Main News of November 19

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

RUSSIA

* Crash investigators in Russia said that flight recorders from a plane that crashed at Kazan airport, killing all 50 people on board, show that the pilots attempted to land manually as one of the autopilot mechanisms was turned off

* Russia is planning to strengthen its integrated regional air defense network with Belarus and set up similar joint networks with Armenia and Kazakhstan, President Vladimir Putin said

* Another suspected accomplice in a deadly bombing in Russia’s southern city of Volgograd last month was shot dead in the turbulent North Caucasus republic of Dagestan, a police source said

* Two district courts in St. Petersburg granted bail to several more Greenpeace activists awaiting trial, signaling a possible softening in the authorities’ stance over the case

* The proportion of Russians who consider themselves patriots has dropped by eight percent since President Vladimir Putin first took office 13 years ago, according to a new survey released by the independent Levada Center pollster

WORLD

* The US Senate has passed a unanimous resolution calling on Ukraine to release jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko as Kiev hopes to sign an association agreement with the European Union

* The international chemical weapons watchdog overseeing the removal of Syria’s stockpile of poison gas is in talks with several countries to host the material, Russia’s foreign minister said

* The leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia met in Vienna in an attempt to resolve a decades-old territorial conflict, an Armenian diplomat said

* A senior European Union diplomat in the energy-rich nation of Turkmenistan said that current conditions are ideal for the construction of a natural gas pipeline across the Caspian Sea

* Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili officially confirmed Irakli Garibashvili for the post of the South Caucasus nation’s prime minister

* The US space agency NASA launched its space probe designed to study the upper atmosphere of Mars in a bid to understand how the Red Planet’s climate changed over the course of billions of years