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grief, anger and frustration, the families of flight 370 gather outside the malaysian embassy in beijing and demand answers. >> and with the search focused on the southern indian ocean, bad weather has grounded the effort today. >> plus, another desperate search, this one in washington state. the number of dead and missing grows from a massive landslide. hello, you are watching cnn newsroom and i'm rosemary church. >> welcome to our viewers in the united states and around the world. we begin with the latest on the missing malaysian airliner and malaysia's prime minister addressed parliament to explain why he decided to announce flight 370 went down in the indian ocean. >> the prime minister said he didn't want the government to appear to be hiding information from passenger's families.

family members have accused malaysia of poor communication. hundreds of them gathered to protest near the malaysian embassy in beijing. >> meantime, gale force winds and heavy rains have forced pilots and naval crews so suspend their search. australia's defense minister says the search is not likely to resume until wednesday and that is weather permitting. >> families of those on board the flight have been lashing out at malaysia airlines as well as the malaysian government. we're in kuala lumpur. this has been just dreadful for family members and they are indeed very angry. tell us the response from malaysia airlines, because there was a news conference there, and particularly the point of using text messages in english to tell family members that their loved ones are no longer alive.

>> reporter: the f we talk about the family members, there has been an air of disbelief, denial, shock, and then that turned to anger. a lot of people, particularly in beijing where the majority of family members -- sorry, majority of passengers and loved ones of those on board are waiting wait ing to for information every day and agonizing night after night. it's day 18 now and they finally heard, some of them, via text message. cnn confirmed this last night that these text messages were sent out before the briefing informing all family members, both here in kuala lumpur and beijing that that the flight, mh-370, had likely ended in the southern indian ocean. that is, of course, how the prime minister put it. and this is what malaysian airlines had to say about in the today's press conference.

>> our sole motivation last night was to ensuring that the incredibly short amount of time available to us the families heard the tragic news before the world did. wherever humanly possible we did so for the families in person or by telephone using sms as the last resort of ensuring fully that nearly 1,000 family members heard the news from us and not from the media. >> reporter: the ceo speaking there who also said that they have done their utmost to ensuring that family members are taken care of with support groups. he also said in a very somber

moment in the press conference "my heart breaks and goes out to all the loved ones on those on board flight mh-370." and let me share with you about one of the team members here working with us who's from kuala lumpur and malaysia, he said "we just kept on hoping and hoping and praying and praying that we'd hear about the plane and find it and when our prayers were finally answered, the answers were not what we were hoping for. >> totally understand that. saima, in the midst of their distress, some family members are going to so far as to accuse malaysia of murdering their loved ones. very strong words there. what do they think happened here? >> reporter: as i said, this grief turned into anger and it's seen loved ones of passengers on board of flight mh-370 really

lash out at malaysian authorities and their handling of the situation. not helped, of course, by that text message going out to family members late last night. some of them believe that this is a coverup. that malaysian authorities and malaysia airlines are hiding something from them, that they do know what's been going on on board and i think a lot of that is because of the lack of information that they've had. we still haven't found the flight data recorder. there is no debris, of course. a lot of loved ones saying "until i see proof, until i know, i won't believe it." and is, of course, part of the shock and denial that psychologists have talked to us about here on cnn that was likely to be a result of hearing any kind of information about what happened to flight mh-370. but a lot of family members saying if you haven't got debris and you haven't got proof that this flight has crashed then why are you telling us we've lost our loved ones? and that is why the prime minister made that statement today in parliament shortly

after holding a one-minute silence in parliament saying we have tried to deal with this with utmost transparency. when we've got information, we have shared it with you straight away. we have nothing to hide. but an official state of mourning won't be announced until they do find debris to flight mh-370. >> many thanks to you. john? let's go to western australia where officials say they are not able to resume the search today. andrew stevens is live in perth with more. andrew, you heard from the air marshal a short time ago basically saying that they don't have a haystack, they're still looking for that to search in. >> reporter: yeah, john. it was quite a sobering judgment from someone who definitely knows. before i get on to that, interesting listening to saima talking about the families who

