World

JINDO, South Korea — The confirmed death toll from South Korea’s ferry disaster rose sharply to more than 120 Tuesday as divers speeded up the grim task of recovering bodies from the submerged ship and police took two more of its crew into custody.

Better weather and calm seas spurred their efforts but underwater visibility was still very poor, forcing divers to grope their way blindly though the corridors and cabins of the ferry that capsized and sank last Wednesday.

Nearly one week into one of South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters, close to 200 of the 476 people who were aboard the 6,825-tonne Sewol — most of them schoolchildren — are still unaccounted for.

The official toll stood at 121, with 181 still missing.

Distraught families of victims gathered in the morning at the harbour on Jindo Island — not far from the disaster site — awaiting the increasingly frequent arrival of boats with bodies.

In the initial days after the Sewol went down, their anger was focused on the pace of the rescue effort.

With all hope of finding any survivors essentially gone, this has turned to growing impatience with the effort to locate and retrieve the bodies of those trapped.

‘I just want my son back’ 

“I just want my son back,” said the father of one missing student. “I need to be able to hold him and say goodbye. I can’t bear the idea of him in that cold, dark place.”

The disaster has profoundly shocked South Korea, a proudly modernised nation that thought it had left behind large-scale accidents of this type.

The sense of national grief is accompanied by an equally deep but largely unfocused anger that has been vented towards pretty much anyone in authority.

Coastguard officials have been slapped and punched, senior politicians — including the prime — pushed and heckled, and rescue teams criticised for their slow response.

If there is a chief hate figure, it is the ferry’s captain Lee Joon-seok, who was arrested at the weekend and charged with criminal negligence and abandoning his passengers.

Six members of his crew are also under arrest and prosecutors said two more were taken into police custody on Tuesday.

President Park Geun-hye, who faced a hostile crowd when she met relatives on Jindo last week, has described the actions of Lee and his crew as being “tantamount to murder”.

Four of the detained crew were paraded — heads bowed and faces hidden — before TV cameras on Tuesday, and asked why only one of the Sewol’s 46 life rafts had been deployed.

“We tried to gain access to the rafts but the whole ship was already tilted too much,” one of them responded.

The Sewol capsized after making a sharp right turn — leading experts to suggest its cargo manifest might have shifted, causing it to list beyond a critical point of return.

The large death toll has partly been attributed to the captain’s instruction for passengers to stay where they were for around 40 minutes after the ferry ran into trouble.

By the time the evacuation order came, the ship was listing so badly that escape was almost impossible.

A transcript released Sunday of the crew’s final communications with marine transport control illustrated the sense of panic and confusion on the bridge before the ferry sank.

Captain Lee has insisted he acted in the passengers’ best interest, delaying the order to abandon ship because he feared people would be swept away and drowned.

Tough task for divers 

Nearly 750 divers, mostly coastguard and military, are now involved in the operation.

“The weather is better, but it’s still very difficult for the divers who are essentially fumbling for bodies in the silted water,” a coastguard official told reporters.

A priority for Tuesday was to access the ferry’s main dining hall.

“We believe there are many bodies there as the accident took place in the morning when students must have been eating breakfast,” the official said.

Of the 476 people on board the Sewol, 352 were students from the Danwon High School in Ansan city just south of Seoul, who were on an organised trip to the holiday island of Jeju.

Among the bodies recovered so far were those of three foreign nationals — believed to be a Russian and two Chinese.

Giant floating cranes have been at the disaster site off the southern coast for days, but many relatives remain opposed to raising the ferry before all the bodies have been removed.

PERTH, Australia — A US submarine drone will keep scouring the Indian Ocean floor for traces of a missing Malaysian jetliner after it finishes its current targeted search, Australian authorities told Reuters as a tropical cyclone suspended the air search.

Authorities are under growing pressure to decide their next course of action as the Bluefin-21 drone nears the end of its first sweep of remote seabed which authorities believe is the most likely resting place of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board.

