The flight had been bringing holidaymakers back to Saint Petersburg, Russia's second largest city, when it disappeared off radar screens while over the Sinai peninsula.
International investigators have begun probing why a Russian airliner carrying 224 people crashed in a mountainous area of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, killing everyone on board in one of the deadliest Airbus incidents of the past decade.
Germany will send thousands of rejected asylum applicants back to the Balkans in the coming months as Berlin toughens its stance on economic migrants in the face of a refugee crisis.
Thousands of people protested against migrants in towns around the Czech Republic, a week after the UN slammed the country's treatment of new arrivals as "degrading".
German auto giant Volkswagen said that the global pollution-cheating scam it is currently embroiled in pushed it deeply into the red in the third quarter and would hurt earnings for the whole of 2015.
More than 2,000 years after the ancient Thracians crafted their exquisite jewelry from gold deposits in Bulgaria, hundreds are combing its rivers again in the hope of striking it rich in the EU's poorest country.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy vowed to use "all political and legal means" to block a Catalan independence bid after separatist parties submitted a bill on secession to the regional Catalan parliament.
The Catalan regional assembly opened a new session dominated for the first time by a secessionist majority that has vowed to break away from Spain within 18 months.
British Prime Minister David Cameron suffered a damaging blow over plans to cut help for low-income working families that drew flak from within his Conservative party.
The UN's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) warned that processed meats like sausages and ham cause bowel cancer, and red meat "probably" does too.
Montenegro's Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic brushed off violent protests calling for his resignation, insisting they were not a threat to his country's stability.