World

CANBERRA, Australia — The aerial search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet was called off Monday, and the underwater hunt will be expanded to include a vast swath of ocean floor that may take at least eight months to thoroughly search, Australian officials said.

Not a single piece of confirmed debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been recovered by a massive multinational hunt that began after it disappeared March 8 with 239 people on board.

“It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.

“Therefore, we are moving from the current phase to a phase which is focused on searching the ocean floor over a much larger area,” he said.

The US Navy’s Bluefin 21 robotic submarine has spent weeks scouring the initial search area for the plane in the remote Indian Ocean far off Australia’s west coast, but has found no trace of the missing aircraft. Officials are now looking to bring in new equipment that can search a larger patch of seabed for the plane, Abbott said.

The aerial search officially ended Monday, the search coordination center confirmed.

Radar and satellite data show the jet veered far off course for unknown reasons during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. Analyses indicate it would have run out of fuel in the remote section of ocean where the search has been focused.

The unmanned sub has been creating a three-dimensional sonar map of the ocean floor for more than two weeks near where signals consistent with airplane black boxes were heard on April 8. The sub has searched a nearly 400-square-kilometre area.

Crews will now begin searching the plane’s entire probable impact zone, an area 700 kilometres long and 80 kilometres wide, Abbott said.

That will be a monumental task — and one that will take time, warned Angus Houston, head of the search effort.

“If everything goes perfectly, I would say we’ll be doing well if we do it in eight months,” Houston said, adding that weather and technical issues could prolong the search well beyond that estimate.

Australian officials will be contacting private companies to bring in additional sonar mapping equipment that can be towed behind boats to search the expanded area at an estimated cost of $60 million, Abbott said. It could take officials several weeks to organize contracts for the new equipment and the Bluefin will continue to scour the seabed in the meantime, Abbott said.

So far, each country involved in the search has been bearing its own costs. But Abbott said Australia would now seek contributions from other countries to help pay for the new equipment.

Two weeks ago, Abbott said officials were “very confident” that a series of underwater signals picked up by sound-detecting equipment came from Flight 370’s black boxes. On Monday, he maintained that he still had a “considerable degree of confidence” — but opened up the possibility that the signals were yet another dead end in a search that has been peppered by them.

“We’re still baffled and disappointed that we haven’t been able to find undersea wreckage based on those detections, and this is one of the reasons why we are continuing to deploy the Bluefin 21 submersible — because this is the best information that we’ve got,” Abbott said. “It may turn out to be a false lead, but nevertheless it’s the best lead we’ve got.”

Abbott also acknowledged it was possible that no debris from the plane would ever be found.

“Of course it’s possible, but that would be a terrible outcome because it would leave families with a baffling uncertainty forever,” he said. “The aircraft plainly cannot disappear — it must be somewhere — and we are going to do everything we reasonably can, even to the point of conducting the most intensive undersea search which human ingenuity currently makes possible of some 60,000 square kilometres under the sea.”

“We are going to do all these things because we do not want this crippling cloud of uncertainty to hang over these families and the wider traveling public,” he said.

KUALA LUMPUR/SLAVYANSK, Ukraine — Pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine freed a Swedish observer on Sunday, but said they had no plans to release seven other European monitors they have been holding for three days.

On the eve of an expected announcement of a mild tightening of Western sanctions against a targeted list of Russians, US President Barack Obama called for the United States and Europe to join forces to impose stronger measures to restrain Moscow.

In Donetsk, where pro-Russian rebels have proclaimed an independent “people’s republic”, armed fighters seized the headquarters of regional television and ordered it to start broadcasting a Russian state TV channel.

Washington and Brussels are expected, possibly as early as Monday, to add new people and firms close to Russian President Vladimir Putin to a small list of those hit by punitive measures. But they have yet to reach a consensus on imposing wider sanctions that would hurt Russia’s economy more generally.

Speaking during a visit to Malaysia, Obama said the impact of any decision over wider sanctions would depend on whether the United States and its allies could find a unified position.

“We’re going to be in a stronger position to deter Mr. Putin when he sees that the world is unified and the United States and Europe is unified rather than this is just a US-Russian conflict,” Obama told reporters.

The stand-off over Ukraine, an ex-Soviet republic of about 45 million people, has dragged relations between Russia and the West to their lowest level since the end of the Cold War.

After Ukrainians overthrew a pro-Russian president, Putin overturned decades of international diplomacy last month by announcing the right to use military force on his neighbour’s territory. He has seized and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and massed tens of thousands of troops on the frontier.

Heavily armed pro-Russian gunmen have seized buildings in towns and cities across eastern Ukraine. Kiev and its Western allies say the uprising is directed by Russian agents. Moscow denies it is involved and says the uprising is a spontaneous reaction to oppression of Russian speakers by Kiev.