The Bluefin-21 is expected to finish its targeted search of a 10-square-kilometre stretch of ocean floor, where a signal suspected to be from the plane’s black box was detected, come Wednesday. No wreckage has yet been found.

“Bluefin-21 has now completed more than 80 per cent of the focused underwater search area and further missions are planned,” the Perth based Joint Agency Coordination Centre told Reuters in an e-mail.

“The search will continue. We are currently consulting very closely with our international partners on the best way to effect this for the future.”

As the Bluefin embarked on its 10th trip to depths of more than 4.5 km, some 2,000 km northwest of the Australian city of Perth, a tropical cyclone heading south over the Indian Ocean suspended the air search.

“It has been determined that the current weather conditions are resulting in heavy seas and poor visibility, and would make any air search activities ineffective and potentially hazardous,” the JACC said.

The ships involved in the day’s search about 1,600km northwest of the Australian city of Perth would continue with their planned activities, the centre added.

The search coordinator, retired Australian Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said on April 14 that the air and surface component of the operation would end about a week ago.

But daily sorties have continued unabated in what is shaping to be the most expensive search in aviation history, involving some two dozen nations.

“There will be no change to our mission of one nine-hour flight per day,” US 7th Fleet public affairs officer, Commander William J. Marks, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a statement attributed to the families of passengers on board the missing flight accused the Malaysian government of giving information about the investigation to the media before them and demanded “regular pre-payments” of compensation before the investigation was complete.

Many family members have been critical of the Malaysian government’s handling of the so far fruitless search.

“We don’t expect that they find all of the plane, or all of the bodies, or even that they know everything about how this surreal situation happened, but we do expect at least a tiny bit of concrete evidence,” said the statement, published on the families’ Facebook page on Tuesday.

Until conclusive proof confirms the plane’s fate, the Malaysian government has “an obligation to make regular pre-payments to the families in need and they have an obligation to exert themselves beyond repeated attempts to force a closure of the issue”.

JINDO, South Korea — The captain and crew of a South Korean ferry that capsized with hundreds of children on board acted in a way “tantamount to murder”, President Park Geun-Hye said Monday, as four more crew members were arrested and the death toll rose to 80.

Park’s denunciation, in which she vowed to hold all those responsible for the disaster “criminally accountable”, followed the release of a transcript showing the panic and indecision that paralysed decision making on the bridge as the ship listed and sank Wednesday morning.

The confirmed death toll jumped to 80 as divers stepped up the recovery of bodies from inside the 6,825-tonne Sewol, but 222 people remained unaccounted for.

“The actions of the captain and some crew members were utterly incomprehensible, unacceptable and tantamount to murder,” Park said in a meeting with senior aides.

“Not only my heart, but the hearts of all South Koreans have been broken and filled with shock and anger,” said Park, who was heckled Thursday when she met relatives of the hundreds of passengers still missing — most of them schoolchildren.

The families have criticised the official response to the disaster, saying the initial rescue effort was inadequate and mismanaged.

The president said it was increasingly clear that Captain Lee Joon-seok had unnecessarily delayed the evacuation of passengers as the ferry started sinking, and then “deserted them” by escaping with most of his crew members.

Ethically ‘unimaginable’ 

“This is utterly unimaginable, legally and ethically,” she said.

Lee was arrested on Saturday along with a helmsman and the ship’s relatively inexperienced third officer, who was in charge of the bridge when the ship first ran into trouble.

Three more officers and an engineer were detained by police on Monday and prosecutors said they could face similar charges of criminal negligence and deserting passengers.

A transcript of the final radio communications between the Sewol and marine traffic control suggested a scene of total confusion as the vessel listed sharply to one side.

In the end, the evacuation order was only given around 40 minutes after the ship ran into trouble, by which time it was listing so heavily that escape was almost impossible.

“Precious minutes just wasted” was the front-page verdict of the Dong-A Ilbo daily on Monday.

