Madrid - Antarctica's Wilkins Ice Shelf is rapidly disintegrating, Spanish scientists reported on Tuesday, with potentially ominous implications for climate change.

An ice sheet of 14,000 square kilometres has broken off from the Wilkins Shelf, and has itself broken into several large icebergs, according to a statement from Spain's National Research Council (CSIC).

CSIC scientists aboard the Hesperides maritime research vessel spotted the disintegration, about 1,600 kilometres south of the southern tip of South America.

Washington  - German rocket scientist Konrad Dannenberg, a member of the team that helped put man on the moon, died in Huntsville, Alabama, aged 96, according to media reports Tuesday.

His wife Jackie said he died Monday of natural causes, the Birmingham News reported.

Dannenberg played a role in the Redstone, Jupiter and Saturn rockets. It was the Saturn V that put the first American astronaut on the moon.

In 1950, 118 German scientists came to Hunstville as part of Wernher von Braun's team. With Dannenberg's death, only six survive.

New York  - The founder of a Muslim television station in the United States has been charged with murder after allegedly decapitating his wife, the channel's website and local media reported Tuesday.

Muzzammil Hassan, 44, was arrested Thursday after informing police that his wife's body was located at the Bridges TV office outside Buffalo in Orchard Park, New York. Police arrived to find Aasiya Zubair Hassan, 37, had been decapitated, the Buffalo News reported.

Buenos Aires  - A ship carrying 74 passengers and a crew of 30 ran aground near an Argentine base in Antarctica Tuesday, although it was expected to move out on its own once the tide came in later in the day.

The captain of the Ocean Nova, sailing under a Bahamas flag, said everyone on board was safe and that the ship had suffered no damage, Argentine Navy spokesman Roberto Ulloa told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Cairo  - Many privately owned pharmacies were engaged in a second day of strikes Tuesday in a row to protest efforts by authorities to enforce a new tax law.

Some pharmacies had signs on their closed doors saying: "The pharmacy is closed in protest against the bad treatment of the Income Tax Authority against the Egyptian people."

Bogota  - Leftist Colombian rebels admitted in a statement posted on the internet Tuesday to having killed eight members of the indigenous Awa tribe.

But the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) also blamed the deaths on the Colombian government. FARC said the government is the "executioner" of civilians because it gets them involved in the country's armed conflict.

Colombia's armed forces have long used civilians as informers, to find out details about the presence and movement of rebels.