are looking for some facts, for something they can hold on to, the truth about the flight and why the malaysian prime minister made this call that the plane did go down in -- somewhere in the southern indian ocean yesterday. that question was pretty much put to the australian defense minister today, just how confident are you that the plane did, indeed, come down here and he said i'm confident based on the information we have available. so there is still very much a slither, a tiny, tiny percentage of doubt. there has to be because it's still based on technical data, on information until they get a positive i.d., a firm sighting on a piece of debris that links it to the flight they can't be 100% sure, obviously. so it is a question which is being asked not only in china but here in australia as well. coming back to what the minister and the vice chief of the military cheer in australia was saying today, there was a press

conference -- there's a lot of expectation that something would be announced, the defense minister was flying over from the capital canberra to western australia and he wasn't doing that to mumble platitudes. but there was no information. the information we did get was disappointing. listen to what the vice defense minister -- the vice marshal of the australian military had to say. >> to give you an analogy of what we've got out there, we're not searching for a needle in a hay stake, we're trying to find the haystack. that's just to put in the context. you're seeing a multinational effort going on. it's difficult in these weather conditions for us to be able to find small bits of debris that is washing around in the southern indian ocean at the moment. >> reporter: so they don't even know where the haystack is, even despite the fact that yesterday,

less than 24 hours ago, there were two sightings from the air of two separate what could be debris fields, one by the chinese who saw two, what they are calling, relatively large objects surrounded by smaller white pieces of debris and not far away in the same target zone the royal australian air force finding what they described as two objects, they described the color, one slynn dry cal, circular shape gray green object and one rectangular orange object. aviation experts say that, yes, they could be linked, particularly the orange. that could be life vests or whatever but we're waiting to see. that was announced yesterday but still frustratingly there was no visual sighting from the sea despite the fact there was an australian warship in the zone. it was in that area for about four hours where the sighting was made. the royal australian air force actually dropped flares but no sighting. the australian defense minister interestingly said, john, that

even though the ship was close to that zone where the. are -- raaf saw that debris, it gives you the idea of challenges they're facing and what the meaning of close in an area so vast and so remote actually means. . >> andrew stevens bringing us an update on the search out of perth and the challenges they are facing. andrew, thank you. what is interesting about what andrew is saying is there does seem to be a chang of tone we're hearing coming out of the australians. we had the prime minister in parliament saying credible evidence, hope that this was best lead they had. now being tempered a little bit by the vice chief of the australian defense forces saying they don't even have a -- know where the haystack is at this point in time. >> it's difficult, isn't it? >> and the weather is not helping things. the search is on hold at least until tomorrow. maybe a little longer.

let's go find out what the forecast is. >> the best way to describe the seas across the search area today is take a washing machine and put it on the high cycle. that's the way we think the sea state is the this region is. upwards of 13 feet, four meters, even as high as 19 to 20 feet in some areas because of the nature of this passive cold front measuring some 5,000 kilometers or 3000 miles across. this cold front would expand the entire length of the united states, the continental u.s. and it's cruising right towards the central region of the search area at this hour. because it's really unobstructed, very little landmasses across will this region we know the seas on the ocean level began white caps taking place, white foam breaking away and being blown away usually in the direction of the wind there and causing whiteout conditions. this was the scene about 24 hours ago as the efforts, the orion aircraft, a low altitude aircraft flying at around 300 feet was beginning to return towards perth. the cloud cover and kreiling is

dropping down. we know today the ceiling is getting down to 200 feet so very, very low situation as far as visibility is concerned and you take a look. the wind 60 miles per hour, that's at this hour and notice what happens. tonight and tomorrow afternoon it's become more tranquil, especially southern portions of the search zone where we know the winds could die down. the northern portions more in the seasonal range, about 15 to 20 miles per hour winds. upwards of 40 or so kilometers per hour. but thursday we expect winds to pick right back up, we expect the storm system to strengthen a tad bit there as we head in towards thursday but the rainfall also comes in on thursday as well. so at this point rainfall looking less of a likelihood for, say, tonight and then really decreasing via wednesday. so perhaps we get a search under way some time tomorrow morning into tomorrow afternoon but this is what it will look like by thursday afternoon. so the weather pattern becoming very active very quickly, guys. >> as it does in that that part of the world.