Lee has insisted he had acted in the passengers’ best interest, delaying the order to abandon ship because he feared people would be swept away and drowned.

Meanwhile, local TV stations aired excerpts Monday of a 2010 promotional video in which Lee said ferries offered the safest public transport “as long as you follow the instruction of our crew”.

Realistic hopes of finding survivors have disappeared, but families of the missing still oppose the use of heavy cranes to lift the ship before divers have searched every section.

It took divers more than two days to access the submerged ferry and the first bodies from inside the vessel were only recovered on Sunday.

Officials said divers had rigged up multiple guide lines Monday into a dining hall as well as cabins on the third and fourth levels where many bodies were believed to be trapped.

“This allows multiple rescue workers to enter the ship at the same time to speed up operations,” said Ko Myeong-seok, a spokesman for the government task force handling the disaster.

Survivor trauma

Of the 476 people on board the Sewol, 352 were students from the Danwon High School in Ansan city just south of Seoul, who were on an organised trip to the holiday island of Jeju.

Cha Sang-hoon, the head of the hospital in Ansan where 74 student survivors are being treated, said 20 per cent of them were suffering from serious mental stress and depression.

South Koreans have been stunned by the tragedy, which looks set to become one of the country’s worst peacetime disasters and has unleashed profound national grief.

The families have bitterly criticised the official response to the disaster, saying delays in accessing the submerged ship may have robbed any survivors of their last chance to make it out alive.

In her comments Monday, Park said the government should review its crisis response system.

KUALA LUMPUR — A Malaysia Airlines plane with 166 people aboard made an emergency landing in Kuala Lumpur on Monday in another blow to the flag-carrier’s safety image after the loss of flight MH370.

Flight MH192, bound for the southern Indian city of Bangalore, turned back to Kuala Lumpur shortly after it was discovered that a tyre had burst on take-off, the airline said.

“As safety is of utmost priority to Malaysia Airlines, the aircraft was required to turn back to KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport),” the airline said in a statement.

The plane carrying 159 passengers and seven crew members circled for hours to burn up fuel and minimise risk of fire when landing.

Some passengers cried while others prayed as the plane circled off the Malaysian coast.

The plane landed safely early Monday morning and took off again more than 12 hours later.

Relieved passengers hugged their relatives when they arrived late Monday at the Bangalore airport.

“I just want to forget what happened. Now that we’ve landed safely, I don’t want to think back,” said Tejaswi, a housewife who uses just one name.

Usha Devi, a 75-year-old woman wearing a green saree, broke down in tears as she spoke to reporters at the airport.

“I am really thankful to the almighty that he saved our lives,” Devi said.

A teenager who gave his name as Tambe said it had been tense time aboard the aircraft.

“The crew and the pilot really held their nerve. We were all pretty scared but the pilot assured us that everything would be alright,” he said.

Malaysia Airlines is still reeling from the loss and presumed crash of MH370, which disappeared on March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The plane is now believed to have crashed into the remote Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard after inexplicably diverting from its route.

Landed safely 

In the latest event, the plane landed without incident at Kuala Lumpur at 1:56 am (1756 GMT), nearly four hours after take-off.

Malaysia Airlines said tyre debris discovered on the runway prompted the decision to bring the Boeing 737-800 aircraft back to Kuala Lumpur.

“They have landed safely — thank God,” tweeted Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein after the plane landed in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said police would probe the incident.

He said the inquiry would include the possibility of sabotage, though he gave no indication that sabotage was suspected.

“We will take the necessary steps to investigate from all angles,” he told Malaysian media.

Until the disappearance of MH370, Malaysia Airlines had enjoyed a good safety record, as did the Boeing 777 aircraft used for MH370.

An Australian-led multination search effort is now scouring a remote area of the Indian Ocean in a bid to find the jet’s wreckage and recover its flight data recorders to determine what happened.

