The fierce backlash to the CDC’s recent decision to shorten the recommended isolation period for people who test positive for Covid-19 was the latest in a series of communications blunders so severe that they have now become a meme.
Communication is an essential part of any public health response. But US health agencies have struggled with it since the very beginning of the pandemic, when government officials initially advised against wearing masks in early 2020 before reversing themselves to recommend nearly
It appeared the initial guidance may have been issued in order to preserve enough masks for health care workers. Government officials were warning at the time that hospitals’ supplies could be depleted at a critical moment if there was a run on masks. It was the first of the pandemic’s “noble lies,” The Week’s Ryan Cooper wrote in a blistering essay on the paternalistic treatment of the US public that has undermined the country’s Covid-19 response.
America’s public health institutions have failed to communicate effectively with the US public throughout the pandemic for two reasons: either they have been left trying to defend poor policies, or the messaging has taken the place of creating any kind of coherent policy at all
Read more at:
Why the CDC’s guidelines on isolation, boosters, and masks are so confusing - Vox
Showing posts with label confusing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label confusing. Show all posts
2/6/22
1/9/22
Coronavirus - a communication disaster: How Communication around COVID Fuels a Mistrust of Science - by Joseph V. Sakran
Throughout the pandemic, we have seen how inconsistent messaging around COVID has fueled doubt around science, giving place to consistently messaged misinformation that has found its way into communities all across America. This has undermined our ability to implement data-driven policymaking.
Even before the pandemic, science has been under attack with debates over whether climate change is real, whether tobacco or vaping causes lung damage, whether guns are associated with gun violence, and whether mental illness is simply a chemical imbalance or more broadly related to a bio-psycho-social model.
We have seen anti-vaccine sentiment prevail after Andrew Wakefield’s work linking autism to vaccines was published. Dozens of peer-reviewed studies have found exactly the opposite. Wakefield’s paper was retracted, and he’s been resoundingly discredited as a scientist, but the damage is done. Prior to COVID-19, we saw measles outbreaks reach their highest numbers since measles was all but eliminated. Why? Pockets of American communities, fearing autism, simply refused vaccination. Children died of a preventable disease.
As the pandemic continues, our public health agencies, starting at the very top, need to be reliable, evidence-driven, and consistent sources of information. But the CDC is not alone. Our top drug regulatory agency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has shown inconsistency that not only affects the general public, but everyone who is involved in health care delivery.
Read more at: How Communication around COVID Fuels a Mistrust of Science - Scientific American
Even before the pandemic, science has been under attack with debates over whether climate change is real, whether tobacco or vaping causes lung damage, whether guns are associated with gun violence, and whether mental illness is simply a chemical imbalance or more broadly related to a bio-psycho-social model.
We have seen anti-vaccine sentiment prevail after Andrew Wakefield’s work linking autism to vaccines was published. Dozens of peer-reviewed studies have found exactly the opposite. Wakefield’s paper was retracted, and he’s been resoundingly discredited as a scientist, but the damage is done. Prior to COVID-19, we saw measles outbreaks reach their highest numbers since measles was all but eliminated. Why? Pockets of American communities, fearing autism, simply refused vaccination. Children died of a preventable disease.
As the pandemic continues, our public health agencies, starting at the very top, need to be reliable, evidence-driven, and consistent sources of information. But the CDC is not alone. Our top drug regulatory agency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has shown inconsistency that not only affects the general public, but everyone who is involved in health care delivery.
Read more at: How Communication around COVID Fuels a Mistrust of Science - Scientific American
5/15/21
International Travel: Vaccinated Travelers Face Chaos and Confusion - by Stephen Hiltner
More than 105 million people in the United States are fully vaccinated. Greece, Iceland and Croatia, among a growing list of countries, are now open to American tourists. Airlines are resuming overseas flights. And perhaps the biggest development of all: Come summer, fully vaccinated Americans will once again be welcome across Europe.
