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With no wreckage found yet that can be linked to Flight MH370 and time beginning to run out for a homing beacon on the 'black box' flight data recorder, Malaysia's police chief says the mystery of the missing airliner may never be solved.

Khalid Abu Bakar says the criminal investigation into the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight could "go on and on and on.

"We have to clear every little thing," he told reporters. "At the end of the investigations, we may not even know the real cause. We may not even know the reason for this incident."

His remarks follow a similar assessment on Tuesday from the head of the Australian-led search effort, retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston.

In comments on Wednesday, Bakar said the investigation is now focused on pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, and the cabin crew after police had "cleared" all passengers on the plane's manifest.

Meanwhile, the British submarine HMS Tireless has arrived in the southern Indian Ocean to join in the search of some 85,000 square miles far off the west coast of Australia, but fog and thunderstorms in the area were complicating efforts to find the Boeing 777 that disappeared seemingly without a trace on March 8.

Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre, or JACC, issued a statement on Wednesday saying "up to 10 planes and nine ships" were engaged in the search.

"The weather forecast for today's search is for marginal conditions, with areas of broken cloud, sea fog and isolated thunderstorms, reducing visibility," the statement said.

On Tuesday, Malaysia authorities released a full transcript of communications between the flight and the control tower in Kuala Lumpur.

The extent of the damage isn't yet clear and the six deaths reported so far may be followed by news of other fatalities.

But on the morning after a massive, 8.2 magnitude earthquake off the coast of northern Chile there are sighs of relief there and in neighboring Peru.

"At a time when horrific natural disasters have become an everyday part of the news cycle, it appeared one finally missed," The Washington Post writes.

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The birth mother of Amber Marie Rose, the teen whose 2005 death was the first linked to an ignition switch problem that's triggered a massive recall of General Motors vehicles, says that through a Facebook group for families of victims, she's identified at least 29 fatalities due to the defect. GM only acknowledges 13 deaths.

"I found 29 so far myself," Laura Christian tells All Things Considered. She said she's determined the additional fatalities using crash data, police reports or eyewitnesses [who reported] the airbags did not deploy."

GM has announced the recall of 2.6 million vehicles to search for the faulty ignition switches.

Christian was reunited with Amber, her biological daughter, a year before the girl's fatal accident at age 16.

Amber's accident was attributed to a faulty ignition switch in her Chevrolet Cobalt, which apparently shut off the engine while the car was in motion – cutting power to the air bags, which didn't inflate when the car hit a tree in Dentsville, Md.

But alcohol and excessive speed were also cited as factors in the crash, although Christian insists she's "very confident" that her daughter would have survived if airbags had deployed as designed.

"I spoke to the EMTs shortly after [the accident] and they told me that had the airbags deployed that she would have been injured, but she would have been alive today," she tells ATC host Robert Siegel.

Christian believes that Congress should increase the maximum of $35 million penalty for delaying the reporting of potentially life-threatening problems.

"That may sound like a lot to us as individuals, but to a corporation like GM, who made over $3 billion last year, that's nothing. It's hardly a deterrent," she says.

She also wants passage of a bill sponsored by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal to require earlier reporting of defects to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, or NHTSA.

"It shouldn't come to a fatality, especially when it's coming from a car that has a defective part," Christian says. "GM knew about this defect, they knew about it in 2001, they OK'd it going forward. They should have been required to pass on that information to the NHTSA from day one."

In testimony on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, GM CEO Mary Barra expressed "sincere apologies to everyone who has been affected by this recall ... especially to the families and friends of those who lost their lives or were injured."

"I cannot tell you why it took years for a safety defect to be announced," Barra said in her opening testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "I can tell you that we will find out."

On how Brad Katsuyama — who worked in New York for the Royal Bank of Canada — discovered the system was rigged

He has 25 traders working for him, he deals in hundreds of millions of dollars of shares every day, he takes risk in the market — and it's in early 2008 he senses something's wrong. What he senses is, when he looks at his trading screens ... his screens will tell him say, that there are 10,000 shares of Microsoft offered at $30 a share if he wanted to buy them.

And normally, up to this point in his life, if he hit his button and said "buy" he'd get the shares for $30 a share, but all of a sudden, when he hits the button on his computer terminal, the shares disappear. It's like someone knows he's trying to buy Microsoft and the price of Microsoft goes up before he can get it. He doesn't understand why this is happening and that's the beginning of the story.

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