An international agreement reached this month calls on rebels to vacate occupied buildings, but Obama said Russia had not “lifted a finger” to push its allies to comply.

“In fact, there’s strong evidence that they’ve been encouraging the activities in eastern and southern Ukraine.”

Prisoners

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has sent unarmed monitors to try to encourage compliance with the peace deal. The pro-Russian rebels seized eight European monitors three days ago and have been holding them at their most heavily fortified redoubt in the town of Slavyansk.

One of them was permitted to leave on Sunday after OSCE negotiators arrived to discuss their release. The freed man got into an OSCE-marked car and drove away. A separatist spokeswoman said the prisoner, a Swede, had been let go on medical grounds, but there were no plans to free the rest.

The captives were shown to reporters on Sunday and said they were in good health.

“We have no indication when we will be sent home to our countries,” Colonel Axel Schneider told reporters as armed men in camouflage fatigues and balaclavas looked on. “We wish from the bottom of our hearts to go back to our nations as soon and as quickly as possible.”

The observers, from Germany, Denmark, Poland and the Czech Republic as well as Sweden, were accused by their captors of spying for NATO and using the OSCE mission as a cover.

The OSCE, a European security body, includes Russia as well as NATO members, and its main Ukraine mission was approved by Moscow, although the Europeans held in Slavyansk were on a separate OSCE-authorised mission that did not require Russia’s consent. Western countries say Russia should do more to prevail upon their pro-Russian captors to free the men.

Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, the rebel leader who has declared himself mayor of Slavyansk, has described them as prisoners of war and said the separatists were prepared to exchange them for fellow rebels in Ukrainian custody.

Washington is more hawkish on further sanctions than some of its European allies, which has caused a degree of impatience among some US officials. Many European countries are worried about the risks of imposing tougher sanctions: the EU has more than 10 times as much trade with Russia as the United States and imports about a quarter of its natural gas from Russia.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in coming days there would be “an expansion of existing sanctions, measures against individuals or entities in Russia”.

Russia! Russia!

At the Donetsk television headquarters, about 400 pro-Russian demonstrators chanted “Russia! Russia!” and “Referendum!” — a call for a vote like one in Crimea that preceded its annexation by Russia last month. Four separatists in masks controlled access at the entrance, and more masked gunmen in camouflage fatigues could be seen inside.

Oleg Dzholos, the station’s director, who came outside to speak to reporters, said the people who seized the building had ordered him to change the programming.

“They used force to push back the gates,” he said. “There were no threats. There were not many of my people. What can a few people do? The leaders of this movement just gave me an ultimatum that one of the Russian channels has to be broadcast.”

Ponomaryov, the rebel leader in Slavyansk, said his men had captured three officers with Ukraine’s state security service who, he said, had been mounting an operation against separatists in the nearby town of Horlivka.

The Russian television station Rossiya 24 showed footage it said was of a colonel, a major and a captain. They were shown seated, with their hands behind their backs, blindfolded, and wearing no trousers. At least two had bruises on their faces.

Ukraine’s State Security Service said the three had been part of a unit which went to Horlivka to arrest a suspect in the murder of Volodymyr Rybak, a pro-Kiev councillor whose body was found last week in a river near Slavyansk.

JINDO, South — Concerns are growing among anguished families that the bodies of those who died in the sinking of a South Korean ferry may never be found, as search teams suspended work Saturday because of bad weather.

A looming storm and high tides put a temporary halt to operations to recover the remains of more than 100 people still missing over a week after the huge ferry capsized.

“Over the weekend, strong wind and rain is expected in the Jindo area,” a coastguard spokesman told journalists.

“As efforts to find the missing people are becoming protracted, there are growing concerns among their families that bodies might be lost for good,” he said.

The confirmed death toll stood Saturday at 187, with 115 unaccounted for — many bodies are believed trapped in the ferry that capsized on April 16 with 476 people on board.

Making up the bulk of the passengers on the 6,825-tonne Sewol when it sank were 325 high school students — around 250 of whom are either confirmed or presumed dead.

Although all hope of finding survivors has been extinguished, there is still anger and deep frustration among relatives of the missing over the pace of the recovery operation.

Challenging conditions 

Frogmen have battled strong currents, poor visibility and blockages caused by floating furniture as they have tried to get inside the upturned vessel, which rests on a silty seabed.

The challenging conditions have meant divers are unable to spend more than a few minutes in the ship each time they go down.

Even so, they are coming across horrifying scenes in the murky water, including one dormitory room — which would normally have held around 31 people — packed with the bodies of 48 students wearing lifejackets.

Around a quarter of the 187 dead recovered so far have been found in waters outside the sunken vessel, and there are fears that some of the missing may have drifted free from the wreck.