But the optimism may be premature. At the moment, the broader reality is more chaotic, and more sobering.<
Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/travel/covid-vaccinated-travel-reality.html
But the optimism may be premature. At the moment, the broader reality is more chaotic, and more sobering.<
Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/travel/covid-vaccinated-travel-reality.html
2/16/21
The Netherlands - confusion court rulings : Covid: Dutch crisis as court orders end to Covid curfew - but later, a higher court ruled curfew could stay in place
A court in The Hague has told the Dutch government that an overnight curfew to reduce the spread of coronavirus should be lifted, ruling that it breaches the right to free movement.
The court said the 21:00 to 04:30 curfew was imposed by an emergency law when there was no "acute emergency".
Later, a higher court ruled that the curfew could stay in place pending an appeal on Friday.
The curfew, imposed in January, led to rioting in several Dutch cities.
Police were patrolling streets near the Dutch parliament on Tuesday evening but no unrest has been reported so far.
The earlier court ruling - which said the curfew should be lifted immediately - was a victory for campaign group Viruswaarheid (Virus Truth) and a major upset for the government.
Read more at: Covid: Dutch crisis as court orders end to Covid curfew - BBC News
The court said the 21:00 to 04:30 curfew was imposed by an emergency law when there was no "acute emergency".
Later, a higher court ruled that the curfew could stay in place pending an appeal on Friday.
The curfew, imposed in January, led to rioting in several Dutch cities.
Police were patrolling streets near the Dutch parliament on Tuesday evening but no unrest has been reported so far.
The earlier court ruling - which said the curfew should be lifted immediately - was a victory for campaign group Viruswaarheid (Virus Truth) and a major upset for the government.
Read more at: Covid: Dutch crisis as court orders end to Covid curfew - BBC News
1/5/21
The Netherlands: Dutch government criticized for late start to vaccinations - by Mike Corder
The Dutch government came under heavy criticism from lawmakers Tuesday over a COVID-19 vaccination plan that has the first shots set to be administered on Wednesday, making the Netherlands the last European Union nation to begin vaccinations.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte conceded that his government had focused in its preparations on the easy-to-handle AstraZeneca vaccine, which has not yet been cleared for use in the EU, and not the vaccine produced by U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech, which is the only shot so far given the green light by the EU’s medicines agency.
“This is outrageous,” Geert Wilders, leader of the largest Dutch opposition party, said during a debate that was arranged during Parliament’s winter recess. “It is not a strategy, but chaos — total chaos — and the preparations were poor and too late.”
Read more at: Dutch government criticized for late start to vaccinations
Prime Minister Mark Rutte conceded that his government had focused in its preparations on the easy-to-handle AstraZeneca vaccine, which has not yet been cleared for use in the EU, and not the vaccine produced by U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech, which is the only shot so far given the green light by the EU’s medicines agency.
“This is outrageous,” Geert Wilders, leader of the largest Dutch opposition party, said during a debate that was arranged during Parliament’s winter recess. “It is not a strategy, but chaos — total chaos — and the preparations were poor and too late.”
Read more at: Dutch government criticized for late start to vaccinations
USA: Trump presidency's final days: 'In his mind, he will not have lost' - by Tara McKelvey
Trump's effort to contest the election results in Pennsylvania failed on Friday, not long after the so-called hearing, and even that had a shaky legal foundation. An appeals court judge said there was "no basis" for his challenge. A certification of ballots showed President-elect Joe Biden won the state by more than 80,000 votes.
Read more at: Trump presidency's final days: 'In his mind, he will not have lost' - BBC News
Read more at: Trump presidency's final days: 'In his mind, he will not have lost' - BBC News
11/4/20
US Election 2020 - final results will be days off: Tighter than expected vote may take days to resolve
Mr Trump, a Republican, claimed to have won and vowed to launch a Supreme Court challenge, baselessly alleging fraud, while Mr Biden, a Democrat, said he was "on track" to victory.
