And now for an MH17 update from RFE/RL's news desk:
Dutch experts have arrived near the Malaysia Airlines crash site in eastern Ukraine, hoping to recover debris from the airliner.
The passenger was jet shot down in July over rebel-held territory, killing all 298 people on board, the majority from the Netherlands.
The head of the recovery team, Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, said today that the experts were "absolutely ready" to start collecting debris.
But rebels were quoted as saying negotiations stumbled over a protocol on gathering the wreckage.
Ukraine and Western countries accuse pro-Russian separatists of shooting the plane down with a Russian-supplied missile, a charge denied by the rebels and Moscow.
In Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks today with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on the sidelines of an Asian summit.
The Kremlin said both men called for the probe to be speeded up.
Abbott has said he would "shirtfront" Putin over the plane's downing when he hosts a G20 summit in Australia on November 15-16, meaning he would not mince words.
Twenty-seven of the victims were Australians.
(AFP, BBC)
Here is a wrap from our news desk of comments in Kyiv by the OSCE's Micael Bociurkiw:
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) says the risk of an escalation in violence in conflict-wracked eastern Ukraine is "rising."
Michael Bociurkiw of the OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine told a press conference in Kyiv on November 11 that more than two months after a cease-fire agreement between Ukraine and the pro-Russian separatists, "the firing has not ceased."
There are concerns that pro-Russian rebels could be gearing up for a fresh offensive in eastern Ukraine despite the September 5 agreement.
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel on November 5 reiterated that EU member states were considering extending travel bans to newly-elected separatist officials in eastern Ukraine.
However, Merkel, speaking in Berlin, said the European Union was not planning new sanctions against Russia.
(AFP, Reuters)
Some interesting comments from the new EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini in Berlin today on the situation in Ukraine, which she says is "clearly going in the wrong direction." However, no one seems to have asked her about how one of her spokespeople is married to a Gazprom lobbyist. (Mogherini starts taking about Ukraine around the 3-minute mark):