thanks, p.j. >> and we will continue to follow the latest developments on the missing malaysian airliner. but here are other stories making headlines. we begin with a deadly landslide in the u.s. state of washington. >> the death toll is at least 14 and 176 others are unaccounted for after a weekend landslide. an emergency official says it's likely some of those currently reported missing are safe. u.s. president barack obama signed an emergency declaration monday and ordered federal aid to the region. russia says being kicked out of the group of eight nations is no big deal. at the hague on monday, the u.s. and other world powers decided to suspend russia's participation in the group of leading industrialized nations. the move follows moscow's annexation of crimea and the current buildup of russian troops on the ukrainian/russian border. the murder trial of oscar pistorius resumes later this hour. a police cell phone expert will return to the stand.

on monday he read allowed text messages between pistorius and reeva steenkamp. in one message steenkamp told pistorius she was afraid of him at times. she called him jealous and possessive and said she was tired of him picking on her. >> time for a short break. when we come back, at first the search zones for malaysia airlines flight 370 were huge but they've gradually been narrowed down. >> and one satellite company was able to decode data to reach a conclusion no one wanted to hear. that is coming up next. and later, families of the passengers reacting with a range of emotions, some of them want a direct -- want to directly confront malaysian officials and we will go to beijing live. ♪

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in the united states and around the world. >> right now, bad weather is delaying the search for malaysia airlines flight 370. the focus is on the southern indian ocean where malaysian officials say the flight ended. they came to that conclusion in large part because of data which came from a british satellite company. >> we have a lot of experience. we feel the sadness of the families and we do feel for them at this point but if you look at the plots that we have using our recent adjusted techniques we can say that the most likely route is the south and the most likely ending is in roughly the area where they're looking now. but, of course, nothing is final. we're not earth observation satellites, we're data satellites so it will require a lot of different skills and a lot of different people, not least the naked eye, to finally confirm what happened to 370. >> and to reach their

conclusion, inmarsat staffers use an unprecedented method to analyze the jet's automated satellite data. tom foreman shows us how they did it. >> reporter: what this search is coming down is basic mathematic detective work. think about this -- if you were to shout out to a canyon wall somewhere and wait for the echo to come back it would take a certain amount of time. if the wall were further away it would take longer. you combine that with the doppler effect, a scientific term weather people like to use a lot, and that's how we got this arc that they say exists in terms of where the plane might be. essentially they have this satellite in geostationary orbit, which means it's at the same spot above earth. we've moved it into a particular position so we can see it. it's not really where it is. 22,000 miles up. every hour it sends an electronic hand shake down to see where this plane is. if it's closer it would be one n one of the tighter rings in the middle here. if it's further out it will be

in one of the fourth out rings. by doing this, they were able to establish this idea that the plane moved through the rings in this fashion. why do they think it didn't go to the north? well, there's a lot of radar up there in different cities and towns and they probably would have seen it up there but the shape of the earth is not exactly round. you get a slightly different mathematical equation if you go that way as compared to the south. but just to make sure, they checked this equation they came up with against existing planes, planes that they knew were out there and they specifically knew the location of. it's sort of like if you did a test problem in arithmetic and you had the answers for the examples. then you get to the actual problem where row don't have the answer. the one where they didn't have the answer to is where was the malaysian air flight, then they ran this equation and they said it's right there, somewhere in that region. that's what's allowed them to cut a gigantic search area down into something much more manageable and much more

promising. okay, for more on the flight, the search, let's bring in alistair rosenshine, a former pie lot 30 years experience in the aviation industry. he joins us from london. alistair, thank you for being with us. now this we have the official word kind whereof the plane went down i guess that's the where question for the most part taken care of. it does not answer the how or the why but are we getting close? >> well, krchris mclaughlin fro inmarsat, his words were they knew roughly the area the aircraft is and that might be the best clue as to where the black boxes will be. that's the flight deck recorder and cockpit voice recorder. without which we are a very long way from working out what happened in this highly unusual accident. >> but now we know the plane continued to fly for six or seven hours, made this very lengthy trip along that southern arc. as we start to piece together

this investigation, are we looking at some kind of catastrophic event on board or is this more of a criminal investigation? >> well, first let me say i'm not absolutely clear that the aircraft actually flew along that arc or that that arc was the delineated a point on which the aircraft ended up. so two different things. the aircraft most probably flew in a straight line from its last turning point somewhere over the sea. are we any closer to finding it? i would feel more comfortable about confidence that this is, in fact, where the aircraft ended when they pick up some of the debris off the ocean. but how it got there, it could easily have been -- well, easily, one of the propositions i put forward is that it could be a double pilot incapacitation. that would account for no radio calls and the aircraft continuing on to an area where one cannot imagine anybody deliberately wanted to fly unless they wished to