Read more at: US Election 2020: Tighter than expected vote may take days to resolve - BBC News
Read more at: US Election 2020: Tighter than expected vote may take days to resolve - BBC News
8/26/19
7/9/19
Britain-Brexit: Boris Johnson is heading for a landslide victory – and then disaster - by John Rentoul
There is only one question in British politics at the moment. Can a no-deal Brexit be stopped? Yes it can, and so Boris Johnson is set to become prime minister on a false prospectus.
According to YouGov, 74 per cent of Conservative Party members intend to elect him as leader – on a pledge to leave the EU, deal or no deal, on 31 October. That is a promise he cannot guarantee to deliver.
Johnson’s blithe assertion that the world is as he wants it to be has confused people. Surely it would be hard to stop a determined prime minister from taking Britain out of the EU without a deal? So it is worth setting out, again, how parliament can prevent such an outcome.
\
It is possible, of course, that Johnson will agree some minor changes to Theresa May’s deal within nine weeks of becoming prime minister and secure the approval of the Commons for them, but it is hard to see where those extra votes would come from.
That’s why I think Johnson will win the leadership by a landslide, and then, as prime minister, collide with reality with – for him – disastrous results.
Read more at: Boris Johnson is heading for a landslide victory – and then disaster | The Independent
The Digest Group
Almere-Digest
EU-Digest
Insure-Digest
Turkish-Digest
For additional information, including advertising rates - e-mail: Freeplanet@protonmail.com
According to YouGov, 74 per cent of Conservative Party members intend to elect him as leader – on a pledge to leave the EU, deal or no deal, on 31 October. That is a promise he cannot guarantee to deliver.
Johnson’s blithe assertion that the world is as he wants it to be has confused people. Surely it would be hard to stop a determined prime minister from taking Britain out of the EU without a deal? So it is worth setting out, again, how parliament can prevent such an outcome.
\
It is possible, of course, that Johnson will agree some minor changes to Theresa May’s deal within nine weeks of becoming prime minister and secure the approval of the Commons for them, but it is hard to see where those extra votes would come from.
That’s why I think Johnson will win the leadership by a landslide, and then, as prime minister, collide with reality with – for him – disastrous results.
Read more at: Boris Johnson is heading for a landslide victory – and then disaster | The Independent
The Digest Group
Almere-Digest
EU-Digest
Insure-Digest
Turkish-Digest
For additional information, including advertising rates - e-mail: Freeplanet@protonmail.com
4/1/19
BRITAIN-Brexit: Getting more confusing by the minute
UK lawmakers vote down all four alternatives to rejected Brexit deal MPs on Monday once again failed to find a majority on any alternative Brexit plan before them, leaving Britain's chaotic path towards leaving the EU mired in uncertainty less than two weeks before its departure date.
Read more at
12/22/17
Spain: Catalan Separatists secure majority while Inés Arrimadas’ Ciutadans wins the regional elections
Situation confusing: “Today we have opted for the union of all Catalans, we
have voted to unite, in favor of coexistence, common sense and a
Catalonia for all,” said Arrimadas as her supporters chanted “president,
president” in Plaça d’Espanya, Barcelona.
Read more: = bCatalan Separatists secure majority while Inés Arrimadas’ Ciutadans wins the regional elections
According to the winner of Thursday’s Catalan elections,
this victory “makes it more visible that Catalonia is plural” and that
has sent a “message” to Spain and the world that “the social majority
feels Catalan, Spanish and European, and will continue to do so.“
As of this Thursday, “it has become clearer that the
social majority of Catalans is in favor of the union,” and assured that
the separatists “will never be able to speak on behalf of Catalonia.”
Read more: = bCatalan Separatists secure majority while Inés Arrimadas’ Ciutadans wins the regional elections
3/21/17
US Market Place:Dow finally reacting to Trump disorganized confused administration and sinks more than 200 points
Stocks posted their worst day of the year Tuesday as banks faced
pressure from falling yields and traders turned their eyes to a key
House vote.
