World

PERTH, Australia — Thunderstorms and gale-force winds grounded the international air search for wreckage from Flight MH370 on Thursday, frustrating the effort yet again as Thailand reported a satellite sighting of hundreds of floating objects.

The Thai report was the second in two days suggesting a possible debris field in the stormy southern Indian Ocean from the crashed jet.

But an international air and sea search has frustratingly failed so far to secure wreckage confirmed to have come from the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane, which went missing on March 8 with 239 people on board.

Planes and ships have faced fierce winds and sometimes mountainous seas as they hunt for hard evidence that the plane crashed, as Malaysia has concluded.

On Tuesday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) called off both the air and sea search.

The agency on Thursday cancelled the air search because of worsening weather after it had got under way, but said ships would stay and try to continue.

“Bad weather expected for next 24 hours,” it tweeted.

Thailand’s Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency said it had satellite images taken on Monday of 300 objects, ranging from two to 15 metres in size.

It said they were scattered over an area about 2,700 kilometres southwest of Perth, but could not confirm they are plane debris.

The agency said the objects were spotted about 200 kilometres away from an area where French satellite images earlier showed objects.

Malaysia had said late Wednesday that those images taken Sunday showed 122 floating objects.

The Boeing 777 is presumed to have crashed on March 8 in the Indian Ocean after mysteriously diverting from its Kuala Lumpur-Beijing path and apparently flying for hours in the opposite direction.

Malaysia believes the plane was deliberately redirected by someone on board, but nothing else is known.

AMSA had said earlier the French satellite images were in an area authorities have pinpointed as a potential crash zone some 2,500 kilometres southwest of Perth.

Six military planes from Australia, China, Japan and the United States had been set to fly sorties throughout Thursday, along with five civil aircraft, scouring two areas covering a cumulative 78,000 square kilometres.

Five ships from Australia and China also were set to resume searching the zone.

Clock ticks on black box 

The search suspensions caused mounting concern as the clock ticks on the signal emitted by the plane’s “black box” of flight data.

The data is considered vital to unravelling the flight’s mystery but the signal, aimed at guiding searchers to the device on the seabed where it hopefully can be recovered, will expire in under two weeks.

The drama is playing out in a wild expanse of ocean described by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott as “about as close to nowhere as it’s possible to be”.

The French images provided by European aerospace giant Airbus depicted some objects as long as 23 metres, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said.

Seeking closure, anguished families of those aboard are desperately awaiting hard evidence, which the aviation industry hopes can also provide clues to what caused one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.

US law firm Ribbeck Law Chartered International fired the first salvo Wednesday in an expected barrage of lawsuits on behalf of grieving families. The firm is targeting Malaysia Airlines and Boeing.

“We are going to be filing the lawsuits for millions of dollars per each passenger based on prior cases that we have done involving crashes like this one,” the firm’s head of aviation litigation, Monica Kelly, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur.

A separate statement by the firm, which filed an initial court petition in the US state of Illinois on Tuesday, said the two companies “are responsible for the disaster of Flight MH370”.

Malaysia Airlines has declined detailed comment.

Malaysia’s government said this week that satellite data indicated the plane plunged into the sea, possibly after running out of fuel.

‘Appalling’ handling 

MH370 relatives have endured more than a fortnight of agonising uncertainty.

Two-thirds of the passengers were from China, and relatives there have criticised Malaysia in acid terms, accusing the government and airline of a cover-up and botching the response.

The sister of New Zealand victim Paul Weeks lashed out Thursday.

“The whole situation has been handled appallingly, incredibly insensitively,” Sara Weeks told Radio Live in New Zealand.

“The Malaysian government, the airline, it’s just all been incredibly poor.”

Scores of Chinese relatives protested outside Malaysia’s embassy in Beijing on Tuesday, and a day later Premier Li Keqiang urged Malaysia to involve “more Chinese experts” in the investigation.

While Malaysia believes the plane was deliberately diverted, other scenarios include a hijacking, pilot sabotage or a crisis that incapacitated the crew and left the plane to fly on autopilot until it ran out of fuel.

Focus has also been on the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, with the FBI Wednesday saying it was close to completing an analysis of data from a flight simulator taken from his home.

Malaysian authorities had sought FBI help to recover files deleted from the hard drive.

So far, no information implicating the captain or anyone else has emerged.

ISTANBUL — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the leaking on YouTube on Thursday of a recording of top security officials discussing possible military operations in Syria as “villainous” and the government blocked access to the video-sharing site.

The anonymous posting followed similar releases on social media in recent weeks which Erdogan has cast as a plot orchestrated by political enemies to unseat him ahead of March 30 elections. But it took the campaign to a higher level, impinging on the most sensitive areas of national security.

An anonymous YouTube account posted what it presented as a recording of intelligence chief Hakan Fidan discussing possible military operations in Syria with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Deputy Chief of military Staff Yasar Guler and other top officials.

“They even leaked a national security meeting. This is villainous, this is dishonesty...Who are you serving by doing audio surveillance of such an important meeting?” Erdogan declared before supporters at a rally ahead of March 30 local polls that will be a key test of his support amid a corruption scandal.

The foreign ministry described the leak as a “wretched attack” on national security and said those behind it would receive the heaviest punishment. It said some sections of the recording had been manipulated. Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the recordings.

The conversation appears to centre on a possible operation to secure the tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, in an area of northern Syria largely controlled by militant Islamists.

