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Start-up allows fans to invest in music artists' royalties
 Steely Dan’s 69-year-old Donald Fagan has to go back on tour. Luis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” may have lost out on millions. Liam Gallagher can’t afford people to make his “fucking tea.”

The truth is that digital music streaming, as beloved as it is amongst listeners for its accessibility and cheapness, just doesn’t make all that much money for artists. But there is good news yet. Streaming is so popular these days that it’s actually growing the once-dying music business—giving the industry a lift for the first time in decades, and offering a glimmer of hope to the producers and musicians who had been watching profits crash down year after year.

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Off the heels of that sudden renewal of optimism, a new music startup, called Royalty Flow, plans to sell shares of rapper Eminem’s royalties—banking on future industry growth as well as the idea that fans will be eager to “own” part of an artist’s work. Jeff and Mark Bass, the two producers who first signed the rapper, are behind the effort, pledging to sell up to 25% of their holdings in his song catalog to the new company. Royalty Flow has just filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to raise between $11 million and $50 million via a crowdsourced fundraising and list on the Nasdaq if successful.

The income stream will include royalties from studio albums that Eminem released between 1993 and 2013, such as The Eminem Show and The Marshall Mathers LP. (Note that this venture has nothing to do with the real Slim Shady; Eminem “was not consulted,” his record label Interscope stated, and is not selling his own publishing.)

Some in the music industry are skeptical of the project, drawing parallels to the “Bowie bonds” that were issued in the 1990s and never saw their promised success—but the odd new era of streaming is volatile and unpredictable enough that things may be different, this time around. According to Nielsen Music, Eminem’s catalog has sold 172 million albums worldwide, 47.4 million of them in the US, to date.

A new report from the Recording Industry of America this month shows that streaming—which is up 48% so far this year—is now 62% of the US music business.

Output: A start-up called Royalty Flow is aiming to allow fans to invest in the potential future royalties of music artists. Founded by producers for rapper Eminem, the firm is aiming to raise between $11m and $50m from fans for a stake in up to 25% of the artist's song catalogue. The income stream to investors will be provided by royalties generated by albums released by Eminem between 1993 and 2013.


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San Francisco studies solar-plus-storage disaster power backup
 Dive Brief:

San Francisco city officials are considering installing solar-plus-storage systems at as many as 12 community buildings, the San Francisco Examiner reports.

Backers of the proposed project say the installations would be designed to provide energy for critical loads for up to five days to help the city survive a major disaster, such as an earthquake.

Whether or not the city moves forward with the project could depend on costs. Consulting group Arup, hired to study the viability of the solar-plus-storage systems, put the price tag at $40 million.

Dive Insight:

Much of San Francisco’s current resiliency planning relies on diesel generators to provide electricity should the city be hit by a disaster. But obtaining fuel for those generators could be difficult during a major disaster that disrupts supply chains.

According to a three year study funded with $1.3 million from the Department of Energy and $300,000 in San Francisco city funds, solar-plus-storage installations at community centers would provide fuel-free backup power for critical services such as refrigeration for medical supplies, lighting for shelters, and communications.

It is still unclear, however, how the city would pay for the proposed installations. The $40 million price tag could be reduced to about $26 million, if the city can find a private sector partner for the installations.

“We are still looking forward to working collaboratively with our fellow city agencies to think about how implementation of these projects might fit into the city’s bigger picture around emergency response, resiliency and also bringing more renewables onto our grid,” Department of the Environment spokesperson Peter Gallotta told the Examiner.

Output: A solar power-plus-storage solution would be the best way for San Francisco to ensure critical services have access to back-up power following a disaster, rather than relying on diesel generators, according to a report funded by the Department of Energy and San Francisco city. The proposal had been initially costed at $40m but private-sector investment could bring the city's commitment down to $26m, the report says.


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UN sustainability goals can help institutional investors
 The United Nations' sustainable development goals can help institutional investors to invest in new opportunities and identify future areas of risk in portfolios, said pension fund executives.

Speaking on a panel discussion at the Principles for Responsible Investment annual conference in Berlin on Tuesday, executives outlined the ways they are using the UN's 17 sustainable development goals in their portfolios and why they are important.

Alexandra West, portfolio head, strategy and innovation at the A$40 billion ($32 billion) Cbus, Melbourne, Australia, said there are two reasons why the goals are important. The first is "because they will ensure a sustainable economy and they will drive economic growth," and the second is that they "need us. Without mainstream institutional investment" the goals will not be achieved, she said.

