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MORE THAN A week after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 came down in rebel-held eastern Ukraine, human remains are still at the crash site, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said today.
The majority of the 298 people killed when the plane was apparently shot down by a missile were Dutch, but there were also 28 Australian nationals and nine permanent residents onboard.
Abbott is sending 190 Australian Federal Police to the Netherlands, along with a small number of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel, to participate in a planned Dutch-led operation to secure the crash site.
“Yesterday Australian officials again had access to the sites,” Abbott said.
“Plainly there are unrecovered body remains in the area. And it’s the presence of unrecovered remains that makes it more important than ever that an international team be dispatched to the site.”
Questioned on concerns about sending troops into the volatile situation in Ukraine, Abbott stressed that Australia’s involvement in the planned mission was only to secure the remains and help the investigation.
“It is, I stress, a humanitarian mission. Others can get involved if they wish in the politics of eastern Europe, our sole concern is to claim our dead and to bring them home,” he said.
“When you’ve got major humanitarian effort, as we have, it’s normal and natural to have ADF assistance and many countries have got their defence personnel on the ground already,” he added, saying this included Dutch and Malaysian military personnel.
Abbott said every day the crash site remained unsecured, there was more risk of interference and that bodies would deteriorate due to their exposure to the elements.
“So we do want to get this done as quickly as we humanly can and that’s why we are exploring all options in Ukraine now,” he added.
Abbott said Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who was in Kiev yesterday to meet with her Ukrainian counterpart, could return to the city in coming days.
He said the last of the remains of MH17 victims which have already been placed in a train and sent to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv were to be sent later today to the Netherlands to begin the process of identification and repatriation.
- © AFP 2014.
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I don’t get from the article what the benefits of being a data hosting hub country are? Other than perhaps prestige and increased regulatory role.
Benefits of pharma and software tech multinationals are proven, with large numbers of high paying jobs.
Data centers aren’t big scale employers, additionally they are energy hungry industries that will not help our push to meet energy reduction targets.
The associated data science careers referred to in the article, arent typically located at the data centres, we could strive to excell in these disciplins without the data centres.
As a country we need to be discerning about the type of industry that we court. If it is to be huge banks of servers, we need to insist on zero emission environmentaly friendly facilities.
To be a global data hub we need data centers! Was it 2yrs later Apple finally gave up on planning for a 1billion investment in a data center in Galway a few years ago ? In the mean time a similar project started In Denmark was complete and operational. They are now proposing to build another in Denmark where they propose to provide unwanted heat to the local community.
Is this just a backup plan ?
The real challenge is hiring academics only, the US have a growing pool of criminals to cut deals with, good hackers either go to jail or work for the state. We don’t have criminals at that level here. Couple of good professionals in Cork but I am unsure where we can get the talent to really enforce the team behind these new task forces. We need people who can reverse engineer malware, are constantly updated on backdoors in circulation, along with 0day flaws and dissect packets, that’s before we even look at the problems with hardware from certain regions.
@Padraig Carey: *”enforce the team” = “harden the team”
It’s almost embarrassing to think the best in Irish tech management and government believe the data management companies like Amazon etc are here for anything other than cold weather cheap power and tax breaks
Perfect place for Data Hubs. Not to extreme weather patterns so cosy of electricity is not so high with cooling units and not really a chance of a earthquake or some other natural disaster.
Downside not great for climate change targets and don’t really employ many.
have your say