Ankara regards the tomb as sovereign Turkish territory under a treaty signed with France in 1921, when Syria was under French rule. About two dozen Turkish special forces soldiers permanently guard it.

‘National security issue’

Turkey threatened two weeks ago to retaliate for any attack on the tomb following clashes between militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an Al Qaeda breakaway group and rival rebel groups in the area, east of Aleppo near the Turkish border.

“An operation against ISIL has international legitimacy. We will define it as Al Qaeda. There are no issues on the Al Qaeda framework. When it comes to the Suleyman Shah tomb, it’s about the protection of national soil,” a voice presented as that of foreign ministry undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu says.

When the discussion turns to the need to justify such an operation, the voice purportedly of Fidan says: “Justification can be created. The matter is to create the will.”

The Turkish telecoms authority TIB said it had taken an “administrative measure” against YouTube, a week after it blocked access to microblogging site Twitter.

A source in Erdogan’s office said the video sharing service was blocked as a precaution after the voice recordings created a “national security issue” and said it may lift the ban if YouTube agreed to remove the content.

Google said it was looking into reports that some users in Turkey were unable to access its video-sharing site YouTube, saying there was no technical problem on its side.

KIEV — Western nations rushed to help Ukraine on Thursday, with the International Monetary Fund pledging up to $18 billion in loans, the UN condemning the vote that drove Crimea into Russian hands and the US Congress considering even harsher sanctions against Russia.

Yet even with such intensive help to prop up Ukraine’s teetering economy, the prime minister warned that all residents are going to feel pain from the necessary financial reforms ahead — and home energy prices are certain to rise quickly.

And if that wasn’t enough, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko — one of the country’s most polarising figures — said she will run for president in the May 25 vote. The announcement is sure to usher in strong emotions in Ukraine’s turbulent politics.

Russia, for its part, shrugged off the spotlight that was on Ukraine and the torrent of criticism directed at its annexation of Crimea. President Vladimir Putin’s government announced it would set up its own payment system to rival Visa and MasterCard after the two companies pulled their services from some Russian banks in the wake of international sanctions.

Speaking in Rome, President Barack Obama called the swell of support a “concrete signal of how the world is united with Ukraine”.

“The decision to go forward with an IMF programme is going to require a lot of courage,” Obama said. “It will require some tough decisions.”

In a lengthy, passionate address to parliament in Kiev, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk warned that Ukraine was “on the brink of economic and financial bankruptcy” and laid out the fixes needed to put the country back on track.

“The time has come to tell the truth, to do difficult and unpopular things,” Yatsenyuk said, adding that Ukraine was short $25.8 billion — “equivalent to the entire state budget for this year”.

The IMF loan, which is expected to range between $14 billion and $18 billion, hinges on structural reforms that Ukraine has pledged to undertake.

Ukraine’s new government finds itself caught between the demands of international creditors and a restive population that has endured decades of economic stagnation, corruption and mismanagement. The reforms demanded by the IMF — which included raising taxes, freezing the minimum wage and hiking energy prices — will hit households hard and are likely to strain the interim government’s tenuous hold on power.

Ukraine, a nation of 46 million people, is battling to install a semblance of normalcy since President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in February after months of protests ignited by his decision to back away from closer relations with the EU and turn towards Russia. Over the last few weeks, an interim government has formed, Ukraine lost Crimea to Russia and further possible military incursions by Russia are feared.

“This is a kamikaze government that perfectly well understands that there is no other way to stabilise Ukraine,” said Viktor Zamyatin, analyst with the Kiev-based Razumkov Centre think tank. “The catastrophic state of Ukraine’s economy has forced the government’s hand.”

But he said it could pay a steep price.

“It is hard to explain to the voter that the worsening of the economy has happened not because of the revolution, but because of Viktor Yanukovych’s policies,” he said.

The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning the referendum that led to annexation of the Crimean Peninsula as illegal. The vote Thursday was 100 in favor, 11 opposed and 58 abstentions.

Tymoshenko, who was released from jail last month following the overthrow of her fierce rival Yanukovych, is variously admired as an icon of democracy or detested as a self-promoting manipulator with a shady past.

This will be the 53-year-old’s second attempt to win the presidency. She narrowly lost to Yanukovych in 2010 and spent two years in jail on charges that many in the West considered politically tainted.

On Thursday, alluding to her time in jail, she declared she has earned the right to promise that she will combat corruption.

“I will be the candidate of Ukrainian unity,” Tymoshenko said. “The west and centre of Ukraine has always voted for me, but I was born in the east.”

Ukraine is politically divided, with western regions favoring closer ties to Europe and the east looking towards Russia. But the dire state of its economy is an unavoidable issue: Ukraine’s finance ministry has said it needs $35 billion over the next two years to avoid default.

The IMF said recent economic policies have drastically slowed Ukraine’s growth and brought foreign currency reserves to a “critically low level”.

“Ukraine’s macroeconomic imbalances became unsustainable over the past year,” the IMF said.

One immediate reform will be to let gas prices for households float up to become more in line with market prices. Ukraine for years has relied on discounted gas from Russia and then subsidized that further, so that residents are used to extremely low energy prices. Russia has abandoned the discounts and Ukraine’s government cannot afford the extra subsidy anymore.