That could be exacerbated if the sea is churned by the gathering storm, scattering bodies.

Authorities — wary of the palpable anger among relatives — have mobilised trawlers and installed 13-kilometre (eight-mile)-long nets anchored to the seabed across the Maenggol sea channel to prevent the dead being swept into the open ocean.

Dozens of other vessels and helicopters have been scouring the site and beyond, with the search operation expanded up to 60 kilometres from the scene of the disaster.

Police and local government officials will also be mobilised to scour coastal areas and nearby islands, a coastguard official said.

Widening investigation 

Furious families demanded a meeting with Choi Sang-hwan, deputy head of the Korea Coastguard, near the pier in Jindo Port, urging him to send the divers back into the water.

“We are waiting for the right moment as conditions in the sea are not favourable,” said Choi.

It took divers working in difficult and dangerous conditions more than two days to get into the sunken ferry and two more days to retrieve the first bodies.

Many relatives believe some of the victims may have survived for several days in trapped air pockets, but perished in the cold water after no rescue came.

As a result some have asked for autopsies to be performed, to see if it would be possible to determine the precise cause and time of death.

On Saturday, a US navy rescue and salvage vessel, the USS Safeguard, arrived at Jindo, AFP journalists on the scene said.

The vessel has “divers and other necessary equipment aboard, but it remains to be seen how the ship can contribute to the ongoing efforts to retrieve bodies”, a US military spokesman told AFP.

The Sewol’s captain, Lee Joon-seok, and 10 crew members have been arrested on charges ranging from criminal negligence to abandoning passengers.

The captain has been sharply criticised for delaying the evacuation order until the ferry was listing so badly that escape was almost impossible.

Prosecutors have raided a host of businesses affiliated with the ferry operator, the Chonghaejin Marine Company, as part of an overall probe into corrupt management.

The widening investigation has also seen travel bans put on eight current and former executives of the Korea Register of Shipping — the body responsible for issuing marine safety certificates.

SLAVYANSK, Ukraine — The Group of Seven (G-7) rich countries have agreed to start slapping fresh sanctions on Moscow as early as Monday over the worsening Ukraine crisis amid Western fears of an imminent Russian invasion.

International tensions were mounting Saturday over the situation in the ex-Soviet republic, where sporadic fighting between pro-Kremlin rebels and Ukrainian security forces flared last week.

Russian warplanes violated Ukraine’s airspace several times on Thursday and Friday, the Pentagon said.

Russia has also begun new drills on the border, where it has tens of thousands of troops massed.

A Western diplomat warned: “We no longer exclude a Russian military intervention in Ukraine in the coming days.”

The diplomatic source noted that Russia’s UN envoy, Vitaly Churkin, “has been recalled urgently to Moscow” for consultations.

Ukraine’s prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, on Saturday cut short a trip to Rome after seeing Pope Francis, skipping a Sunday canonisation ceremony for Popes John Paul II and John XXIII “because of the situation,” his spokeswoman told AFP.

OSCE team 

taken hostage 

On the ground in east Ukraine, Kiev’s Western-backed government is waging an offensive against pro-Moscow rebels holding a string of towns.

A 13-member OSCE military observer team sent into Ukraine to monitor an April 17 Geneva accord designed to de-escalate the situation was being held hostage by rebels in the flashpoint town of Slavyansk.

The chief of the insurgents’ self-styled “Republic of Donetsk”, Denis Pushilin, accused them of being “NATO spies” and said they would only be released in a prisoner swap for militants detained by Ukrainian forces.

An AFP journalist in Slavyansk said a barricade around the building where the team from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe was being held had been greatly fortified with sandbags and a machinegun.

Washington and Europe called for the immediate release of the OSCE team, which includes members from Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has urged his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to intervene to have the team freed, officials in Berlin said.

Russia responded it would do everything in its power to win their release.

Kiev has accused Moscow — which it sees as controlling the rebels — of seeking to trigger a “third world war” and urged Russian troops to withdraw from the border.

Russia in turn has warned it has a “right” to invade to protect Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population concentrated in the east and southeast, sparking the worst East-West confrontation since the Cold War.

 US eyes ‘tougher actions

The G-7 nations said in a joint statement they would “move swiftly to impose additional sanctions on Russia”.

“These sanctions will be coordinated and complementary, but not necessarily identical. US sanctions could come as early as Monday,” a senior US administration official said.

The Group of Seven consists of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. EU foreign ministers are also to meet soon to discuss the issue.

The United States and the European Union have already targeted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle with visa and asset freezes and imposed sanctions on a key Russian bank.

A senior White House official said the next round of sanctions could target “individuals with influence on the Russian economy, such as energy and banking”.

US Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Malaysia with President Barack Obama, spoke of “a spectrum of sanctions” that “allows us to escalate further” if the situation deteriorates.