The Dow fell 237 points, with Goldman Sachs contributing the lion's share of the losses. The S&P 500 dropped 1.24 percent, with financials falling more than 2.5 percent to lead decliners. The indexes were also posted their first decline of at least 1 percent since October.
"We're settling back into the middle of the range in the 10-year yield. That certainly has taken the air out of financials lately," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities.
U.S. Treasury yields traded mixed, with the benchmark 10-year note yield holding around 2.42 percent and the short-term two-year note yield trading around 1.26 percent. Weaker yields lead to lower interest rates on loans, which hurt financial stocks, particularly banks.
Read more: Dow sinks more than 200 points as stocks post worst day of the year
The Dow fell 237 points, with Goldman Sachs contributing the lion's share of the losses. The S&P 500 dropped 1.24 percent, with financials falling more than 2.5 percent to lead decliners. The indexes were also posted their first decline of at least 1 percent since October.
"We're settling back into the middle of the range in the 10-year yield. That certainly has taken the air out of financials lately," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities.
U.S. Treasury yields traded mixed, with the benchmark 10-year note yield holding around 2.42 percent and the short-term two-year note yield trading around 1.26 percent. Weaker yields lead to lower interest rates on loans, which hurt financial stocks, particularly banks.
Read more: Dow sinks more than 200 points as stocks post worst day of the year
3/6/15
Pharmaceutical Industry: Do U.S. Consumers Foot the Bill for Cheap Drugs in Europe and Canada? - not really !
In an an article under the heading U.S. Consumers Foot the Bill for Cheap Drugs in Europe and Canada Megan McArdle
wrote in the Bloomberg View. "
A few days ago, when I remarked that U.S. pharmaceutical prices subsidize much of the research that benefits the rest of the world, I got various forms of push back, so it seems worth running, briefly, through the logic:
1. Both critics and boosters of pharma agree that prices are higher here than elsewhere.
2. Therefore, the U.S. accounts for a disproportionate share of pharmaceutical profits for companies that develop new drugs.*
3. Profits provide both incentive to develop new drugs and the cash with which to do so.
4. Drug companies are, in fact, needed to bring large numbers of drugs to market.
5. New drugs are valuable.
That’s not a very interesting argument, though it is one we’ll surely be having over and over again. But there was an interesting question asked in the comments: How do we make Europe and Canada and Japan bear part of the costs of drug development? I’m going to sound like a Negative Nellie here, but the answer is, we don’t.
Let’s start by pointing out that the problem is not that we’re paying Canada’s “share” of development for the drugs we get. This is not how markets work. Drug companies charge what the market will bear for the drugs they make, both here and abroad. Here, where the market is largely private, that share is small. Abroad, where the “negotiation” consists of governments telling you what they are willing to pay, even as you know that they can always change the law to shorten your patent term so that other countries can manufacture your product, using your research for free.
There’s more to it than that, to be fair. Yet when negotiating with other governments, pharmaceutical companies operate at a severe disadvantage, not because the governments’ buying power is so vast (the national health-care systems of Canada and many European countries cover fewer people than Aetna), but because the people you’re negotiating with can change the rules under which your product gets sold. At any point they can say, like Lord Vader, “I am altering the deal. Pray that I do not alter it any further.”
But if Canada started paying more, that wouldn’t mean we’d pay less. Drug companies are charging what they think we will pay. The result of Canadians and Europeans paying less is not that we pay more for drugs; it’s that fewer drugs get developed. To the extent that they are harming us, it is in hindering the development of cures or better treatments that we are missing, and don’t even know about.
Unfortunately, this is a classic case of Bastiat’s dilemma. It is easy for each country’s government to see the high prices that people are paying and intervene to lower them. It is hard for each country’s government, much less its citizens, to envision the new medical treatments that they might get if they paid more for drugs. So their incentives are heavily skewed toward controlling the price here and now, even if that means losing future cures.