State energy company Naftogaz announced this week that household gas prices would rise 50 per cent beginning May 1 to make utility costs economically viable for the state by 2018. Yatsenyuk said the number of households getting state energy subsidies would rise from 1.4 million to four million.

He also announced layoffs for 10 per cent of Ukraine’s civil servants, or 24,000 workers.

Other donors, including the European Union and Japan, have already pledged further aid to Ukraine, conditional on the IMF bailout and reform package. The total amount of international assistance will be about $27 billion over the next two years.

Separately, the 28-nation EU has prepared a wider aid package including loans and grants for Ukraine expected to total more than $10 billion over the coming years.

Ukraine has historically had a fraught relationship with the IMF and failed to keep to the terms of earlier bailouts in 2008 and 2010. Such recalcitrance is seen as less probable this time around, although doubts persist.

“Given the volatile political situation, the prospect of a change in president following elections on May 25, and Ukraine’s track record with the IMF, there will still be many doubts about whether politicians will be able or willing to push through more substantial changes,” wrote William Jackson, an analyst at Capital Economics research company.

BRUSSELS/MOSCOW — The United States and the European Union agreed on Wednesday to work together to prepare possible tougher economic sanctions in response to Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine, including on the energy sector, and to make Europe less dependent on Russian gas.

US President Barack Obama said after a summit with top EU officials that Russian President Vladimir Putin had miscalculated if he thought he could divide the West or count on its indifference over his annexation of Crimea.

Leaders of the Group of Seven major industrial powers decided this week to hold off on sanctions targeting Moscow’s economy unless Putin took further action to destabilise Ukraine or other former Soviet republics.

“If Russia continues on its current course, however, the isolation will deepen, sanctions will increase and there will be more consequences for the Russian economy,” Obama told a joint news conference with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

He also said NATO should step up its presence in new east European member states bordering on Russia and Ukraine to provide reassurance that the alliance’s mutual defence guarantee would protect them.

Russian forces in Crimea captured the last Ukrainian navy ship after firing warning shots and stun grenades, completing Moscow’s grip on military installations in the Black Sea peninsula. Kiev has ordered its forces to withdraw.

Western concern has focused on Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s eastern border amid Kremlin allegations of attacks on Russian speakers in that industrial region of the country.

But Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Wednesday it seemed likely that the firm Western response so far would stop Russia undertaking what he called “other acts of aggression and interference on the territory of Ukraine”.

The new Ukrainian authorities announced a radical 50 per cent increase in the price of domestic gas from May 1, meeting an unpopular condition for International Monetary Fund aid which Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych had refused before he was ousted last month.

Kiev is seeking $15-20 billion in IMF assistance to help stabilise its shattered economy. Russia has said it will increase the price it charges Ukraine for gas from April.

Develop your own

In response to EU pleas to expand US gas exports to Europe to reduce reliance on Russian supplies, Obama said a new transatlantic trade deal under negotiation would make it easier to licence such sales.

However, he said Europe should also look to develop its own energy resources — a veiled reference to environmental resistance to shale gas extraction and nuclear power — and not just count on America.

Russia provides around one third of the EU’s oil and gas and some 40 per cent of the gas is exported through Ukraine.

“You cannot just rely on other people’s energy, even if it has some costs, some downside,” the EU ambassador to Washington quoted Obama as telling his EU hosts over a working lunch.

The World Bank warned that the economic impact of annexing Crimea from Ukraine could drive Russia into a sharp recession this year even if the West stops short of trade sanctions.

A World Bank report on the Russian economy, compiled before the most recent evidence of the scale of capital flight, made clear Moscow was already set to pay a significant price in lost growth due to the most serious East-West confrontation since the end of the Cold War.

Gross domestic product could contract by as much as 1.8 per cent in 2014 if the crisis persists, it said. That high-risk forecast assumes that the international community would still refrain from trade sanctions.

“An intensification of political tension could lead to heightened uncertainties around economic sanctions and would further depress confidence and investment activities,” the World Bank said.

“We assume that political risks will be prominent in the short-term.”

Under a low-risk scenario, assuming only a short-lived impact from the crisis, GDP could grow by 1.1 per cent, just half the bank’s 2.2 per cent growth forecast published in December.

Russian stocks rebound

Russia is refusing to recognise the Kiev government chosen by parliament after the overthrow of Yanukovich on February 22 following months of street protests against his refusal to sign a pact on closer ties with the EU.

So far, the United States and the EU have imposed personal sanctions against Russian and Crimean officials involved in the seizure of the peninsula and Washington has slapped visa bans and asset freezes on senior business figures close to Putin.

Neutral Switzerland, one of the world’s major offshore banking centres, said it would take steps to ensure it was not used to circumvent those sanctions.

Russian markets and the rouble have been shaken, resulting in massive capital outflows, now estimated by the economy ministry at up to $70 billion in the first quarter alone compared with $63 billion in the whole of last year.

However, Russian stocks clawed back more ground on Wednesday and the rouble strengthened as a relief rally continued due to signs of an easing of tensions over Crimea. Russian assets have rallied as investors calculate that the annexation will not trigger more serious Western sanctions.

The Ukraine crisis has largely pushed aside strains in the US-EU relationship over last year’s disclosures of large-scale spying by Washington on European allies, which only drew a brief mention at the summit.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has led the charge for the adoption of technologies such as shale gas fracking in response to the Ukraine crisis.

“Some countries are almost 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas, so I think it is something of a wake-up call,” Cameron said on Tuesday.