Obama on Friday said that new sanctions against Russia were “ready to go” but had signalled they would not target key areas of the Russian economy such as the mining, energy and the financial sectors.

US officials have said those measures would only be considered if Russia sent its regular forces into Ukraine.

US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said sanctions were a long-term strategy.

“The goal is to hurt the Russian economy while doing the least damage necessary to the US and the global economy,” he told American public radio.

“We’ve made clear we’re prepared to take tougher actions and prepared to absorb the consequences of that if we need to.”

Tensions on the ground 

Tensions have been heightened within Ukraine, with the military pursuing a new offensive against the rebels.

Slavyansk is under siege. Several locals and insurgents there told AFP a roadblock on the town’s outskirts came under fire overnight but no-one was hurt. The rebels there have vowed they will never surrender.

The insurgents in the east have conducted their own attacks. On Friday, they blew up an army helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade in the town of Kramatorsk, wounding the pilot.

Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danylo Lubkivsky told reporters at the United Nations that his country would exercise restraint in its operations against pro-Russian separatists.

“The anti-terrorist operation is ongoing, but we are guided by one major idea: we would like to avoid any victims or casualties,” he said.

‘Expensive mistake’

The crisis over Ukraine has plunged relations between the West and Russia to its lowest point since the Cold War.

Russia refuses to accept the legitimacy of Kiev’s new pro-EU government, which came to power after four months of street protests forced the ouster of the Kremlin-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Last month, Moscow annexed Ukraine’s peninsula of Crimea after deploying troops, sparking international outrage.

With the threat of further sanctions hanging over Russia’s already shaky economy, ratings agency Standard and Poor’s on Friday downgraded its credit rating to one notch above junk status.

Russia’s central bank reacted by raising its key interest rate.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has warned that Russia could be making “an expensive mistake” in Ukraine.

While Obama has ruled out sending US or NATO forces into Ukraine, Washington has begun deploying 600 US troops to bolster NATO’s defences in nearby eastern European states.

France also said it was sending four fighter jets to join NATO air patrols over the Baltic states.

Washington and Moscow have traded barbs over Ukraine, with Lavrov claiming the push against rebels in the east was part of a US plot to “seize” Ukraine for its own “geopolitical ambitions and not the interests of the Ukrainian people”.

The White House has urged Moscow to “choose a peaceful resolution to the crisis” by implementing the Geneva deal, which calls for “illegal armed groups” to lay down their weapons and end their occupation of public buildings.

SLAVYANSK, Ukraine — Ukraine’s military launched assaults to retake rebel-held eastern towns on Thursday in which up to five people were reported killed, a move Russian President Vladimir Putin warned would have “consequences”.

The offensive sent international tensions soaring and oil prices up on the prospect of Russia making good on its threat of a massive response in the ex-Soviet republic.

In Slavyansk, a flashpoint eastern Ukrainian town held by rebels since mid-April, armoured military vehicles drove past an abandoned roadblock in flames to take up position.

Shots were heard as a helicopter flew overhead, and the pro-Kremlin rebels ordered all civilians out of the town hall to take up defensive positions inside.

“During the clashes, up to five terrorists were eliminated,” and three checkpoints destroyed, the interior ministry said in a statement. Regional medical authorities confirmed one death and one person wounded.

Hours later, the armoured vehicles withdrew, leaving the town calm but tense.

The rebels, which the Kiev government and its Western backers believe are controlled and supported by Moscow, have been occupying around 10 towns in Ukraine’s east since mid-April.

An international accord reached in Geneva last week was meant to defuse the crisis, but was swiftly dismissed by the rebels.

A brief truce collapsed over the weekend, prompting Ukraine’s acting President Oleksandr Turchynov to order a resumption of an “anti-terrorist” offensive to flush the militants out.

Also on Thursday, Ukrainian special forces seized back control of the town hall in the southeastern port city of Mariupol with no casualties, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said. Separatist sources confirmed the loss of the building in the port city, whose population is nearly 500,000.

And an army base in the eastern town of Artemivsk overnight repelled an attack by heavily armed rebels using machineguns and grenades, the interior and defence ministries said. One soldier was wounded.

Failure of accord 

It was the worst violence to erupt in Ukraine since the signing of the Geneva accord a week ago.

Putin called the armed offensive a crime.

“If Kiev has really begun to use the army against the country’s population... that is a very serious crime against its own people,” he said.

He warned of “consequences, including for our intergovernmental relations”.

Russia, which has an estimated 40,000 troops massed on Ukraine’s border, has already threatened to respond as it did when it invaded Georgia in 2008 if it sees its interests in Ukraine attacked.

Shortly after Putin spoke, Russia’s defence ministry announced new military “exercises” near the border in response to the Ukrainian military operations.