Malaysia’s government and the airline have come under harsh criticism from Chinese relatives of MH370 passengers — two thirds of its 227 passengers were from China — who have alleged a bungling response and a cover-up.

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday he had signed a decree rehabilitating Crimea’s Tatars, native inhabitants of the peninsula who were deported under Stalin over accusations of Nazi collaboration and who fiercely oppose the region’s new Moscow-backed authorities.

“I have signed a decree to rehabilitate the Crimean Tatar population of Crimea, the Armenian population, Germans, Greeks, all those who suffered during Stalin’s purges,” Putin told a government meeting.

Crimea’s 300,000 Tatars, who make up around 12 per cent of the peninsula’s population, largely boycotted a disputed referendum last month in which nearly 97 per cent of voters chose to split from Ukraine and join Russia.

The decree calls for “historical justice [and] a political, social and spiritual revival” for the Crimean Tatars and other groups deported under Stalin.

It is seen as an overture but will likely fail to satisfy Tatars, who eye the Kremlin with distrust and have recently said they will consider holding a plebescite on broader autonomy.

The chairman of the Tatars’ assembly, the Mejlis, declined immediate comment but one of his deputies expressed scepticism that the decree would lead to any real changes for the long-suffering people.

“We’ve been waiting for this decree,” Nariman Jelial told AFP. “But it would be a fantasy to say that the Mejlis and the Crimean Tatars as a whole have welcomed it with joy and enthusiasm.”

He dismissed the decree as a “standard set of wishes and directives which were repeatedly voiced by the Ukrainian authorities” who ruled the peninsula before Russia annexed it.

“There is another problem,” he added. “The people who have stood in the way of all the good Ukrainian initiatives towards the Crimean Tatars remain in power in Crimea.”

Ukrainian flag taken down 

In a sign of the continuing tensions in Crimea, a group of 30 men in fatigues took down a Ukrainian flag from the Mejlis building in Simferopol, the peninsula’s main city, on Monday.

The men, believed to be members of the peninsula’s self-defence units, replaced it with Crimea’s regional flag despite the protests of three women in the building at the time.

Mejlis spokeswoman Lilia Muslimova, who was at the building, said the men insulted them and threatened them with arrest.

Following the March 16 secession referendum, the Mejlis had taken down the Ukrainian flag so as not to provoke confrontation with the new local authorities.

But it had recently re-hoisted the flag at the request of the spiritual leader of the Crimean Tatars, Mustafa Dzhemilev, who is also a Ukrainian lawmaker and is currently in Simferopol.

After the men in camouflage left, one of the women replaced the Crimean flag with the national banner of the Crimean Tatars.

Under Stalin, the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group, were accused of collaborating with Nazi Germany and deported to Central Asia in 1944.

Nearly half of them died of starvation and disease.

They began returning to Crimea under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and were granted Ukrainian citizenship after Kiev won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

At a closed-door session of the UN Security Council last month, Dzhemilev said his people were extremely worried for the future and that some 5,000 Tatars had already fled the peninsula.

Many Tatars have said the sight of armed Russian soldiers and armoured personnel carriers stirred painful memories among the older generation and some expressed fears they could again be deported.

DONETSK, Ukraine — Russia was under US pressure Saturday to convince pro-Moscow rebels in Ukraine to cease occupying eastern towns, after Washington warned the situation in the former Soviet republic was in a “pivotal period”.

But with the separatists’ refusal to budge throwing a deal to defuse the crisis into doubt, and US sanctions looming large, Russia warned that its military was massed on Ukraine’s border, ready to act.

In the nearly dozen Ukrainian towns the pro-Kremlin rebels were holding, the stalemate dragged on Saturday.

In the major eastern city of Donetsk, gunmen remained barricaded inside the regional government building.

“We are going on as usual,” one of the rebels told AFP. “An Orthodox priest is inside with us and we are going to celebrate Easter tonight.”