He pointed to reserves of shale gas in southeastern Europe, Poland and England that could be extracted by the process of pumping liquids at high pressure into underground rock formations known as fracking, widespread in the United States.

Environmentalists say fracking is a threat to the water table and can cause earthquakes and landslides. Countries such as France and Bulgaria have banned it and others such as Britain and Poland have faced anti-fracking protests.

NEW YORK — Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama Bin Laden, was found guilty of terrorism-related charges on Wednesday following a three-week trial that offered unusually vivid details of the former Al Qaeda leader’s actions in the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Abu Ghaith, 48, a Kuwait-born Muslim cleric, faces life in prison after a federal court jury in New York convicted him of conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to provide material support for terrorists, and providing such support.

Jurors took just over one day to reach a verdict in a courtroom that is blocks from the site of the World Trade Centre destroyed in the hijacked plane attacks nearly 13 years ago.

Abu Ghaith’s court appointed lawyer, Stanley Cohen, said there were several issues he would raise on appeal. They include US District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s decision to bar testimony from Pakistan-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man the US government accuses of masterminding the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

“He was stoic, he was at ease,” Cohen said of Abu Ghaith’s reaction to the verdict. “I think he feels that it was impossible under the circumstances to receive a fair trial.”

The judge scheduled September 8 for sentencing.

Prosecutors had accused Abu Ghaith, one of the highest-profile Bin Laden advisers to face trial in a US civilian court, of acting as an Al Qaeda mouthpiece and using videotapes of his inflammatory rhetoric to recruit new fighters.

They also said Abu Ghaith knew in advance of an attempt to detonate a shoe bomb aboard an airplane by Briton Richard Reid in December 2001, citing in part an October 2001 video in which he warned Americans that the “storm of airplanes will not stop”.

Lawyers for Abu Ghaith said the prosecution was based on “ugly words and bad associations”, rather than actual evidence that the defendant knew of or joined plots against Americans.

US Attorney General Eric Holder, in a statement after the verdict, said it bolstered the argument that militants should be tried on terrorism charges in civilian courts, rather than as combatants in military commissions.

That sentiment was echoed by Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham Law School’s Centre on National Security, who attended the trial.

“The federal courts are robust and can handle the numerous challenges that terror trials pose, including witnesses taking the stand and classified material,” she said on Wednesday.

Unexpected testimony

In a surprising move, Abu Ghaith testified in his own defence, denying he helped plot Al Qaeda attacks and claiming he never became a formal member of the group.

He described meeting Bin Laden inside a cave in Afghanistan hours after the September 11 attacks.

“We are the ones who did this,” Bin Laden told Abu Ghaith, according to the defendant’s testimony. Abu Ghaith said he learned of the attacks in news reports.

He said that night, Bin Laden asked him what he believed the United States’ response would be.

Abu Ghaith said he told Bin Laden that the United States would not rest until it had accomplished two goals: killing Bin Laden and overthrowing the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

“You’re being too pessimistic,” Bin Laden replied, according to Abu Ghaith.

The Taliban was in fact soon ousted by the US and its allies and bin Laden, a founder of al Qaeda, was killed by US forces in May 2011 at a hideout in Pakistan.

On the day after seeing Bin Laden and discussing the attacks, Abu Ghaith testified, he joined a meeting that included Al Qaeda’s inner circle: Bin Laden and two of his closest lieutenants, Egyptians Ayman Al Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef.

A few hours later, he recorded the first of several videos at Bin Laden’s request, declaring that the September 11 attacks were a “natural” result of the US policy toward Muslims worldwide.

But he denied that his intention was to speak or recruit for Al Qaeda. Instead, he claimed he was trying to exhort all Muslims to stand up against oppression.

Abu Ghaith married Bin Laden’s daughter Fatima years after the September 11 attacks, a fact that was kept from the jury.

Abu Ghaith’s lawyers repeatedly sought to introduce testimony from accused plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stating that Abu Ghaith had no involvement in al Qaeda’s military planning. The judge rejected those requests, finding that Mohammed, now a prisoner in the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, did not appear to have personal knowledge to back up his claims.

Defence lawyer Cohen also faulted Kaplan for telling the jury on Wednesday morning that he might keep them deliberating past day’s end if they had not reached a verdict by then, calling it “coercive”.

“It sends a message that in the court’s mind this is a no-brainer,” Cohen said.

As in several other terrorism trials held in US civilian courts, the jury remained anonymous.

KUALA LUMPUR — A French satellite scanning the Indian Ocean for remnants of a missing jetliner found a possible plane debris field containing 122 objects, a top Malaysian official said Wednesday, calling it “the most credible lead that we have”.

Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein also expressed exasperation with the anger rising among missing passengers’ relatives in China, who berated Malaysian government and airline officials earlier in the day in Beijing. About two-thirds of the missing are Chinese, but Hishammuddin pointedly said that Chinese families “must also understand that we in Malaysia also lost our loved ones” as did “so many other nations”.

Nineteen days into the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, the latest satellite images are the first to suggest that a debris field from the plane — rather than just a few objects — may be floating in the southern Indian Ocean, though no wreckage has been confirmed. Previously, an Australian satellite detected two large objects and a Chinese satellite detected one.

All three finds were made in roughly the same area, far southwest of Australia, where a desperate, multinational hunt has been going on for days.