US President Barack Obama on Thursday accused Russia of not abiding by the Geneva deal and warned more sanctions could be imposed on Moscow within days.

“We continue to see malicious, armed men taking over buildings, harassing folks who are disagreeing with them, destabilising the region and we haven’t seen Russia step out and discouraging it,” he said Thursday during a trip to Japan.

Russia, though, claims Washington and the Ukrainian government are reneging on their responsibilities, despite Kiev vowing to give an amnesty to the rebels, protect the Russian language and decentralise power.

 Geopolitical tensions 

While Obama has ruled out sending US or NATO forces into Ukraine, Washington has begun deploying 600 US troops to boost NATO’s defences in nearby eastern European states.

France said it was also sending four fighter jets to NATO air patrols over the Baltics.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday accused the United States and the European Union of trying to stage “an operation to unconstitutionally change the regime”.

“They are trying to use Ukraine as a pawn in a geopolitical game,” he said.

The Ukrainian government announced its renewed offensive against the rebels after the body of an abducted local politician who belonged to Turchynov’s party was found weighted down in a river near Slavyansk.

Volodymyr Rybak’s funeral was held Thursday in his hometown of Horlivka. His wife and friends wept before his body, which was covered in flowers, before prayers were said and it was taken for burial.

Ukraine’s acting president said he had been “brutally tortured” and blamed the rebels, while his wife said he had been stabbed multiple times.

The European Union’s top foreign policy official, Catherine Ashton, urged implementation of the Geneva accord, and expressed “grave concern” at the murder of Rybak and other violence.

Russia’s gas supplies to Ukraine — and through it, to Europe — have also become a significant source of tensions.

Putin has warned in a letter to the EU that Moscow could cut gas supplies in a month’s time if Ukraine’s bill —now estimated at some $3.5 billion (2.5 billion euros) — was not paid in full.

The energy concerns sent global oil prices up. The price of North Sea Brent oil rose seven US cents from Wednesday to $109.18 a barrel, and benchmark West Texas WTI oil rose 24 cents to $101.68.

TOKYO — US President Barack Obama assured ally Japan on Thursday that Washington was committed to its defence, including of tiny isles at the heart of a row with China, but denied he had drawn any new “red line” and urged peaceful dialogue over the islands.

His comments drew a swift response from China, which said the disputed islets were Chinese territory.

Obama also urged Japan to take “bold steps” to clinch a two-way trade pact seen as crucial to a broad regional agreement that is a central part of the US leader’s “pivot” of military, diplomatic and economic resources towards Asia and the Pacific.

US and Japanese trade negotiators failed to resolve differences in time for Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to shake hands on a deal at the summit.

The leaders reported progress, but Japan’s economics minister, Akira Amari, said later that remaining sticking points could not be resolved quickly.

Obama, on the start of a four-nation tour, is being treated to a display of pomp and ceremony meant to show that the US-Japan alliance, the main pillar of America’s security strategy in Asia, is solid at a time of rising tensions over growing Chinese assertiveness and North Korean nuclear threats.

“We don’t take a position on final sovereignty determinations with respect to Senkaku, but historically they have been administered by Japan and we do not believe that they should be subject to change unilaterally and what is a consistent part of the alliance is that the treaty covers all territories administered by Japan,” Obama said.

“This is not a new position, this is a consistent one,” he told a joint news conference after his summit with Abe, using the Japanese name for the islands that China, which also claims sovereignty over them, calls the Diaoyu.

“In our discussions, I emphasised with Prime Minister Abe the importance of resolving this issue peacefully,” Obama added.

Whilst his comments amounted to a restatement of long-standing US policy, there was symbolism in the commitment being stated explicitly by a US president in Japan.

Responding to Obama’s remarks, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a daily press briefing in Beijing that the islands belonged to China.

“The so-called US-Japan security treaty is a product of the Cold War era and it cannot be aimed at a third party and ought not to harm China’s territorial sovereignty,” he said.

“No matter what anyone says or does, it cannot change the basic reality that the Diaoyu Islands are China’s inherent territory and cannot shake the resolve and determination of the Chinese government and people to protect [our] sovereignty and maritime rights.”

International rules

Obama also said there were opportunities to work with China —which complains that his real aim is to contain its rise — but called on the Asian power to stick to international rules.

“What we’ve also emphasised, and I will continue to emphasise throughout this trip, is that all of us have responsibilities to help maintain basic rules of the world and international order, so that large countries, small countries, all have to abide by what is considered just and fair,” he said.

Some of China’s neighbours with territorial disputes with Beijing worry that Obama’s apparent inability to rein in Russia, which annexed Crimea last month, could send a message of weakness to China.