Drug development is essentially a giant international collective-action problem. The U.S. has kept it from being a total disaster because we don’t have good centralized control of our insurance market, and our political system is pretty disorganized and easy to lobby. If that changes -- and maybe we just changed it! -- we’ll knock down the prices of drugs to near the marginal cost using government fiat, and I expect that innovation in this sector will grind to a halt. Stuff will still be coming out of academic labs, but no one is going to take those promising targets and turn them into actual drugs.
I don’t expect this to happen right away, but if the Affordable Care Act does result in some form of pharmaceutical price controls, I think we’ll see the death of Big Pharma, after which we will realize, much to the surprise of folks such as Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, that they did a bit more than just printing pretty labels and inventing new cures for baldness.
There are some promising alternatives. The main two that have been suggested are prizes and having the U.S. government get into the business of developing actual drugs, rather than just funding basic research. I’m in favor of trying both of these approaches. But so far, prizes have not proved themselves as ways to fund what is essentially commercial product development -- at least, not at the same level that patents do. Nor has the government. As we’ve just seen from the government’s attempt to develop a Travelocity-like site for health insurance, there are reasons to think that government might not be very good at that sort of thing. I don’t mean to slur the government -- governments absolutely have developed drugs in the past. But these are not the majority, and government processes often make it hard to do things that companies do easily."
Our take on this editorial in Bloomberg by Megan McArdle is that the headline and the facts in the story at times somewhat confusing because it gives the impression that all research is done in the US by US companies and institutions. Fact is that among the 10 top global pharmaceutical companies 5 come from the US and 5 from Europe.
These are: 1) Pfizer, USA 2) Novartis, Switzerland 3) Sanofi, France 4) Roche Holding, Switzerland 5) Merck & Co., USA 6) GlaxoSmithKline, UK, 7) AstraZeneca, UK 8) Eli Lilly & Co., USA, 9) Abbott Laboratories, USA 10) McKesson, USA
On the other hand one can fully agree with the statement on the Affordable Care Act, which notes "that if the Affordable Care Act result in some form of pharmaceutical price controls, I think we’ll see the death of Big Pharma, after which we will realize, much to the surprise of folks such as Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, that they did a bit more than just printing pretty labels and inventing new cures for baldness".
Anyway,at present, whatever way you look at it, the pricing structure differences between the US, Canada and Europe are abnormal, to say the least.
EU-Digest
A few days ago, when I remarked that U.S. pharmaceutical prices subsidize much of the research that benefits the rest of the world, I got various forms of push back, so it seems worth running, briefly, through the logic:
1. Both critics and boosters of pharma agree that prices are higher here than elsewhere.
2. Therefore, the U.S. accounts for a disproportionate share of pharmaceutical profits for companies that develop new drugs.*
3. Profits provide both incentive to develop new drugs and the cash with which to do so.
4. Drug companies are, in fact, needed to bring large numbers of drugs to market.
5. New drugs are valuable.
That’s not a very interesting argument, though it is one we’ll surely be having over and over again. But there was an interesting question asked in the comments: How do we make Europe and Canada and Japan bear part of the costs of drug development? I’m going to sound like a Negative Nellie here, but the answer is, we don’t.
Let’s start by pointing out that the problem is not that we’re paying Canada’s “share” of development for the drugs we get. This is not how markets work. Drug companies charge what the market will bear for the drugs they make, both here and abroad. Here, where the market is largely private, that share is small. Abroad, where the “negotiation” consists of governments telling you what they are willing to pay, even as you know that they can always change the law to shorten your patent term so that other countries can manufacture your product, using your research for free.
There’s more to it than that, to be fair. Yet when negotiating with other governments, pharmaceutical companies operate at a severe disadvantage, not because the governments’ buying power is so vast (the national health-care systems of Canada and many European countries cover fewer people than Aetna), but because the people you’re negotiating with can change the rules under which your product gets sold. At any point they can say, like Lord Vader, “I am altering the deal. Pray that I do not alter it any further.”