Clouds obscured the latest satellite images, but dozens of objects could be seen in the gaps, ranging in length from one metre to 23 metres. At a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, Hishammuddin said some of them “appeared to be bright, possibly indicating solid materials.”

The images were taken Sunday and relayed by French-based Airbus Defence and Space, a division of Europe’s Airbus Group; its businesses include the operation of satellites and satellite communications. The company said in a statement that it has mobilised five observation satellites, including two that can produce very high resolution images, to help locate the plane.

Various floating objects have been spotted in the area by planes over the last week, including on Wednesday, when the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said three more objects were seen. The authority said two objects seen from a civil aircraft appeared to be rope, and that a New Zealand military plane spotted a blue object.

None of the objects were seen on a second pass, a frustration that has been repeated several times in the hunt for Flight 370, missing since March 8 with 239 people aboard.

Australian officials did not say whether they received the French imagery in time for search planes out at sea to look for the possible debris field, and did not return repeated phone messages seeking further comment.

It remains uncertain whether any of the objects seen came from the plane; they could have come from a cargo ship or something else.

The search resumed Wednesday after fierce winds and high waves forced crews to take a break Tuesday. A total of 12 planes and five ships from the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand were participating in the search, hoping to find even a single piece of the jet that could offer tangible evidence of a crash and provide clues to find the rest of the wreckage.

Malaysia announced Monday that a mathematical analysis of the final known satellite signals from the plane showed that it had crashed in the sea, killing everyone on board.

The new data greatly reduced the search zone, but it remains huge — an area estimated at 1.6 million square kilometres, about the size of Alaska.

“We’re throwing everything we have at this search,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Nine Network television on Wednesday.

“This is about the most inaccessible spot imaginable. It’s thousands of kilometres from anywhere,” he later told Seven Network television. He vowed that “we will do what we can to solve this riddle”.

Malaysia has been criticised over its handling of the search, though it is one of the most perplexing mysteries in aviation history. Much of the most strident criticism has come from relatives of the 153 Chinese missing, some of whom expressed outrage that Malaysia essentially declared their loved ones dead without recovering a single piece of wreckage.

At a hotel banquet room in Beijing on Wednesday, a delegation of Malaysian government and airline officials explained what they knew to relatives of those lost. They were met with scepticism and even ridicule by some of the roughly 100 people in audience, who questioned some of the report’s findings, including how investigators could have concluded the direction and speed of the plane. One man later said he wanted to pummel everyone in the Malaysian delegation.

“Time will heal emotions that are running high. We fully understand,” Hishammuddin said in Kuala Lumpur.

“For the Chinese families, they must also understand that we in Malaysia also lost our loved ones. There are so many other nations that have lost their loved ones,” Hishammuddin said. “I have seen some images coming from Australia, very rational. [They] understand that this is a global effort. Not blaming directly on Malaysia, because we are coordinating something that is unprecedented.”

But one of the main complaints from families — mixed messages from Malaysia — continued Wednesday. Two days after Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said there were no survivors, Hishammuddin allowed for the possibility that some people aboard the plane might still be alive.

“If [the debris] is confirmed to be from MH370, then we can move on to deep sea surveillance search and rescue, hopefully, hoping against hope,” he said.

China dispatched a special envoy to Kuala Lumpur, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui, who met Najib and other top officials Wednesday, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

China, which now has Chinese warships and an icebreaker in the search zone, has been intent on supporting the interests of the Chinese relatives of passengers, backing their demands for detailed information on how Malaysia concluded the jet went down — details Hishamuddin said Malaysia handed over on Wednesday.

China’s support for families is the likely reason why authorities there — normally extremely wary of any spontaneous demonstrations that could undermine social stability — permitted a rare protest Tuesday outside the Malaysian embassy in Beijing, during which relatives chanted slogans, threw water bottles and briefly tussled with police who kept them separated from a swarm of journalists.

Though officials believe they know roughly where the plane is, it remains unknown why it disappeared shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur. Investigators have ruled out nothing — including mechanical or electrical failure, hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or someone else on board.

The search for the wreckage and the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders will be a major challenge. It took two years to find the black box from Air France Flight 447, which went down in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, and searchers knew within days where that crash site was.

Wednesday’s search focused on an 80,000 square kilometre  swath of ocean about 2,000km southwest of Perth.

There is a race to find Flight 370’s black boxes, whose battery-powered “pinger” could stop sending signals within two weeks.

On Wednesday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the southern search operation on Malaysia’s behalf, said a US Towed Pinger Locator arrived in Perth along with a Bluefin-21 underwater drone. The equipment will be fitted to the Australian naval ship the Ocean Shield, but AMSA could not say when they would be deployed.

Kerry Sieh, the director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, said the seafloor in the search area is relatively flat, with dips and crevices similar to the part of the Atlantic Ocean where the Air France wreckage was found.

He believes any large pieces of the plane would likely stay put once they have completely sunk. But recovering any part of the plane will be tough because of ocean depths in the search area, which are mostly 3,000 to 4,500 metres.

Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, publisher of Airlineratings.com, called the search “the most complex, the most difficult in aviation history”.

“The weather in this part of the world is far more difficult than that experienced in the search for [Air France] 447.”

He said huge swells were common, particularly during the southern hemisphere’s upcoming winter. “There’s a real urgency to find something as quickly as possible because through the winter months, they’ll probably have to suspend the search.”

