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regional center, Donetsk, where pro-Russian protesters have occupied a government building for nearly a week.
• Interior Minister Arsen Avakov pledged a "very tough response" to the seizure.
• Video on a local website showed several armed men in balaclavas guarding the entrance to the police station.
• Protesters who have held the administration building in Donetsk since Sunday initially called for a referendum on secession but later reduced the demand to a vote on autonomy within Ukraine.
• ___

• PERTH, Australia (AP) -- With no new underwater signals detected, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Saturday that the massive search for the Malaysian jet would likely continue "for a long time" as electronic transmissions from the dying black boxes were fading fast.
• Abbott appeared to couch his comments from a day earlier while on a visit to China, where he met President Xi Jinping. He said Friday he was "very confident" signals heard by an Australian ship towing a U.S. Navy device that detects flight recorder pings are coming from the Boeing 777.
• He continued to express this belief on Saturday, but added that the job of finding the plane that disappeared March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing remains arduous.
• "No one should underestimate the difficulties of the task still ahead of us," he said on the last day of his China trip. We have "very considerably narrowed down the search area, but trying to locate anything 4.5 kilometers beneath the surface of the ocean about 1,000 kilometers from land is a massive, massive task and it is likely to continue for a long time to come," Abbott said.
• After analyzing satellite data, officials believe the plane with 239 people aboard flew off course for an unknown reason and went down in the southern Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia.
• ___

• ORLAND, Calif. (AP) -- Three months after sharing a picture-perfect Christmas

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