The failure to implement the agreement hammered out in Geneva on Thursday by the US, Russia, Ukraine and the EU threatened to deepen the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War.

US Secretary of State John Kerry told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov overnight that “full and immediate compliance” was needed of the pact, which calls for the disarmament of “illegal armed groups” and the end to the occupation of seized buildings.

Kerry “made clear that the next few days would be a pivotal period for all sides to implement the statement’s provisions”, a senior State Department official said.

US looking to Russia
for progress 

US President Barack Obama has said he wants to see progress within days, otherwise more sanctions would be imposed, on top of those already targeting the inner circle of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The United States, NATO and many EU countries see Putin as the puppet master behind the Ukraine insurgency. They accuse him of sending in elite Russian soldiers to stir unrest and ensure the country — parts of which are historically and linguistically tied to Russia — stays in Moscow’s orbit.

US National Security Adviser Susan Rice said on Friday that the White House was watching to see whether Russia uses “its very considerable influence to restrain and withdraw those irregular militia from the buildings and spaces that they’ve occupied”.

Putin denies his forces have any role in east Ukraine. On Thursday, however, he dropped an identical denial over Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine last month, to finally admit the Russian army had in fact been deployed there.

The Russian leader said in a television interview to be broadcast later Saturday that the soldiers sent to Crimea would soon receive medals.

He also said he believed relations with the West could be normalised — but that “does not only depend on us. It depends on our partners”.

In a sign of the current prickly relationship with the West, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday the US threats of more sanctions on Moscow were “absolutely unacceptable”.

“One cannot treat Russia like it is a shameful student,” he said.

The West and Ukraine also had responsibility to make sure the Geneva deal worked, he said.

He also stressed that Russian troops were deployed “close to the Ukrainian border” — many of them sent there “due to the situation in Ukraine”.

NATO believes Russia has around 40,000 troops positioned on its border with Ukraine, in a state of readiness for an invasion.

Putin has said that he retained the right to send his army into Ukraine in order to protect Russian speakers there. On Friday, he repeated the assertion, though he said that he “very much hoped” he would not have to do so.

US vice president to visit 

Although the United States has not given a deadline for compliance with the Geneva deal, US Vice President Joe Biden is due to visit Kiev on Tuesday.

He will be meeting leaders who have taken charge since the February ouster of pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych, after months of street protests that turned increasingly deadly.

Russia refuses to see the new Kiev government as legitimate, and the turmoil in Ukraine’s southeast could prove an obstacle to a planned May 25 presidential election.

The separatist leaders in the self-declared Donetsk Republic say they will not vacate public sites until the “illegal” government exits state buildings in Kiev.

But Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister who is a leading candidate for next month’s presidential election, said she held talks with the Donetsk separatists on Friday that left her convinced that “compromise is possible”.

In concessions to the Russian-speaking militants, Ukraine’s interim president and prime minister have vowed to protect the Russian language, decentralise power and hold off further military action against the separatists until at least Tuesday.

Ukraine’s military has so far proven woefully inept in its efforts to dislodge the separatists. On Friday, in a rare success, the army said it had recovered two of six armoured vehicles captured by rebels during a disastrous military operation earlier in the week.

Yet a poll published Saturday suggested the majority of inhabitants in Ukraine’s restive east, while suspicious of Kiev’s authorities, had no desire to be subsumed into the Russian Federation.

The Russian-language Weekly Mirror newspaper said 52.2 per cent of the 3,200 respondants to the survey by Kiev’s Institute for International Sociology were against coming under Russian rule while 27.5 per cent were in favour.

In a gesture of national unity, despite the political differences, around 50 Kiev residents on Saturday sent Easter cakes to people in Ukraine’s east along with greeting cards.

“I wrote that we Ukrainians are a united people, we should live in a united country, we should not be divided,” one of them, 12-year-old Maxym, told AFP.