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology warned that the weather was expected to deteriorate again Thursday, with thunderstorms, low clouds and strong winds on the way.

THE HAGUE — World leaders called on countries on Tuesday to cut their use and their stocks of highly enriched nuclear fuel to the minimum to help prevent Al Qaeda-style militants from obtaining material for atomic bombs.

Winding up a third nuclear security summit since 2010, this one overshadowed by the Ukraine crisis, 53 countries — including the United States and Russia at a time of high tension between them — agreed much headway had been made in the past four years.

But they also underlined that many challenges remained and stressed the need for increased international cooperation to make sure highly enriched uranium (HEU), plutonium and other radioactive substances do not fall into the wrong hands.

The United States and Russia set aside their differences over Crimea to endorse the meeting’s final statement aimed at enhancing nuclear security around the world, together with other big powers including China, France, Germany and Britain.

US President Barack Obama said Ukraine’s decision at the first nuclear security summit in Washington in 2010 to remove all of its HEU was a “vivid reminder that the more of this material we can secure, the safer all of our countries will be”.

“Had that not happened, those dangerous nuclear materials would still be there now,” Obama told a news conference. “And the difficult situation we are dealing with in Ukraine today would involve yet another level of concern.”

At this year’s summit, Belgium and Italy announced that they had shipped out HEU and plutonium to the United States for down-blending into less proliferation-sensitive material or disposal. Japan said it would send hundreds of kilogrammes of such material to the United States.

Like plutonium, uranium can be used to fuel nuclear power plants but also provides the fissile core of a bomb if refined to a high level.

“We encourage states to minimise their stocks of HEU and to keep their stockpile of separated plutonium to the minimum level,” said the summit communique, which went further in this respect than the previous summit in Seoul in 2012.

A fourth meeting will be held in Chicago in 2016, returning to the United States where the process was launched by Obama.

Lacking security?

“We still have a lot more work to do to fulfil the ambitious goals we set four years ago to fully secure all nuclear and radiological material, civilian and military,” Obama said.

To drive home the importance of being prepared, the Dutch hosts sprang a surprise by organising a simulation game for the leaders in which they were asked to react to a fictitious nuclear attack or accident in a made-up state, officials said.

Analysts say that radical groups could theoretically build a crude but deadly nuclear bomb if they had the money, technical knowledge and fissile substances needed.

Obtaining weapons-grade nuclear material — HEU or plutonium — poses the biggest challenge for militants, so it must be kept secure both at civilian and military sites, they say.

Around 2,000 tonnes of highly-radioactive materials are spread across hundreds of sites in 25 countries. Most of the materials is under military control but a significant quantity is stored in less secured civilian locations, according to the Fissile Materials Working Group (FMWG).

Since 1991, the number of countries with nuclear weapons-usable material has roughly halved from some 50.

However, more than 120 research and isotope production reactors around the world still use HEU for fuel or targets, many of them with “very modest” security measures, a Harvard Kennedy School report said this month.

“With at least two and possibly three groups having pursued nuclear weapons in the past quarter century, they are not likely to be the last,” the report said.

Referring to a push to use low-enriched uranium (LEU) as fuel in research and other reactor types instead of HEU, the summit statement said: “We encourage states to continue to minimise the use of HEU through the conversion of reactor fuel from HEU to LEU, were technically and economically feasible.

“Similarly, we will continue to encourage and support efforts to use non-HEU technologies for the production of radio-isotopes, including financial incentives,” it said.

‘Dirty bomb’

An apple-sized amount of plutonium in a nuclear device and detonated in a highly populated area could instantly kill or wound hundreds of thousands of people, according to the Nuclear Security Governance Experts Group.

But a so-called “dirty bomb” is seen as a more likely threat than an atomic bomb: conventional explosives are used to disperse radiation from a radioactive source, which can be found in hospitals or other places that may not be very well secured.

In December, Mexican police found a truck they suspected was stolen by common thieves and which carried a radioactive medical material that could have provided such an ingredient.

In another incident that put nuclear security in the spotlight and embarrassed US officials, an elderly nun and two peace activists have admitted breaking into a Tennessee defence facility in 2012 where uranium for atomic bombs is stored.

The FMWG, an international group of over 70 security experts, said the summit had taken “moderate steps” towards stopping dangerous weapons-usable nuclear materials from going astray but that bolder and more concerted action is needed.

“Today’s nuclear security system — a hodgepodge of voluntary national pledges without global standards to lock down nuclear materials — needs more than just patching up to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack,” the FMWG said in a statement.

ARLINGTON, United States — The death toll from a devastating landslide in the US state of Washington rose to at least 14 Monday with over 150 more potentially missing, as the White House announced federal help.

The number of people unaccounted for after the killer mudslide, described as “like a small earthquake”, rose to 176, although many of those could be double-counted, emergency managers said.

“I’m very disappointed to tell you that we didn’t find any sign of any survivors,” said Snohomish County fire chief Travis Hots, after six more bodies had been found, adding to the eight already confirmed dead.

“The situation is very grim,” he added.

 ‘I believe in miracles’ 

Emergency management chief John Pennington added: “I’m a man of faith and I believe in miracles... but I think that we as a community are beginning to realise that... we are moving towards a recovery operation.”

“Most of us... believe that we will not find any individuals alive,” he added at an evening briefing.

