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lines jet will be expanded to include a massive swath of ocean floor that may take up to eight months to thoroughly search, Australia's prime minister said Monday.
• The U.S. Navy's Bluefin 21 robotic submarine has spent weeks scouring the initial search area for Flight 370 in the remote Indian Ocean far off Australia's west coast, but has found no trace of the missing aircraft, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said. Officials are now looking to bring in new equipment that can search a larger patch of seabed for the plane, Abbott said.
• "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," Abbott told reporters. "Therefore, we are moving from the current phase to a phase which is focused on searching the ocean floor over a much larger area."
• An aerial search for the plane that has dragged on for six weeks will officially end on Monday, the search coordination center later confirmed.
• Radar and satellite data show the jet carrying 239 passengers and crew veered far off course on March 8 for unknown reasons during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. Analysis indicates it would have run out of fuel in the remote section of ocean where the search has been focused. But not a single piece of debris has been recovered since the massive multinational hunt began.
• ___

• The Los Angeles Clippers have Monday off.
• Adam Silver likely won't get that same luxury.
• Facing the first real crisis of his short tenure as NBA commissioner, Silver is under pressure to swiftly bring some sort of resolution to the scandal surrounding Clippers owner Donald Sterling and the racially charged comments he allegedly made in a recorded conversation, portions of which were released over the weekend by TMZ and Deadspin.
• The matter will not go away anytime soon, but the players' association is hoping Silver rules before the Clippers play host to Golden State in a critical Game 5 of their knotted-up Western Conference first-round series on Tuesday night. That means plenty of eyeballs will remain on the commissioner's office Monday, waiting to see if any word is coming.
• "This situation is a massive distraction for the league right now," said Sacra

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