deliberately end the flight in the indian ocean. >> which then leads to another question, how were they incapacitated? was there a fire in the cockpit or did someone overpower them? where do we go from there? >> well, i think a fire is highly unlikely. fires tend to -- when they take hold in an aircraft pretty much everything in an aircraft is flammable so it's unlikely to be that. i'm just trying to think through a few ideas. you must understand this is p e purely speculative, i don't know. i don't have a crystal ball but let's, for example, say the pilot's oxygen bottle was to explode -- and this has happened before. it would have the dual function of making a hole in the eric and leaving the pilots without any oxygen and therefore they'd start their turn back to kuala lumpur and their emergency procedure without any oxygen so hypoxia would take over fairly quickly and they would both become incapacitated. i mean, that's -- you know, that's a possible outcome here.

>> very, very quickly. if we don't get the data recorders, the so-called black boxes, there l this essentially remain a mystery? >> i suspect it probably will. i'm not an expert on finding sunken black boxes but it seems an awesome task after the air france 447 took two years and they knew exactly where that aircraft was and in this case they don't. so they really must try and locate those black boxes whilst there's some battery life on the flight deck recorder. it's only got a range of about 10 kilometers so you've got to literally be on top of it to find it and the faster they get throughout the better. >> what about 13 days left before those batteries completely run down. alistair, good speaking with you. we appreciate your insights. we know you have experience not just flying planes but also investigating this kind of stuff too. thank you for being with us. >> thank you very much. we're going to take a short break now and we're covering another story. just ahead, world powers

penalize russia. >> and they say there could be more costs to come if russian troops roll into ukraine. we'll take you live to the hague. that's up next.

snup welcome back. well, ukraine's acting president is ordering ukrainian troops and their families who are still in crimea to withdraw. >> he says that's because of threats to their lives. this comes after russian forces stormed a ukraine i don't knowian -- a ukrainian naval base and captured dozens of troops. >> key jeff is closely watching russia's military buildup. russia annexed crimea last week after a controversial referendum that ukraine and the west say was illegal. well, the u.s. and its allies have suspended russia's participation in the group of

eight industrialized nations. u.s. president barack obama is attending a second day of nuclear security meetings at the hague in the netherlands and white house correspondent michelle kaczynski joins me now from the hague. michelle, russia doesn't appear to be very concerned about its suspension from the g-8 going by foreign minister sergei lavrov's reaction, does it? >> reporter: he issued a response shortly after the announcement was made saying they don't cling to the g-8, russia does not see it as a problem that they won't be participating and the g-8 was formed by agreement so it's not as if the other members can vote russia out. what they can do is exactly what they did -- decide not to attend the g-8 meeting that russia was hosting this summer and instead have their own meeting. it's going to be in brussels at the same time that the g-8 was supposed to be. so now we're looking at the operating group here really being the g-7, just excluding russia. and in a press conference after

these moves were made the u.s. said, well, russia cares deeply about its standing in the world, it cares deeply it was going to host the g-8, that was a big deal for russia. it was increasing its standing on the world stage and it cares about participation but, as you said, clearly they don't care enough about their global standing to change course in crimea which other nations continue to call for, rosemary. >> and, of course, michelle, we're now hearing more talk of more cost to come if russia moves into eastern ukraine. of course, there's the buildup of the military causing a lot of concern for everyone, but all along russia's really thumbed its nose, hasn't it? >> yes, it seems to be the case. early on there were talks and, in fact, there are some -- i guess you could say there is some dialogue here in that the foreign minister of russia met with the foreign minister of

ukraine yesterday. no one really said how that talk went, what came out of it. i mean, clearly nothing has changed in the situation at hand. but we asked repeatedly the u.s. government what would be an escalation exactly for those larger costs to go into effect and by the same token what would be deescalation at this point? because the west has been continuing to call for a deescalation and saying that there's still a door open for a reversal of course, there's still a door open to dialogue. so how would things deescalate now? because as we said it's not as if russia's going to leave crimea. and the u.s. responded saying, well, a dialogue. if russia would simply sit down and talk directly to ukraine, that would be seen as something of a deescalation. an escalation, of course, would be a movement into ukraine, but the bigger question is, well, what about russia staying in crimea, is that an escalation? at this point those greater cost