The wall of mud, rocks and trees smashed into the rural town of Oso, northeast of Seattle in the northwestern US state on Saturday, destroying dozens of homes and part of a highway.

Some 100 emergency crew workers were searching for survivors in the field of mud and rubble about 1.6km square, and some four to six metres deep in areas.

 Mini hovercraft 

A total of 49 dwellings of various types in the area were hit by the devastating landslide, he said, adding that there were likely to have been more people at home on a Saturday than during the week.

Mini hovercraft were used to skate across the vast mudslide’s surface, while tracker dogs and helicopters were also being used.

Rescuers reported hearing voices calling for help on Saturday, but Hots said they “didn’t see or hear any signs of life” on Sunday.

Among the missing was a four-month-old baby and her grandmother, local media reported.

Oso resident Doug Dix, whose house was a couple of hundred yards from the slide, said he was working in his barn when he heard a huge rumbling noise.

 ‘Like a small earthquake’ 

“My first impression was I thought we were having a small earthquake. The barn was vibrating,” the semi-retired wildlife toxicologist told AFP.

“Then I went outside and it sounded to me like one of those twin-prop helicopters coming down... It was unbelievably noisy.” The noise went on for about a minute. “I was looking up in the air trying to find a plane crash,” he said.

Shari Ireton of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office said the number of people reported unaccounted for could include double counting, as it was the result of combining a number of lists of people missing, not always with full names.

“Some of those could be overlapped,” she said.

Pennington added at the evening briefing: “The 176 names actually, as discouraging as that sounds, is exactly what we were looking for... which was information and data.”

“That number is about individual names reported. They’re not individuals that are deceased, they’re not individuals that are missing, they are 176 reports,” he said.

Obama pledges 

federal help 

President Barack Obama meanwhile declared an emergency in the Pacific coast state, opening the way for federal aid to add to local and state emergency resources.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will help “save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, and to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in Snohomish County”, said the White House.

Washington state Governor Jay Inslee told reporters there is “a full-scale, 100 per cent, aggressive rescue effort” going on.

Workers ‘up 

to their armpits’ 

The stricken area was so unstable that some rescue workers “went in and got caught literally up to their armpits”, and had to be pulled out themselves, Inslee said.

Rain has been especially heavy in the Cascade Mountains region in the past weeks. The forecast is for more downpours throughout the week.

US Senator Patty Murray, from Washington state, called the mudslide a “devastating... disaster”.

“Dozens and dozens of families... do not know if their loved ones are still alive,” she said on the Senate floor in Washington.

LONDON — Air pollution kills about 7 million people worldwide every year, with more than half of the fatalities due to fumes from indoor stoves, according to a new report from the World Health Organisation (WHO) published Tuesday.

The agency said air pollution is the cause of about one in eight deaths and has now become the single biggest environmental health risk.

“We all have to breathe, which makes pollution very hard to avoid,” said Frank Kelly, director of the environmental research group at King’s College London, who was not part of the WHO report.

One of the main risks of pollution is that tiny particles can get deep into the lungs, causing irritation. Scientists also suspect air pollution may be to blame for inflammation in the heart, leading to chronic problems or a heart attack.

WHO estimated that there were about 4.3 million deaths in 2012 caused by indoor air pollution, mostly people cooking inside using wood and coal stoves in Asia. WHO said there were about 3.7 million deaths from outdoor air pollution in 2012, of which nearly 90 per cent were in developing countries.

But WHO noted that many people are exposed to both indoor and outdoor air pollution. Due to this overlap, mortality attributed to the two sources cannot simply be added together, hence WHO said it lowered the total estimate from around 8 million to 7 million deaths in 2012.

The new estimates are more than double previous figures and based mostly on modeling. The increase is partly due to better information about the health effects of pollution and improved detection methods. Last year, WHO’s cancer agency classified air pollution as a carcinogen, linking dirty air to lung and bladder cancer.

WHO’s report noted women had higher levels of exposure than men in developing countries.

“Poor women and children pay a heavy price from indoor air pollution since they spend more time at home breathing in smoke, and soot from leaky coal and wood cook stoves,” Flavia Bustreo, WHO Assistant Director-General for family, women and children’s health, said in a statement.

Other experts said more research was needed to identify the deadliest components of pollution in order to target control measures more effectively.

“We don’t know if dust from the Sahara is as bad as diesel fuel or burning coal,” said Majid Ezzati, chair in global environmental health at Imperial College London.

Kelly said it was mostly up to governments to curb pollution levels, through measures like legislation, moving power stations away from big cities, and providing cheap alternatives to indoor wood and coal stoves.

He said people could also reduce their individual exposure to choking fumes by avoiding traveling at rush hour or by taking smaller roads. Despite the increasing use of face masks in heavily polluted cities such as Beijing and Tokyo, Kelly said there was little evidence that they work.

“The real problem is that wearing masks sends out the message we can live with polluted air,” he said. “We need to change our way of life entirely to reduce pollution.”

THE HAGUE/FEODOSIA, Crimea — US President Barack Obama conferred with major industrialised allies in the Group of Seven (G-7) on Monday on how to pressure Russia over its seizure of Crimea after Ukraine told its remaining troops to leave the region for their own safety.

Obama, who has imposed tougher sanctions on Moscow than European leaders over its takeover of the Black Sea peninsula, sought backing for his firm line at a meeting deliberately called to exclude Russia, which joined in 1998 to form the G-8.