JINDO/MOKPO, South Korea — Some relatives of the more than 200 children missing in a sunken South Korean ferry offered DNA swabs on Saturday to help identify the dead as the rescue turned into a mission to recover the vessel and the bodies of those on board.

The Sewol, carrying 476 passengers and crew, capsized on Wednesday on a journey from the port of Incheon to the southern holiday island of Jeju. Thirty-two people are known to have died.

The 69-year-old captain, Lee Joon-seok, was arrested in the early hours of Saturday on charges of negligence along with two other crew members, including the third mate who was steering at the time of the capsize.

Prosecutors later said the mate was steering the Sewol through the waters where it listed and capsized — for the first time in her career.

Asked why the children had been ordered to stay put in their cabins instead of abandoning ship, Lee, apparently overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, told reporters he feared they would have been swept out to sea in the strong, cold current.

Early reports said that the ferry turned sharply and listed, perhaps due to a shift in the cargo it was carrying and crew members said the captain, who was not initially on the bridge, had tried to right the ship but failed.

Some 500 relatives of the 270 people listed as missing watched a murky underwater video shot after divers reported they had seen three bodies through the windows.

The official number of those missing was revised up from an earlier estimate of 269.

Packed in a gymnasium in the port city of Jindo day and night since Wednesday, tempers frayed and fist fights broke out after the video was shown. The video, viewed by relatives and journalists, did not appear to show any corpses.

“Please lift the ship, so we can get the bodies out,” a woman who identified herself as the mother of a child called Kang Hyuck said, using a microphone.

Relatives have criticised what they say is the slow response of the government and contradictory information given out by authorities in the early stages of the rescue mission.

Chances of finding survivors ‘almost zero’

President Park Geun-hye was jeered by some when she visited on Thursday. “Park Geun-hye should come here again,” Kang Hyuck’s mother said.

Three cranes were moved close to the sunken ship on Saturday but were not deployed. Strong tides and rough weather again impeded efforts to get inside.

Coastguard spokesman Kim Jae-in said the cranes would be deployed when the divers say it is safe.

“Lifting the ship does not mean they will remove it completely from the sea. They can lift it two to three metres off the seabed,” he said.

Coastguard officials said that divers would make another attempt to enter the ship in the evening.

“The chances of finding anyone alive now are almost zero,” said Bruce Reid, chief executive officer of the International Maritime Rescue Foundation.

“There will still be a search operation on the water, a surface search, but it would be more of a recovery exercise now. They’ll be looking for bodies.”

The capsize occurred in calm weather on a well-travelled 400km sea route from Incheon to Jeju some 25km from land.

Lee, the ship’s captain, was described by officials from Chonghaejin Marine Co. Ltd., the owner of the vessel, as a “veteran”.

“I had ordered [passengers] to leave the ferry, but [later] I said to them to stay because there was no rescue ship,” he told South Korean television as he was led away by police.

Police also raided Chonghaejin offices in Incheon and Yang Joong-jin, a prosecutor in the city of Mokpo, said ten people were being questioned over the loading and stowing of the Sewol’s cargo.

Yonhap news agency said 180 vehicles were onboard the ferry along with 1,157 tonnes of freight. At least some of the freight was in containers stacked on the foredeck.

Relatives and friends of the schoolchildren have also gathered at the Danwon High School in the commuter town of Ansan.

The vice-principal of the school, Kang Min-gyu, 52, was one of those rescued as the children followed orders and stayed aboard. He hanged himself outside the gym in Jindo, police said.

His body was discovered on Friday and police released part of a two-page suicide note.

“Burn my body and scatter my ashes at the site of the sunken ferry,” he wrote. “Perhaps I can become a teacher for the missing students in my next life.”

SYDNEY/PERTH, Australia — The current underwater search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, focused on a tight 10km circle of the sea floor, could be completed within a week, Australian search officials said on Saturday.

Malaysia said the search was at a “very critical juncture” and asked for prayers for its success.

A US Navy deep-sea autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is scouring a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean floor for signs of the plane, which disappeared from radars on March 8 with 239 people on board.