Obama told the news conference that additional sanctions were “teed up” against Russia if it does not deliver on promises in an agreement reached in Geneva last week to ease tensions in Ukraine.

Obama and Abe also agreed that their top trade aides, US Trade Representative Michael Froman and Amari, would keep trying to narrow gaps in their trade talks.

“This is not something we can reach a conclusion [on] in a short period of time,” Amari told reporters after meeting Froman again after the leaders’ summit.

Abe has touted the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as key to the “Third Arrow” of his economic programme to reinvigorate the world’s third biggest economy, along with hyper easy monetary policy and fiscal spending.

Both sides have also stressed that the TPP would have strategic implications by creating a framework for business that could entice China to play by global rules.

But the talks have been stymied by Japan’s efforts to protect politically powerful agriculture sectors such as beef, and disputes over both countries’ auto markets.

Pointing to restrictions on access to Japan’s farm and auto sectors, Obama said: “Those are all issues that people are all familiar with and at some point have to be resolved. I believe that point is now.”

Experts had said failure to reach a final deal could cast doubts on Abe’s commitment to economic reform and take the wind out of the sails of a drive for a broader TPP agreement.

“If they don’t show progress ... it will be harder to use TPP as a spur to reforms,” said Robert Feldman, a managing director at Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities in Tokyo. “It gives the anti-reform forces aid and comfort.”

The diplomatic challenge for Obama during his weeklong, four-nation regional tour is to convince Asian partners that Washington is serious about its promised strategic “pivot”, while at the same time not harming US ties with China, the world’s second biggest economy.

Obama will also travel to South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Abe — who repeatedly referred to the US president as “Barack” during their news conference — and Obama were keen to send a message of solidarity after US-Japan ties were strained by Abe’s December visit to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, seen by critics as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism.

Japan lobbied hard to get the White House to agree to an official state visit, the first by a sitting US president since Bill Clinton in 1996.

Abe is trying to soothe US concerns that his conservative push to recast Japan’s war record with a less apologetic tone is overshadowing pragmatic policies on the economy and security.

PERTH/MELBOURNE — Authorities ruled out any link between debris picked up on an Australian beach and a missing Malaysian jetliner on Thursday as a tropical cyclone again threatened to hamper a 26-nation air, surface and underwater search of the Indian Ocean.

The debris, found on Wednesday on a beach at the southern tip of Western Australia state, was seen as the first lead since April 4 when authorities detected what they believed was a signal from the black box of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.

But it took Australian authorities less than a day to analyse detailed photographs of the beached debris, no description of which was given, and dismiss the possibility that it may be linked to the plane.

“We’re not seeing anything in this that would lead us to believe that it is from a Boeing aircraft,” Australian Transport Safety Bureau Commissioner Martin Dolan  of the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

That puts the focus of the search, the most expensive in aviation history, back on US navy undersea drone Bluefin-21, which will soon finish scouring a 10-square-kilometre stretch of seabed where the acoustic pings were located.

Authorities have said if Bluefin-21 fails to find a trace of the plane in its initial target search area, some 2,000km northwest of the Western Australian city of Perth, it will be redeployed to new areas, still to be determined.

On Wednesday, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters that authorities would be “increasing the assets that are available for deep-sea search” and that his government was seeking help from state oil company Petronas which has expertise in deep-sea exploration.

Search authorities would need to “regroup and restrategise” if nothing was found in the current search zone, but the search would “always continue”, Hussein said.

Australian search officials said weather conditions may impact the search effort after the air component was suspended for the previous two days because of heavy rain, strong winds, rough seas related to related to Tropical Cyclone Jack.

Up to 11 military aircraft and 11 ships were expected to help with the day’s search although authorities would monitor the weather before the sorties commenced.

ANSAN, South Korea — Thousands of mourners paid tearful respects Wednesday at a temporary memorial to the hundreds of student victims of South Korea’s ferry disaster, as the grim search for bodies entered a second week.

The confirmed death toll stood at 150, but 152 were still unaccounted for, their bodies believed trapped in the inverted, submerged ship that sank a week ago in circumstances that have yet to be fully explained.

As the relatives of the missing began their daily vigil at the harbour on Jindo island, where bodies recovered from the disaster site are brought, others converged on a temporary memorial to the victims in Ansan, 320 kilometres to the north.

Ansan has become a focal point of national mourning. The city is home to the Danwon High School which had 352 students and a dozen teachers on the Sewol when it capsized.

Nearly 280 students are among the dead and missing.

The memorial, set up in an indoor sports stadium, was opened Wednesday and comprised a giant altar in the form of a terraced bank of flowers — white, yellow and green chrysanthemums — among which rested the framed pictures and names of students whose funerals have already taken place.

Above the floral wall a large banner carried the message: “We pray for the souls of the departed.”