“As long as the political environment for the G-8 is not at hand, as is the case at the moment, there is no G-8 — neither as a concrete summit meeting or even as a format for meetings,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said before the talks.

She said she did not expect the hour-long session of leaders of the United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Britain and Italy, plus the European Union, to decide on new sanctions, although the leaders would discuss possible further measures to be taken if the situation escalates.

Since the emergency meeting held on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit in The Hague was announced last week, President Vladimir Putin has signed laws completing Russia’s annexation of the region.

Russian troops forced their way into a Ukrainian marine base in the port of Feodosia early on Monday, overrunning one of the last remaining symbols of resistance.

In Kiev, acting president Oleksander Turchinov told parliament the remaining Ukrainian troops and their families would be pulled out of the region in the face of “threats to the lives and health of our service personnel”.

That effectively ends any Ukrainian resistance, less than a month since Putin claimed Russia’s right to intervene militarily on its neighbour’s territory.

White House officials accompanying Obama expressed concern on Monday at what they said was a Russian troop buildup near Ukraine and warned that any further military intervention would trigger wider sanctions than the measures taken so far.

Russia-Ukraine talks

In what has become the biggest East-West confrontation since the Cold War, the United States and the European Union have imposed visa bans and asset freezes on some of Putin’s closest political and business allies. But they have held back so far from measures designed to hit Russia’s wider economy.

“Europe and America are united in our support of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people,” Obama said after a meeting with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. “We’re united in imposing a cost on Russia for its actions so far.”

He also discussed the crisis at a meeting in The Hague with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has voiced support for Ukraine’s sovereignty but refrained from criticising Russia. The West wants Beijing’s diplomatic support in an effort to restrain Putin.

Moscow formally annexed Crimea on March 21, five days after newly-installed pro-Moscow regional leaders held a referendum that yielded an overwhelming vote to join Russia. Kiev and the West denounced the annexation as illegal.

In one sign of a possible easing of tension, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed to hold a first meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Andriy Deshchytsya on the sidelines of the nuclear security summit, a Russian diplomatic source said.

The first 50 out of 100 observers dispatched by the pan-European OSCE security watchdog arrived in Ukraine on Monday to monitor potential trouble spots and report back to the 54-nation organisation. Russia relented late last week and agreed on a mandate after prolonged wrangling, but the monitors will not be allowed to enter Crimea.

Further costs

Western officials are now focused less on persuading Putin to relinquish Crimea — a goal that seems beyond reach — than on deterring him from seizing other parts of Ukraine.

White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters Obama hoped the G-7 leaders would foreshadow “what economic sanctions Russia would be faced with if it continues down this road”.

Another G-7 official said the main point of the G-7 meeting was “to show the isolation of Putin”. The leaders were also expected to cancel plans for a G-8 meeting at the Russian Olympics site in Sochi, for which preparations were frozen after Moscow seized Crimea, he said.

Persuading Europeans to sign on to tougher sanctions could be difficult for Obama. The EU does 10 times as much trade with Russia as the United States, and is the biggest customer for Russian oil and gas. The EU’s 28 members include countries with widely varying relationships to Moscow.

Central and east European countries that were once under Moscow’s domination and have joined the EU in the last decade are mostly urging caution due to the risk to their economies.

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the EU’s most powerful leader, has taken a tough line with Putin and supported EU moves to reduce the bloc’s long-term dependence on Russian energy.

Little resistance

The seizure of Crimea has been largely bloodless, apart from one Ukrainian soldier and one pro-Moscow militia member killed in a shoot-out last Tuesday. Ukraine’s troops left behind in Crimea have been besieged inside bases while offering little resistance.

In Feodosia, Ukrainian troops hugged each other in farewell after their base was overrun. Some chanted “Hurra! Hurra!” in defiance. One marine in full uniform who declined to identify himself wept and blamed the government in Kiev for the chaotic end to the stand-off.

“Yesterday we had an agreement: we would lower our flag and the Russians would raise theirs. And this morning the Russians attacked, firing live ammunition. We had no weapons. We did not fire a round,” said one marine, Ruslan, who was with his wife Katya and nine-month-old son.

Although Russian forces have not entered other parts of Ukraine, NATO says they have built up at the border. The Western military alliance also fears Putin may have designs on a part of another former Soviet republic, Moldova.

Despite the disruption to East-West relations, Washington wants other diplomatic business with Moscow to continue.

US Secretary of State John Kerry also held talks with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, after meeting the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The OPCW is overseeing the destruction of Syria’s toxic stockpile in action sponsored jointly by Washington and Moscow.

Russia hit back symbolically at Canada, announcing personal sanctions against 13 Canadian officials in retaliation for Ottawa’s role in Western sanctions so far. It has already taken similar measures against senior US Congress members but not yet European officials.

Western governments are struggling to find a balance between putting pressure on Putin, protecting their own economies and avoiding triggering a vicious cycle of sanctions and reprisals.

Rutte, who is making his residence available to Obama and the other G-7 leaders for the talks on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit, said the West might want to move slowly.

“Russia has an economy that is highly focused on oil and gas,” Rutte told Reuters. “If it came to putting in place sanctions, that would hurt Russia considerably. So in my view we should do everything to prevent that.”

US officials say any further sanctions will need to be carefully calibrated to avoid bans on entire sectors, such as oil or metals, that could affect the global economy.