tops at NLO and NNLO

We briefly review the recent progress in the study of higher order corrections to hadron scattering processes involving top quark pairs in the final state. In particular, we discuss the Monte-Carlo simulation of the $pp \to t \bar{t} b \bar{b}$ process at the next-to-leading order with the help of the {\tt Helac-NLO} system, and the status of the soft-gluon resummation program for $pp \to t \bar{t}$ near threshold at the next-to-next-to-leading order.