But if Canada started paying more, that wouldn’t mean we’d pay less. Drug companies are charging what they think we will pay. The result of Canadians and Europeans paying less is not that we pay more for drugs; it’s that fewer drugs get developed. To the extent that they are harming us, it is in hindering the development of cures or better treatments that we are missing, and don’t even know about.
Unfortunately, this is a classic case of Bastiat’s dilemma. It is easy for each country’s government to see the high prices that people are paying and intervene to lower them. It is hard for each country’s government, much less its citizens, to envision the new medical treatments that they might get if they paid more for drugs. So their incentives are heavily skewed toward controlling the price here and now, even if that means losing future cures.
Drug development is essentially a giant international collective-action problem. The U.S. has kept it from being a total disaster because we don’t have good centralized control of our insurance market, and our political system is pretty disorganized and easy to lobby. If that changes -- and maybe we just changed it! -- we’ll knock down the prices of drugs to near the marginal cost using government fiat, and I expect that innovation in this sector will grind to a halt. Stuff will still be coming out of academic labs, but no one is going to take those promising targets and turn them into actual drugs.
I don’t expect this to happen right away, but if the Affordable Care Act does result in some form of pharmaceutical price controls, I think we’ll see the death of Big Pharma, after which we will realize, much to the surprise of folks such as Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, that they did a bit more than just printing pretty labels and inventing new cures for baldness.
There are some promising alternatives. The main two that have been suggested are prizes and having the U.S. government get into the business of developing actual drugs, rather than just funding basic research. I’m in favor of trying both of these approaches. But so far, prizes have not proved themselves as ways to fund what is essentially commercial product development -- at least, not at the same level that patents do. Nor has the government. As we’ve just seen from the government’s attempt to develop a Travelocity-like site for health insurance, there are reasons to think that government might not be very good at that sort of thing. I don’t mean to slur the government -- governments absolutely have developed drugs in the past. But these are not the majority, and government processes often make it hard to do things that companies do easily."
Our take on this editorial in Bloomberg by Megan McArdle is that the headline and the facts in the story at times somewhat confusing because it gives the impression that all research is done in the US by US companies and institutions. Fact is that among the 10 top global pharmaceutical companies 5 come from the US and 5 from Europe.
These are: 1) Pfizer, USA 2) Novartis, Switzerland 3) Sanofi, France 4) Roche Holding, Switzerland 5) Merck & Co., USA 6) GlaxoSmithKline, UK, 7) AstraZeneca, UK 8) Eli Lilly & Co., USA, 9) Abbott Laboratories, USA 10) McKesson, USA
On the other hand one can fully agree with the statement on the Affordable Care Act, which notes "that if the Affordable Care Act result in some form of pharmaceutical price controls, I think we’ll see the death of Big Pharma, after which we will realize, much to the surprise of folks such as Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, that they did a bit more than just printing pretty labels and inventing new cures for baldness".
Anyway,at present, whatever way you look at it, the pricing structure differences between the US, Canada and Europe are abnormal, to say the least.
EU-Digest
7/21/14
Ukraine: Dutch investigators say remains of bodies from Aircraft downed and held by pro-Russian rebels not refrigerated
Dutch investigators inspected bodies recovered from downed passenger
airliner MH17 which had been loaded onto a train under rebel control not
far from the crash site, an AFP reporter said.
Each of the train wagons carrying the corpses was opened and examined by two men wearing masks and headlights. The stench from the wagon was overpowering and, contrary to claims that the carriages were refrigerated, there was little sign that the remains in black body bags were being chilled.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Monday that the Netherlands should head up the investigation into downed flight MH17 and that Kiev was ready to "send all bodies to Amsterdam".
"We are ready for the Netherlands to take upon itself the coordination of the international investigation as the country that suffered the most," Yatsenyuk said.
Another 21 bodies have been found in the east Ukraine village where Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17 crashed last week. All 298 people aboard were killed. Local rescue workers had piled 21 black body bags by the side of the road in Hrabove early on Monday, adds the Associated Press report.