After almost two months without a sign of wreckage, the current underwater search has been narrowed to a small area around the location in which one of four acoustic signals believed to be from the plane’s black box recorders was detected on April 8, officials said.

“Provided the weather is favourable for launch and recovery of the AUV and we have a good run with the serviceability of the AUV, we should complete the search of the focused underwater area in five to seven days,” the Joint Agency Coordination Centre told Reuters in an e-mail.

Officials did not indicate whether they were confident that this search area would yield any new information about the flight, nor did they state what steps they would take in the event that the underwater search were to prove fruitless.

More than two dozen countries have been involved in the hunt for the Boeing 777 disappeared from radar shortly into a Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight in what officials believe was a deliberate act.

Weeks of daily sorties have failed to turn up any trace of the plane, even after narrowing the search to an arc in the southern Indian Ocean, making this the most expensive such operation in aviation history.

“It is important to focus on today and tomorrow. Narrowing of the search area today and tomorrow is at a very critical juncture,” Malaysian acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a media conference in Kuala Lumpur, asking for people to pray for success.

Malaysia was asking oil companies and others in the commercial sector to provide assets that might help in the search, Hishammuddin added, after earlier saying more AUVs might be used.

Drone goes deeper than ever before

After almost two weeks without picking up any acoustic signals, and long past the black box battery’s 30-day life expectancy, authorities are increasingly reliant on the $4 million US Bluefin-21 drone, which on Saturday was expected to have dived to unprecedented depths.

Because visual searches of the ocean surface have yielded no concrete evidence, the drone, with its ability to search deep beneath the ocean surface with “side scan” sonar, has become the focal point of the search 2,000km northwest of the Australian city of Perth.

The search has thus far centred on a city-sized area where a series of “pings” led authorities to believe the plane’s black box may be located. The current refined search area is based on one such transmission.

After the drone’s searches were frustrated by an automatic safety mechanism which returns it to the surface when it exceeds a depth of 4.5km, authorities have adjusted the mechanism and have sent it as deep as 4,695 metres, a record for the machine.

But hopes that it might soon guide searchers to wreckage are dwindling with no sign of the plane after six deployments spanning 133 square kilometres. Footage from the drone’s sixth mission was still being analysed, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said on Saturday.

On Monday, the search coordinator, retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said the air and surface search for debris would likely end by midweek as the operation shifted its focus to the ocean floor.

But the air and surface searches have continued daily, and on Saturday the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said up to 11 military aircraft and 12 ships would help with the Saturday’s search covering about 50,200 square kilometres across three areas.

“The search will always continue,” Hishammuddin said. “It’s just a matter of approach.”

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) –– The career-focused social network LinkedIn announced Friday it has 300 million members, with more than half the total outside the US.

"While this is an exciting moment, we still have a long way to go to realise our vision of creating economic opportunity for every one of the 3.3 billion people in the global workforce," said LinkedIn vice president Deep Nishar in a blog posting.

Nishar said that for future growth, the company believes it will be more important to get people using the network on mobile devices.

"We know mobile is critical," he said.

"Later this year, we are going to hit our mobile moment, where mobile accounts for more than 50 per cent of all global traffic. Already, our members in dozens of locations including Costa Rica, Malaysia, Singapore, Sweden, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, use LinkedIn more on their mobile devices than on their desktop computers."

LinkedIn has its headquarters in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, California, and is available in more than 200 countries.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn launched a Chinese language version, attempting to tap the huge market while navigating a strict censorship regime that has seen other foreign social media giants banned.

"Our goal is to connect the more than 140 million Chinese professionals with each other and the global workforce," Nishar said.

In China, LinkedIn allows users to post public comments, but unlike its English-language counterpart it does not currently allow group discussions.

The social network launched in 2003 allows members to create professional circles that help their career path, and allows employers and recruiters to locate people with needed skills.

