A U.S. ship was on Saturday towing an Australian fishing trawler to open water after freeing it from Antarctic pack ice, rescue authorities said.

The 63-meter (207-foot) "Antarctic Chieftain" became trapped in ice some 900 nautical miles (1,650 kilometers) northeast of McMurdo Sound on Tuesday, damaging its propeller.

The detente achieved at U.N. talks that concluded Friday with a framework for a world climate pact is only temporary, achieved by kicking the difficult decisions down the road, parties and observers say.

But it also generated a degree of optimism rarely observed in the tense process -- a sense of common purpose which many hope will bolster negotiators in the months to come.

More than 100 pilot whales that stranded on a New Zealand beach have died, conservation officials said Saturday, voicing grave fears for more than 90 others from the pod.

The whales beached themselves on Friday at Farewell Spit at the northern tip of the South Island, with dozens of rescuers racing to re-float the marine mammals on the evening high tide.

Negotiators in Geneva adopted a climate blueprint Friday, a symbolic milestone in the fraught U.N. process that must culminate in a universal pact in Paris in December.

Assembled over the past six days, the 86-page draft plan for limiting man-made global warming was gavelled through at the close of six days of talks, prompting applause from delegates.

Archaeologists in Greece have discovered a rare burial of a prehistoric couple positioned in an embrace, the culture ministry said on Thursday.

The discovery was made in the cave of Diros, a coastal site in the Peloponnese peninsula known to have been inhabited since 6,000 BC, the ministry said in a statement. 

Shoddy waste management and littering across the globe likely added eight million metric tons (17.6 billion pounds) of plastic to the ocean in 2010, posing significant dangers to marine life, scientists said Thursday.

Long-lasting mega-droughts could occur with increasing frequency in the western United States later this century if no action is taken to rein in climate change by curbing fossil fuel use, researchers said Thursday.

Mega-drought is defined as any drought as bad as the worst already seen in the 20th century, but lasting much longer, for 35 years or more.

Almost 200 pilot whales stranded themselves Friday on a New Zealand beach renowned as a deathtrap for the marine mammals, conservation officials said.

At least 24 whales from the pod of 198 that beached themselves at Farewell Spit had died and rescue workers were trying to refloat the survivors, the Department of Conservation (DOC) said.

Saudi customs agents have foiled an attempt to smuggle in almost 3,000 live "ornamental" birds from Bahrain, official media reported on Thursday.

"They were found hidden in three vehicles entering the kingdom" via the King Fahd Causeway from the island nation, the Saudi Press Agency said.

Gene sequencing of Galapagos Island finches first studied by Charles Darwin have found the birds have a traceable evolutionary history going back two million years, scientists said on Wednesday.

Arguably the most famous community of birds in the world, the finches came to Darwin's attention when he visited the islands in 1831.