has been frozen over for hundreds of thousands of years, in the hope of finding microbial life forms that might provide new insight into the evolution of life on Earth. They also hoped the lake floor's sediments might yield a new record of the Earth's climate.

China's economic boom has seen its coral reefs shrink by at least 80 percent over the past 30 years, a joint Australian study found Thursday, with researchers describing "grim" levels of damage and loss.

Scientists from the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology said their survey of mainland China and South China Sea reefs showed alarming degradation.

A massive winter storm system that whipped up tornadoes, ice and snow from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes and killed at least three people on Christmas was moving slowly eastward Wednesday.

Hundreds of flights were canceled and people were warned to stay home rather than brave the strong winds, freezing temperatures and treacherous roads.

Volunteers who patrol California beaches for plastic, cigarette butts and other litter will be on the lookout this winter for debris from last year's monstrous tsunami off Japan's coast.

The March 2011 disaster washed about 5 million tons of debris into the sea. Most sank, leaving an estimated 1 1/2 million tons afloat. No one knows how much debris — strewn across an area three times the size of the United States — is still adrift.

A bitter cold spell in Russia has claimed 123 lives in the past 10 days, an official said Tuesday, with the unseasonably early freeze testing authorities in a country used to notoriously tough winters.

Temperatures have plunged to up to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 34 degrees Farenheit) in the Moscow region and up to minus 60 degrees Celsius (minus 51 degrees Farenheit) in Eastern Siberia.

Forecasts of snow, sleet and freezing rain threatened to complicate Christmas Day travel around the nation's midsection Tuesday as several Gulf Coast states braced for a chance of twisters and powerful thunderstorms.

A blizzard watch was posted for parts of Indiana and western Kentucky for storms expected to develop Tuesday amid predictions of up to 4 to 7 inches of snow in coming hours. Much of Oklahoma and Arkansas braced under a winter storm warning of an early mix of rain and sleet later turning to snow.