Mourners, clutching single white chrysanthemums handed out by volunteers, wept, bowed and prayed as they stood before the altar before placing their flowers below the students’ pictures.

There was anger as well as grief. One woman railed tearfully against the authorities for not saving more people, while one large floral tribute carried a sash with the simple message: “I hate the Republic of Korea.”

Among the 6,500 mourners who passed through the memorial during the day, were many schoolchildren in uniform, some of whom broke down and had to be helped out of the stadium.

Across the road in Danwon High School, bouquets of flowers had been placed on the desks of empty classrooms, while sad, handwritten messages of loss and remembrance were plastered on walls and windows.

Hong Hyun-ju, a grief counsellor working with the school, said the teaching staff was as traumatised as the student body.

North Korea, which has barely referenced the ferry disaster over the past week, sent its condolences Wednesday via a Red Cross channel used for inter-Korean communications.

The message voiced sorrow that “so many passengers, including young students, died or went missing,” the South’s Unification Ministry said.

In Jindo harbour, the latest bodies recovered from the ferry were taken to a small tented village set up to manage the process of identifying the bodies.

“I’m here to help you recognise the dead,” a forensic official told a group of relatives called to the site because ID documents or distinguishing features indicated their family member might be among those brought ashore.

“We have cleaned the bodies, but did not take their clothes and socks off so that you can recognise them more easily,” the official said, before leading them into a separate, closed-off section.

Each positive identification was marked by a piercing cry of anguished recognition and an outpouring of grief from the family members — most of them middle-aged parents.

The Sewol’s captain, Lee Joon-seok, and six crew members are under arrest with two other crew taken into police custody on Tuesday.

On Wednesday morning prosecutors raided a host of businesses affiliated with the ferry operator, the Chonghaejin Marine Company.

The raid was part of a probe into “overall corruption in management”, Kim Hoe-jong, a prosecutor on the case, told AFP.

More than 70 executives and other people connected with Chonghaejin and its affiliates have been issued 30-day travel bans while they are investigated on possible charges ranging from criminal negligence to embezzlement.

PERTH, Australia — Australia said Wednesday cost was not a concern in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, after the mini-submarine plumbing the depths of the Indian Ocean for wreckage ended its ninth mission empty-handed.

Searchers were also investigating “unidentified material” which washed up on the country’s southwest coast to see if it was linked to the Boeing 777, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people aboard.

But officials cautioned it may be unconnected to the plane.

Australia is leading the multinational search, and bearing many of the costs of the mission expected to be the most expensive in aviation history.

“There will be some issues of costs into the future but this is not about costs,” Defence Minister David Johnston told reporters in Canberra.

“We want to find this aircraft. We want to say to our friends in Malaysia and China this is not about cost, we are concerned to be seen to be helping them in a most tragic circumstance.”

China, whose citizens made up two-thirds of the passengers, and Malaysia are among eight countries including Australia which have committed planes or ships to the Indian Ocean search.

The plane was mysteriously diverted during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

With no confirmed sightings of debris on the surface so far, the search moved underwater nearly two weeks ago but has yet to find any sign of the aircraft.

Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), which is organising the search, said the Australian Transport Safety Bureau was examining photographs of the material which washed ashore for any link to the missing jet.

“It’s sufficiently interesting for us to take a look at the photographs,” safety bureau Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan told broadcaster CNN, describing the object as appearing to be sheet metal with rivets.

But he added a note of caution. “The more we look at it, the less excited we get.”

Speaking to reporters in Canberra, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said searchers still believed the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean.

“Our expert advice is that the aircraft went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean where they have identified a probable impact zone which is about 700 kilometres long, about 80 kilometres wide,” he said.

Abbott said based on the detections from what Australia still believed was the plane’s black box flight recorder, an underwater search area of just under 400 square kilometres was being scoured.

“We haven’t finished the search, we haven’t found anything yet in the area that we’re searching, but the point I make is that Australia will not rest until we have done everything we humanly can to get to the bottom of this mystery,” he said.

The JACC said the unmanned mini-submarine looking for the plane on the seabed had scanned more than 80 per cent of its target zone using sonar and was now on its 10th dive.

“No contacts of interest have been found to date,” it said.

The torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle called Bluefin-21 is searching an area at least 4,500 metres deep defined by a 10-kilometre radius around a detection of a signal believed to be from the black box and heard on April 8.

‘Reasonable hope’ 

A surface search involving up to 10 military aircraft and 12 ships was also scheduled for Wednesday.

JACC later suspended the air search due to bad weather, but said the ships would continue their work.

The visual hunt covers an area totalling about 37,948 square kilometres some 855 kilometres northwest of Perth.

Johnston said that if the Bluefin-21 failed to spot wreckage the search would move into a new phase, but Canberra was committed to the task.

