MH17: International monitors say their movements are being limited by separatist rebels at the eastern Ukraine crash site of Malaysian Airlines flight 17. The Ukraine government says Russia is helping to destroy evidence that the jet was shot down with a missile.

   Body removal is going slowly and the dead are beginning to decay in the summer sun. Witnesses say luggage was rifled and looted, and wallets and purses emptied of cash before authorities arrived.

The shoot down of the Malaysian jetliner is an international outrage, President Obama said yesterday as he called for an immediate truce in eastern Ukraine to allow an investigation and recovery of bodies. “Nearly 300 innocent lives were taken … men, women, children, infants … who had nothing to do with the crisis in Ukraine,” the president said.  “Their deaths are an outrage of unspeakable proportions.” One American man was on board.

Obama said the incident points to an immediate need to defuse the Ukraine crisis and end the fighting. “I think that this certainly will be a wake-up call for Europe and the world that there are consequences to an escalating conflict in eastern Ukraine; that it is not going to be localized, it is not going to be contained,” Obama said. 

About 100 of the 298 passengers were going to an international AIDS conference in Australia. The most prominent were Dr. Joep Lange, 59, and his business/life partner Jacqueline van Tongeren, 64. They had five children.

Gaza: Israeli troops say they have discovered a dozen cross-border tunnels as they continue to fight militants in Gaza. More that 330 Palestinians are reported dead as combat stretches into its second week. One Israeli soldier was reported killed by “friendly” fire.

Smoke: Wildfire east of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State has destroyed at least 100 homes. Thirty-five homes were lost in the town of Pateros, and the rest were scattered throughout the area. At least 24 large uncontained wildfires are burning in the northwest. The biggest has burned nearly 400,000 acres.

Shake: The eastern United States has a higher risk of earthquake than previously thought, according to the US Geological Survey. The hotspot is the juncture of Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. But the biggest area of earthquake likelihood is still the whole West Coast from Canada to Mexico.

Missing: The body of the late top 40 DJ Casey Kasem is missing, according to his daughters. Kasem’s body had been taken to a mortuary and his daughters obtained a court order to for an autopsy. But when they went to the mortuary Kasem’s body was no longer there, evidently spirited away by his wife Jean. The kids by another marriage and Jean had been battling over Casey in life, and it continues in death.

Bigfoot: NBC News is doing the bigfoot two-step after relieving a reporter of duty in Gaza, then bringing him back. Ayman Mohyeldin had been reporting from Gaza and actually witnessed the killing of four Palestinian boys by Israeli naval fire. But the network brought in chief foreign correspondent Richard Engle to tell the story that night. In network news “bigfooting” is replacing a reporter with a bigger name reporter, and Engle is one of the biggest. After howls of protest within the network, and from the outside, Mohyeldin was sent back to Gaza, where he will continue to report standing on his smaller feet.

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