The company went public in 2011 with one of the hottest public offerings in the sector at the time. Its share price has jumped to $175.42 from the IPO price of $45.

GENEVA — Russia and Ukraine sat down Thursday for Western-backed talks on the escalating crisis in the former Soviet republic as Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the authorities in Kiev of dragging the country towards the abyss.

In a dramatic worsening of tensions in the restive east, three pro-Moscow separatists were killed in an overnight gunbattle with Ukrainian troops in the southeastern port city of Mariupol.

The violence highlighted the urgency of the talks, which bring together the foreign ministers of Russia, the United States, the European Union and Ukraine, as scores of pro-Kremlin separatists Kiev says are backed by Moscow have taken over parts of the former Soviet republic’s southeast.

Russia, which has tens of thousands of troops stationed on its border with Ukraine, denies backing the militants and has warned Kiev not to use force against them, saying it reserves the right to protect the many Russian speakers in the country.

“Only through dialogue, through democratic procedures and not with the use of armed forces, tanks and planes can order be imposed in the country,” Putin said from Russia in televised comments timed to coincide with the start of talks.

“I hope that they [participants in talks] manage to understand towards what abyss the Kiev authorities are going, dragging with them the whole country.”

Kiev launched a much-hyped military operation against separatists earlier this week, but it ended in failure when the insurgents humiliated Ukrainian troops by blocking them and seizing six of their armoured vehicles, to the obvious joy of many of the Russian-speaking locals.

NATO promptly announced it was deploying more forces in eastern Europe and urged Russia to stop “destabilising” Ukraine, which has been in turmoil since the ouster of pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych in February and now threatens to split between its EU-leaning west and Russian-speaking east.

Decisive four-way showdown  

The situation in Ukraine has emerged as the biggest East-West crisis since the end of the Cold War.

Each side comes to the talks armed with a very specific set of demands, in what is likely to make negotiations between Russia’s Sergei Lavrov, Ukraine’s Andriy Deshchytsya, US Secretary of State John Kerry and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton very tough.

Washington and Kiev aim to get Moscow to demobilise the militias, and the United States warned Moscow on Wednesday that it risked fresh sanctions unless it made concessions.

But Moscow categorically denies having dispatched elite special forces to Ukraine to stir unrest, despite Kiev intelligence saying the same Russian agents who oversaw the seizure of Crimea last month are now coordinating the unrest in the southeast.

Instead, Russia blames Kiev’s interim leaders for pushing the country dangerously close to a civil war.

Moscow refuses to see Kiev’s government — installed by Ukraine’s parliament in February after the overthrow of Yanukovich following months of protests — as legitimate. 

‘Consequences’ if talks fail  

The United States and European Union have already imposed punitive sanctions on key Russian and Ukrainian political and business officials, including members of Putin’s inner circle.

But if the meeting ends in failure, Western countries are prepared to slap Moscow with tougher, broader economic and financial sanctions meant to hurt its already struggling economy.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that the United States was “actively preparing” new sanctions against Russia, with signs growing that Washington may be ready to target the country’s key mining, energy and financial sectors.

US President Barack Obama specifically accused Moscow of supporting separatist militias.

“Each time Russia takes these kinds of steps that are designed to destabilise Ukraine and violate their sovereignty, there are going to be consequences,” Obama told CBS News.

In the meantime, the situation on the ground in Ukraine continued to deteriorate.

In Mariupol, where the three separatists were killed, a further 63 were detained out of around 300 insurgents who attacked an interior ministry base using guns and petrol bombs.

The army unit that lost six armoured vehicles to militants on Wednesday was formally disbanded as Kiev’s military reeled from its disastrous attempt to oust separatists.

The events in Ukraine’s southeast are disturbingly similar to the situation in the Crimean peninsula before it was annexed by Russia last month.

In a statement on Thursday, Ukraine’s interior minister said Russian cell phones had been seized from some of the people arrested in Mariupol.