It was unclear how quickly they would be transported to refrigerated railcars in the nearby town of Torez, where the other bodies are being held.
The United Nations Security Council is expected to consider a resolution demanding that pro-Russian separatists provide "full and unrestricted access" to the crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that was
The document, proposed by Australia and co-sponsored by countries like France, also calls on all actors in the region to fully cooperate in an international probe of the incident.
It demands that all military activities, including by armed groups, be "immediately ceased in the immediate area surrounding the crash site to allow for security and safety of the international investigation."
US Secretary of State John Kerry laid out "extraordinary circumstantial evidence" on Sunday that Ukrainian pro-Russian rebels were behind the downing of a Malaysian jet hit by weapons obtained from Russia.
US intelligence suggests that a sophisticated SA11 missile system was used to bring down flight MH17 on Thursday as it flew at some 33,000 feet over Ukraine en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Kerry said. A total of 298 people on board were killed in the disaster that has shocked the world.
"It's pretty clear that this is a system that was transferred from Russia in the hands of separatists," Kerry told CNN as he blitzed the Sunday television talk shows.
"We know with confidence, with confidence, that the Ukrainians did not have such a system anywhere near the vicinity at that point in time. So it obviously points a very clear finger at the separatists."
The top US diplomat also slammed "grotesque" scenes at the crash site where he said rebels were hampering the investigation and the proper removal of the bodies.
Overall situation so far is chaotic with no real coordinated efforts by the West to take charge of the recovery activities and accident investigation or defensive measures to eliminate the possibility of future missile attacks from the separatist and their Russian allies.
EU-Digest
Each of the train wagons carrying the corpses was opened and examined by two men wearing masks and headlights. The stench from the wagon was overpowering and, contrary to claims that the carriages were refrigerated, there was little sign that the remains in black body bags were being chilled.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Monday that the Netherlands should head up the investigation into downed flight MH17 and that Kiev was ready to "send all bodies to Amsterdam".
"We are ready for the Netherlands to take upon itself the coordination of the international investigation as the country that suffered the most," Yatsenyuk said.
Another 21 bodies have been found in the east Ukraine village where Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17 crashed last week. All 298 people aboard were killed. Local rescue workers had piled 21 black body bags by the side of the road in Hrabove early on Monday, adds the Associated Press report.
It was unclear how quickly they would be transported to refrigerated railcars in the nearby town of Torez, where the other bodies are being held.
The United Nations Security Council is expected to consider a resolution demanding that pro-Russian separatists provide "full and unrestricted access" to the crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that was
The document, proposed by Australia and co-sponsored by countries like France, also calls on all actors in the region to fully cooperate in an international probe of the incident.
It demands that all military activities, including by armed groups, be "immediately ceased in the immediate area surrounding the crash site to allow for security and safety of the international investigation."
US Secretary of State John Kerry laid out "extraordinary circumstantial evidence" on Sunday that Ukrainian pro-Russian rebels were behind the downing of a Malaysian jet hit by weapons obtained from Russia.
US intelligence suggests that a sophisticated SA11 missile system was used to bring down flight MH17 on Thursday as it flew at some 33,000 feet over Ukraine en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Kerry said. A total of 298 people on board were killed in the disaster that has shocked the world.
"It's pretty clear that this is a system that was transferred from Russia in the hands of separatists," Kerry told CNN as he blitzed the Sunday television talk shows.
"We know with confidence, with confidence, that the Ukrainians did not have such a system anywhere near the vicinity at that point in time. So it obviously points a very clear finger at the separatists."
The top US diplomat also slammed "grotesque" scenes at the crash site where he said rebels were hampering the investigation and the proper removal of the bodies.
Overall situation so far is chaotic with no real coordinated efforts by the West to take charge of the recovery activities and accident investigation or defensive measures to eliminate the possibility of future missile attacks from the separatist and their Russian allies.
EU-Digest
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)