“We move to the next phase which is a more intensive single sideband sonar-type programme, I suspect, but let’s take advice of the experts as to where we go forward,” he said.

Abbott said Australia would not abandon the search and let down the families of the six Australians and 233 other people on board “by likely surrendering while there is reasonable hope of finding something”.

“At the moment we are conducting an underwater search with the best equipment that is currently available,” he said.

“If at the end of that period, we find nothing, we are not going to abandon the search. We may well re-think the search, but we will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery.”

SLAVYANSK, Ukraine  — Russia issued a sharp warning on Wednesday that it will strike back if its “legitimate interests” in Ukraine are attacked, raising the stakes in the Cold War-like duel with the United States over the former Soviet republic’s future.

“If we are attacked, we would certainly respond,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told state-controlled RT television.

“If our interests, our legitimate interests, the interests of Russians have been attacked directly, like they were in South Ossetia for example, I do not see any other way but to respond in accordance with international law,” he said, referring to Russia’s armoured invasion of Georgia in 2008.

Moscow also insisted that Kiev withdraw the forces it has sent into eastern Ukraine to dislodge pro-Russian rebels who have seized control of government buildings in several towns.

Both Kiev and Washington believe the current crisis is being deliberately fuelled by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a bid to restore former Soviet glory.

The Kremlin has an estimated 40,000 Russian troops poised on Ukraine’s eastern border, prompting Washington on Wednesday to start deploying 600 US troops to boost NATO’s defences in eastern European states neighbouring Ukraine.

The first unit of 150 US soldiers arrived in Poland on Wednesday, with the remainder arriving in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia in the coming days.

 Journalists held 

Reports of two journalists — an American and a Ukrainian — being held in the flashpoint rebel-held town of Slavyansk have done nothing to ease the mounting tensions.

The US State Department said it was “deeply concerned about the reports of a kidnapping of a US citizen journalist in Slavyansk, Ukraine, reportedly at the hands of pro-Russian separatists”.

The town was also the source of gunfire that damaged a Ukrainian military reconnaissance plane on Tuesday, and the site of a crime scene for two bodies that Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said had been “brutally tortured”.

One of the two victims was believed to be a local politician and member of Turchynov’s party, which the president used as justification to relaunch “anti-terrorist” operations against the insurgents on Tuesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Yarema said security forces had been activated “to liquidate all the groups currently operating in Kramatorsk, Slavyansk and the other towns in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions”, according to the Interfax Ukraine news agency.

The spiralling violence — coupled with America and Russia both accusing each other of inflaming the situation through the use of proxies in Ukraine — has scuppered a Geneva accord agreed last week between Ukraine, Russia and the West which was meant to move Ukraine away from the brink of civil war.

Trading blame 

Russia said it wants Kiev to pull back its army units and start a “genuine internal Ukrainian dialogue involving all of the country’s regions”.

Lavrov accused the US of orchestrating the new offensive, noting that it was announced immediately after a two-day visit from US Vice President Joe Biden to Kiev.

“The Americans are running the show,” he told RT.

There were no immediate reports of any confrontation between the Ukrainian military and the pro-Moscow fighters.

In Slavyansk on Wednesday, the streets were calm, with locals walking about as usual.

A handful of rebels wearing camouflage gear and ski masks but with no apparent weapons stood outside the barricaded town hall they are occupying.

In front of the building were three photos of militants killed in a weekend attack on a nearby roadblock that the separatists have blamed on pro-Kiev ultra-nationalists.

The local rebel leader, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, who styles himself as Slavyansk’s “mayor” told a news conference that the two journalists being held were unharmed.

The American journalist is Simon Ostrovsky of Vice News, who used to be employed by AFP in Azerbaijan. The Ukrainian is Irma Krat, who appears to work for her own pro-Kiev outlet.

Ponomaryov asserted that Ostrovsky “is not being detained, was not abducted, has not been arrested” and claimed he was “working” in one of the rebel-occupied buildings.

However, the Twitter feed of the normally prolific journalist has been inactive for over a day.

Vice News said in an online statement that it was “aware of the situation, and is in contact with the US State Department and other appropriate government authorities to secure the safety and security of our friend and colleague, Simon Ostrovsky”.

The State Department’s spokeswoman Jen Psaki condemned the abductions and said in a statement: “We call on Russia to use its influence with these groups to secure the immediate and safe release of all hostages in eastern Ukraine.”

Washington has also underlined its worry about “the lack of positive Russian steps to de-escalate” the crisis.

Sanctions, on top of those already imposed on President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, will follow if no progress is made soon, it warned.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has acknowledged his nation’s economy was facing an “unprecedented challenge” with recession looming, but Russia has nonetheless dismissed the threat of sanctions and insists it has the right to protect the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine.