World

KABUL — Afghan officials gave up hope on Saturday of finding any survivors from a landslide in the remote northeast, putting the death toll at more than 2,100, as rescuers turned their attention to helping the over 4,000 people displaced.

Officials expressed concern the unstable hillside above the site of the disaster may cave in again, threatening the homeless as well as the UN and local rescue teams that have arrived in Badakhshan province, which borders Tajikistan.

“More than 2,100 people from 300 families are all dead,” Naweed Forotan, a spokesman for the Badakhshan provincial governor, told Reuters.

Villagers and a few dozen police, equipped with only basic digging tools, resumed their search when daylight broke but it soon became clear there was no hope of finding survivors buried in up to 100 metres of mud.

“Seven members of my family were here, four or five of them were killed... I am also half alive, what can I do?” said an elderly woman, her hair covered in a pink shawl.

The UN mission in Afghanistan said the focus was now on the more than 4,000 people displaced, either directly as a result of Friday’s landslide or as a precautionary measure from villages assessed to be at risk.

Their main needs are water, medicine, food and emergency shelter, said Ari Gaitanis, a spokesman from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

The impoverished area, dotted with villages of mud-brick homes nestled in valleys beside bare slopes, has been hit by several landslides in recent years.

Plea for help

The side of the mountain above Ab Barak collapsed at around 11am (0630 GMT) on Friday as people were trying to recover belongings and livestock after a smaller landslip hit a few hours earlier.

Hundreds of homes were destroyed in the landslides that were triggered by torrential rain. Officials worry another section of the mountainside could collapse at any time.

The Afghan military flew rescue teams to the area on Saturday, as the remote mountain region is served by only narrow, poor roads which have themselves been damaged by more than a week of heavy rain.

“We have managed to get one excavator into the area, but digging looks hopeless,” Colonel Abdul Qadeer Sayad, a deputy police chief of Badakhshan, told Reuters.

He said the sheer size of the area affected, and the depth of the mud, meant that only modern machinery could help.

NATO-led coalition troops are on stand-by to assist but on Saturday said the Afghan government had not asked for help.

“I call on the government to come and help our people, to take the bodies out,” said a middle-aged man, standing on a hill overlooking the river of mud where his village once stood.

“We managed to take out only 10-15 people, the rest of our villagers here are trapped.”

Hundreds of people camped out overnight in near freezing conditions, although some were given tents. Officials distributed food and water.

At least 100 people were being treated for injuries, most of them by medics who set up facilities in a stable building.

Seasonal rains and spring snow melt have caused devastation across large swathes of northern Afghanistan, killing more than 100 people before this latest disaster.

US President Barack Obama said American forces were on stand-by to help.

“Just as the United States has stood with the people of Afghanistan through a difficult decade, we stand ready to help our Afghan partners as they respond to this disaster, for even as our war there comes to an end this year, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people will endure,” he said.

About 30,000 US soldiers remain in Afghanistan, although that number is falling as Washington prepares to withdraw all combat troops who battled Taliban insurgents by the end of this year.

Police said they had provided a security ring around the area, which has been relatively free of insurgent attacks. The Taliban said in a statement they were also willing to provide security.

BEIJING — Relatives of passengers aboard missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 were leaving their Beijing hotel on Friday, a day after the airline said it would stop providing them with accommodation.

“I’m very angry,” said Steven Wang, whose mother was on the flight, adding: “Malaysia Airlines have suddenly told us to leave.”

“They should have at least given us an adjustment period for us to make preparations and collect our things,” said Wang, who himself lives in Beijing and has emerged as a spokesman for the relatives.

There was a heavy police presence at the Lido Hotel in Beijing Friday, with dozens of uniformed officers inside, following previous chaotic clashes between angry family members and Malaysia Airlines staff.

The airline has provided the service for relatives in Malaysia and China — where they have suffered an agonising wait for news since the flight mysteriously disappeared on March 8.

The carrier announced late Thursday in a statement that it was ending all hotel accommodation for passenger relatives by next Wednesday, but several staying in Beijing said they had been told to leave even sooner.

In the statement, the airline said it was advising families “to receive information updates on the progress of the search and investigation, and other support by Malaysia Airlines within the comfort of their own homes”.

Malaysia’s Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Hamzah Zainuddin told reporters in Kuala Lumpur on Friday that the time had come for relatives to return home.

The airline “has been supporting these family members in Beijing for the last 55 days”, he said.

“That’s the reason I think it’s about time for us to actually accept the reality that the family members should go back and wait for the answer in their hometowns.”

‘I’m looking for a lawyer’ 

Relatives’ tempers have repeatedly flared throughout the ordeal of the missing plane, particularly at the Lido, where Chinese families have lashed out at officials from the Malaysian government and the airline over their inability to explain the disappearance.

Chinese passengers account for about two-thirds of the total on the flight.

“I’ve left the hotel,” said Wen Wancheng, whose son was on MH370. “I’m already on the train going back home,” he told AFP by phone.

“We were asked to leave too suddenly,” he said. “The impact on our family is big. Our family is in a bad state.”

Steven Wang said that a protest or group action of any kind was unlikely, adding that families would leave one by one rather than as a group.

Low level local government officials have gone to Beijing to persuade relatives to leave the hotel and return home, some relatives said.

“They said if we went home they could help us,” a relative surnamed Wang, who had already returned home, told AFP.

She added that three officials from her local neighbourhood committee, the lowest level of government administration in China, had accompanied her and other family members on a flight to her home in the eastern city of Nanjing.

“I am looking for a lawyer and intend to sue Malaysia Airlines,” she said.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement that China “was willing to work with the Malaysian side to make progress in comforting the families of passengers”.

Chinese relatives posting in a group on China’s popular WeChat social networking service said that the airline notified them it would offer initial $50,000 payments to families for each of the passengers to “meet their economic needs”.

Relatives were to be notified of details about the payments two weeks after they return home, the relatives said, citing the notice.

KIEV — Ukraine’s armed forces are on “full combat alert” against a possible Russian invasion, Kiev said Wednesday, as pro-Kremlin insurgents tightened their grip on the increasingly chaotic east of the country.

Rebels stormed the regional police building and town hall in the eastern Ukrainian city of Gorlivka, local officials told AFP, bringing to more than a dozen the number of locations under their control.

The new seizure followed clashes in nearby Lugansk late Tuesday, as hundreds of pro-Russia protesters spearheaded by a heavily armed mob took control of the police station after a fraught stand-off.

Ukraine’s interim president Oleksandr Turchynov told his Cabinet that the nation’s armed forces were on “full combat alert” as fears grew in Kiev that Russia could mount an armed invasion of the ex-Soviet republic.

“The threat of a Russia starting a war against mainland Ukraine is real,” he said.

Turchynov urged “Ukrainian patriots” to bolster the beleaguered police force, which he has criticised for “inaction and in some cases treachery”. His priority was to prevent “terrorism” spreading in the restive east of the country, he said.

The West has accused Russia of fomenting the crisis and backing the rebels and has imposed sanctions to try to get Moscow to back down.

The United States and EU members see the insurgency as a bid to destabilise Ukraine ahead of presidential elections slated for May 25, but Moscow denies it has a hand in the rebellion.

President Vladimir Putin insisted to reporters late Tuesday that there were “neither Russian instructors, nor special units, nor troops” operating in Ukraine.

Opening up another front in the war of words between Washington and Moscow, Putin warned that the sanctions against his country could harm Western interests in Russia’s lucrative energy sector.

Putin said: “If this continues, we will of course have to think about how [foreign companies] work in the Russian Federation, including in key sectors of the Russian economy such as energy,” said Putin, speaking at a regional summit in Minsk.

The Russian president’s comments threaten the operations of some of the world’s biggest energy companies in the resource-rich country — once viewed as a reliable alternative to unstable natural gas and oil-producing countries in the Middle East.

Among those targeted by the US sanctions is the president of Rosneft, Russia’s top petroleum company and one of the world’s largest publicly traded oil companies.

The EU said talks with Russia and Ukraine will take place in Warsaw on Friday to try to resolve a $3.5-billion gas bill Gazprom calculates Kiev owes. Putin has threatened to cut off the gas flow to Ukraine if it is not quickly paid.

Russian officials have accused the United States of wanting to reinstitute “Iron Curtain”-style policies and warned the sanctions would “boomerang” back to hurt it.

But the tensions are already having an impact on the Russian economy, as the International Monetary Fund announced Wednesday that the country was already “experiencing recession”.

The IMF also drastically slashed its 2014 growth forecast for Russia to 0.2 per cent from 1.3 per cent, amid massive capital outflows over the Ukraine crisis.

US moves to restrict high-tech exports to Russia appeared to touch a nerve in Moscow which warned Washington was “exposing their astronauts” on the International Space Station to consequences.

SYDNEY — The Australian agency heading up the search for the missing Malaysian jet has dismissed a claim by a resource survey company that it found possible plane wreckage in the northern Bay of Bengal.

The location cited by Australia-based GeoResonance Pty Ltd. is thousands of kilometres north of the remote area in the Indian Ocean where the search for Flight 370 has been concentrated for weeks.

“The Australian-led search is relying on information from satellite and other data to determine the missing aircraft’s location. The location specified by the GeoResonance report is not within the search arc derived from this data,” the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which is heading up the search off Australia’s west coast, said in a statement Tuesday. “The joint international team is satisfied that the final resting place of the missing aircraft is in the southerly portion of the search arc.”

GeoResonance stressed that it is not certain it found the Malaysia Airlines plane, which vanished March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, but called for its findings to be investigated.

The company uses imaging, radiation chemistry and other technologies to search for oil, gas or mineral deposits. In hunting for Flight 370, it used the same technology to look on the ocean floor for chemical elements that would be present in a Boeing 777: aluminum, titanium, jet fuel residue and others.

GeoResonance compared multispectral images taken March 5 and March 10 — before and after the plane’s disappearance — and found a specific area where the data varied between those dates, it said in a statement. The location is about 190 kilometres south of Bangladesh.

Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said China and Australia were aware of the announcement. “Malaysia is working with its international partners to assess the credibility of this information,” a statement from his office said Tuesday.

Hishammuddin said Malaysia would release a preliminary report of its investigation into the missing plane on Thursday.

Angus Houston, head of the search effort off Australia’s west coast, said Wednesday that he was confident crews were already searching in the right place, but that Malaysia should investigate the GeoResonance report. He said he only discovered this week that the Bay of Bengal information had been passed directly to Malaysia.

“Any sort of information that comes forth needs to be investigated,” he told Australia’s Sky News. “It’s certainly something that needs to be looked at and I believe it probably has been looked at, but I’m not aware of any of that detail. I’m focused on the search in our area of responsibility.”

GeoResonance said it began trying to find the plane before the official search area moved to the southern Indian Ocean.

India, Bangladesh and other countries to the north have said they never detected the plane in their airspace. The jet had contact with a satellite from British company Inmarsat for a few more hours and investigators have concluded from that data that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean.

No wreckage from the plane has been found and an aerial search for surface debris ended Monday after six weeks of fruitless hunting. An unmanned sub is continuing to search underwater in an area where sounds consistent with a plane’s black box were detected earlier this month. Additional equipment is expected to be brought in within the next few weeks to scour an expanded underwater area. Houston has predicted that the search could drag on for as long as a year.

ANKARA — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday he would ask the United States to extradite an Islamic cleric he accuses of plotting to topple him and undermine Turkey with concocted graft accusations and secret wire taps.

Fethullah Gulen has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1997, when secularist authorities raised accusations of Islamist activity against him. Erdogan accuses him of building a “parallel state” of followers in institutions such as the police and judiciary and using them to try to pull the levers of state power.

Gulen, a former ally, denies engineering a police graft investigation which has seen three Cabinet ministers quit, but has denounced Erdogan over moves to shut down the inquiry by purging police and judiciary of his followers.

Asked by a reporter at parliament after a meeting of his ruling AK Party if a process would begin for Gulen’s extradition, Erdogan said: “Yes, it will begin.”

In an interview with PBS talk show host Charlie Rose broadcast late on Monday, Erdogan said Gulen could also pose a threat to US security by his activities.

“These elements which threaten the national security of Turkey cannot be allowed to exist in other countries because what they do to us here, they might do against their host,” Erdogan told Rose in the interview, according to a transcript.

Erdogan has drawn accusations of increasing authoritarianism with his response to the graft investigation, which has included removing thousands of police officers and hundreds of judges and prosecutors, as well as imposing a two-week ban on Twitter and broadening the powers of the state intelligence service.

Human Rights Watch on Monday criticised a new law giving the national intelligence agency (MIT) more scope for eavesdropping, greater immunity from prosecution for top agents and jail terms for leaks of sensitive information, saying it gave the agency “carte blanche” and was open to abuse.

The government has said the law replaces outdated legislation and brings Turkey in line with international norms.

German President Joachim Gauck criticised Erdogan’s leadership style during a trip to Turkey on Monday and warned against curbing freedom of expression.

“Presumably he still thinks he is a clergyman,” Erdogan said of Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor, adding his comments showed a lack of statesmanship and that he was “saddened” by his attitude.

Extradition

Erdogan said Turkey had complied with more than 10 extradition requests from the United States and now expected the same response from its NATO ally. But it was not clear on what basis an extradition might be agreed.

Turkish authorities would first need to issue an arrest warrant for Gulen and produce evidence indicating he has committed a crime, according to the 1979 treaty signed between the two countries.

“If he was tried in Turkey and had been convicted, then you can send that court ruling. You can request extradition for the implementation [of that sentence],” said former European Court of Human Rights judge Riza Turmen, a deputy from the main opposition CHP Party.

“But none of these are currently the case,” he told Reuters.

The 1979 treaty also exempts all crimes of a “political character” unless they can be shown to have targeted either the head of state or head of government, or their families.

Erdogan said Turkey had cancelled Gulen’s passport and that he was in the United States as a legal resident on a green card.

The US embassy in Ankara had no immediate comment.

Gulen runs a network of businesses and schools, well-funded and secular in nature, across the world. The schools are a major source of influence and funding and have become the target of government efforts to have them shut down.

Erdogan accuses Gulen of contriving criminal allegations that his son and the children of three ministers were involved in a corruption scandal and took billions of dollars of bribes.

He has also accused Gulen’s Hizmet (Service) movement of bugging thousands of phones and leaking audio recordings, including purportedly of his foreign minister and senior security officials discussing possible armed intervention in neighbouring Syria, on the website YouTube.

Gulen has denied these accusations.

The recordings appeared ahead of a March 30 municipal election, but did little to affect Erdogan’s popularity, with his AK Party dominating the electoral map.

MANILA — Barack Obama’s Asia-Pacific legacy is now taking shape, but he has work to do to complete a genuine rebalancing of US power to the region that goes beyond rhetoric.

The US leader ended his four-nation Asian tour in the Philippines Tuesday, after spending a week telling China not to use coercion in maritime disputes and reassuring allies that US security guarantees are genuine.

He made it clear that America’s defence alliance with Japan did cover disputed islands known as the Senkakus to Toyko and the Diaoyus to China.

He clinched a 10-year defence pact with the Philippines, similar to one already agreed with Australia, that will put US forces close to the volatile geopolitical currents of the South China Sea.

Obama also became the first American president to visit Malaysia for nearly 50 years — formally ushering the country into the US orbit after its decades of outspoken anti-Americanism.

Malaysia’s evolution complements the administration’s move in pushing reform in Myanmar and drawing the once junta-led nation away from China.

Senior US officials said Obama privately pressed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to consider the explosive regional political impact of visiting war shrines — particularly the impact on relations with US ally South Korea.

But despite administration claims that Obama engineered a significant breakthrough, he has yet to close a deal on opening Japan’s auto and agricultural markets.

That left a 12-nation Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal in limbo.

Obama needs the TPP to take the Asia pivot beyond a reshuffling of military assets and to claim a piece of the region’s dynamic future for the slowly recovering US economy.

Asian doubts over whether Obama can get any trade deal through Congress are also contributing to the uncertainty.

While his rebalancing strategy is premised in part on exploiting the anxiety of regional states about China’s rise, Obama also needs to keep tensions with the Asian giant under control.

While warning China over its conduct in territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas, which US officials privately fear could erupt into shooting incidents sooner if not later, Obama was careful not to antagonise Beijing.

In return China kept its denunciations of the US-Philippines defence deal, which will see forces rotate through the country, comparatively muted.

The trip “was not a complete success”, said Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong.

“However... [Obama] demonstrated that he attaches a high priority to the region in line with his return-to-Asia strategy.”

This trip was one that Obama had to make: his cancellation of a regional tour last year due to political dysfunction in Washington made allies question US staying power.

And even while selling his rebalancing policy all over again, Obama was preoccupied by crises elsewhere that threaten to distract him from Asia, including the East-West showdown over Ukraine.

Daniel Twining, an Asia analyst with the German Marshall Fund of the United States who worked on foreign policy for former president George W. Bush, said a number of Obama’s moves represented a “smart investment” for Washington.

But he warned: “Our big Asian allies remain worried.”

Twining said the absence of a trade deal with Japan and niggles in implementing the Korea-US trade pact “are setbacks, and reflect the president’s unwillingness to sell the US global trade agenda to Democrats in Congress”.

To some extent, Obama may always find it difficult to fulfil hopes in the region for his Asia policy.

By having characteristically raised expectations by declaring himself America’s first “Pacific President”, he ensured regional states will always want more.

The fact that America is a Pacific nation but not an Asian one will always render Washington an outsider to some extent — and promote Chinese suspicions of US motives in its backyard.

So it was significant that Obama repeatedly made it clear that Washington did not seek to “contain” or “counter” China.

One clear deficit on Obama’s Asia legacy is his failure to produce new ideas to rein in unpredictable North Korea.

Though a feared nuclear test by Pyongyang did not materialise during his visit, Obama’s presidency will go down in history as a time when the Stalinist state increased its nuclear arsenal.

His next trip to Asia is scheduled for November, when he will travel to regional summits in Beijing, Myanmar and Australia.

KOSTYANTYNIVKA, Ukraine — The United States and Europe on Monday whacked Russia with fresh sanctions over Ukraine for failing to stop tensions soaring in the east of the ex-Soviet republic, where rebels seized another town and a pro-Moscow mayor was badly wounded by a shot to the back.

As the West sought to step up the pressure on Moscow over the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War, the White House imposed sanctions on seven Russian officials and 17 firms close to President Vladimir Putin.

The European Union was adding 15 names to its own list, diplomatic sources said.

The Kremlin hit back almost immediately, vowing a “painful” response for Washington, in a tit-for-tat rhetorical battle.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the Interfax news agency that Moscow was “disgusted” by the US action, which he said showed Washington had “completely lost touch with reality”.

The US said it was prepared to “impose still greater costs” on Russia for what it called its “illegal intervention and provocative actions” in Ukraine.

Among those targeted is Igor Sechin, president and chairman of the board at Rosneft, Russia’s top petroleum company and one of the world’s largest publicly traded oil companies.

Washington is also tightening licensing requirements for certain high-tech exports to Russia that could have a military use.

The Western sanctions are a response to Russia’s perceived lack of action in implementing an April 17 deal struck in Geneva to defuse the crisis.

Washington has threatened to target specific sectors of the Russian economy if the tens of thousands of troops the Kremlin has ordered to the border actually invade Ukraine.

‘Shot in the back’ 

As the sanctions hammer swung at Russia, tensions on the ground in eastern Ukraine showed little sign of easing. 

Kalashnikov-toting militants seized the town hall of Kostyantynivka — the latest of more than a dozen towns held by pro-Russian insurgents who were supposed to have disarmed under the Geneva deal.

AFP reporters in the nearby flashpoint town of Slavyansk said militants on rebel-held checkpoints were visibly more agitated.

Some 300 masked men wielding baseball bats attacked a bank in the regional hub of Donetsk owned by a billionaire oligarch and regional governor who has clashed with Putin.

The pro-Moscow mayor shot in the back, Gennady Kernes, of the town of Kharkiv, was in critical condition. The identity and motive of the gunman who targeted him while he was riding his bicycle were unknown.

Meanwhile, negotiations were still under way to secure the release of a team of international observers from the OSCE, whose capture by rebels on Friday sparked global fury.

The pan-European security organisation held an emergency meeting in Vienna to discuss the rising threat in Ukraine to monitors overseeing the faltering Geneva accord.

The current head of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Swiss President Didier Burkhalter, told AFP: “We don’t want to stop, but it is our responsibility to assess the situation steadily... If there is a change, then we will act.”

On Sunday, the rebels presented the OSCE captives — four Germans, a Pole, a Dane, a Czech and a Swede — to the cameras for a news conference slammed as “repugnant” by Germany.

The Swede, who suffers from diabetes, was released late Sunday on medical grounds.

A spokeswoman for the rebels said all seven were “alive and in good health” but scrapped a news conference planned for later Monday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross told AFP it was trying to gain access to the detainees and urged all sides to treat captives “humanely”.

The rebels are also holding three Ukrainian soldiers captured near Slavyansk. Russian television showed the men blindfolded, cuffed and bloodied, stripped to their undergarments.

‘Painful’ response 

The Kremlin issued a robust response to the US sanctions, which President Barack Obama had earlier announced in Manila, where we was wrapping up a tour of Asia.

“We will, of course, respond,” Ryabkov said, adding: “We are certain that this response will have a painful effect on Washington.”

The measures taken by Washington and Brussels are “leading things towards an escalation of the crisis”, the minister added.

After a brief period of optimism prompted by the Geneva accord, the crisis has lurched into increasingly dangerous ground, with the Ukrainian prime minister warning that Moscow wanted to trigger a “third world war” with its military manoeuvres near the border.

Ukraine’s army is waging an offensive to quell the separatist movement in the eastern part of the country, which the West believes is fomented and controlled by the Kremlin.

Kiev’s soldiers are surrounding the flashpoint town of Slavyansk in a bid to prevent reinforcements reaching militants there.

Ukraine also threatened to take Russia to court over its threat to cut off gas supplies if Kiev does not pay its bills.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told reporters Ukraine would pay $2.2 billion to Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom if it accepts a price of $268 per 1,000 cubic metres.

“We are waiting for a Gazprom answer.... Unless we reach an agreement within 30 days, we will move from pre-arbitration phase to a legal case,” he said.

The crisis has escalated at breathtaking pace since November when pro-Western protesters in Kiev began mass demonstrations against Kremlin-backed then-president Viktor Yanukovych after he rejected an agreement to bring Ukraine closer to the European Union.

After four months of protests, which turned deadly as authorities tried to break them up, Yanukovych was forced from power.

In response, Moscow launched a blitz annexation of the peninsula of Crimea and stepped up troop movements on the border.

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas — Rescue workers searched for survivors on Monday in the rubble left by a wave of tornadoes that ripped through the south-central United States a day earlier, killing at least 16 people in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Iowa.

Arkansas was the hardest hit, with at least 10 people dead in central Faulkner County and four more across the state, for the first reported fatalities of this year’s US tornado season, authorities said.

Strong winds wrenched houses off their foundations and flipped cars on top of the rubble in the small town of Vilonia in Faulkner County.

One person was killed in neighboring Oklahoma and another in Iowa, state authorities said.

A tornado hit the east side of Mayflower, Arkansas, on Sunday evening, killing at least one person, tearing up trees and bringing down power lines, making it difficult for the emergency services to find stricken areas in the dark, officials said.

The Arkansas National Guard was deployed to help out.

At least one other person was killed in a tornado in the town of Quapaw, in the northeast corner of neighboring Oklahoma, according to Ottawa County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Derek Derwin.

That twister was spotted in the town 320km northeast of Oklahoma City, according to the weather service.

Another fatality was reported on a farm in northeastern Keokuk County in Iowa by the local sheriff’s office last night, said John Benson, a spokesperson for Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

A tornado in Baxter Springs, Kansas that touched down on Sunday evening destroyed as many as 70 homes and 25 businesses, and injured 34 people, of whom nine were hospitalised, state and county officials said.

One person was reported dead but it was unclear if the death was storm-related, said the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office.

Overnight tornado watches and warnings were announced in several parts of Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prisoners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russia! Russia!

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

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

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

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

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

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