Anne Simpson, investment director of sustainable investments at the $336.2 billion California Public Employees' Retirement System, Sacramento, agreed. "These are not just a moral imperative," but an "economic necessity" given CalPERS' size, which means the fund has "nowhere to hide from the world's problems and the world's risks. However, we are not in a position, even though we are a large fund, to tackle these … without a public policy framework."

The goals also present potential for returns. Ms. Simpson said CalPERS relies on economic growth globally and cannot invest in only one place.

"I think we have our part to do … not out of charity, but mutual interest to ensure those goals are met." Ms. Simpson added that the goals will "underpin our ability to pay pensions" over generations to come.

For the €394 billion ($470.4 billion) Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP, Heerlen, Netherlands, the goals "are a gift from the United Nations to the world," said Josepha Meijer, vice chairwoman and member of the board of trustees at the fund.

Executives at ABP see a number of areas where the goals are relevant: "They provide a widely supportive frame of reference, and also a vision to the world." She said the goals can be used as an "overarching framework" in portfolios. "ABP wants to invest in solutions … that contribute to SDGs … through investments that meet our risk/return requirement, but also (have a) positive impact," said Ms. Meijer.

But not all goals are investible, added Ms. West. Some never will be, and others will require policy changes. She said investors have three levers they can pull: allocate capital, engage and "advocate either for others to join you or for policy changes to make things more investible."

Output: Institutional investors can generate economic gains and investment returns by paying attention to the United Nation's sustainable development goals, a panel of executives speaking at the Principles for Responsible Investing Conference have said. Investing according to these principles can aid the development of sustainable economies while also adding greater diversity to portfolios since they necessitate investing globally, noted pension fund managers from the US, Australia and the Netherlands. The executives also suggested the success of the UN's sustainability initiative may depend on significant institutional investment.


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UK firm eyes US market for its liquid-air energy-storage tech
 A new, hybrid storage technology could be making its way to the United States, if a U.K. company’s plans pan out.

Last month, Highview Power Storage won £1.5 million ($2.03 million) in funding for a new hybrid configuration of its existing Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) system from the U.K. government’s Innovate UK program.

The funding will pay for the addition of supercapacitors and flywheel technology to Highview’s existing 5 MW, 15 MWh LAES facility at Viridor’s Pilsworth landfill gas plant in Bury, near Manchester, U.K. That project was the recipient of £8 million ($10.8 million) in funding from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in 2014 and is due to come online by year end.

Quick response

A LAES system has a ramp rate similar to a gas-fired peaking plant. Adding flywheels and supercapcitors gives the system the ability to respond even more quickly to the U.K.’s frequency response market and enables it to layer on more revenue streams, said Richard Riley, Highview’s business development manager for North America.

“The next step is to build a complete system,” Riley told Utility Dive. The minimum size for a commercial scale LAES plant is 10 MW, which would cost between $40 million and $60 million, he said.

Highview wants to take its technology to that next step, from demonstration to commercial scale, and is looking for projects in the U.S. “The U.S. is probably the most healthy storage market,” particularly states such as California, Hawaii and New York, Riley said.

Riley acknowledged that there is a challenge in the U.S.’ patchwork of state regulatory regimes, buts said the state of regulation for energy storage in the U.S. is “promising.” Energy regulation in the U.K. is slower moving and more “deliberative,” he said.

While a LAES system itself is new, its component parts rely on existing technology. “A lot of the equipment comes from the oil and gas industry. It is all catalogue equipment,” Riley said. The most expensive component in the system is air liquefaction equipment.

Liquid air storage

Liquid air has been used industrially for decades, but it did not appear as a storage technology until about 2001 when it was developed by Peter Dearman, a garage inventor in Hertfordshire. “Dearman engines” are being explored for use in liquid nitrogen fueled vehicles, including zero emission refrigerated trucks. Highview Power was created to use Dearman's technology for energy storage and move it to the commercial stage.

A LAES system cools and compresses air into a liquid that is stored in what is essentially a giant thermos. When the air is released, it expands rapidly and is used to drive a conventional expansion turbine. To increase the efficiency of that process, the air is heated as it expands. The system also incorporates devices that can store heat from the air liquefaction process and cold from the process of moving the air back to ambient temperature in order to further increase system efficiency.

A LAES system also can be paired with other industrial plants to gain efficiencies by using waste heat and cold. Highview’s 350 kW, 2.5 kWh demonstration project in Slough, U.K., uses waste from a biomass plant. Highview says another application for its technology would be to pair it with a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant that compresses natural gas into a liquid.

The roundtrip efficiency of a LAES system is about 60%, but Highview says it can boost that up to about 70% by gaining efficiencies from thermal storage or hosting. The biggest cost in operating the system is purchasing power to run the compressors for the initial air liquefaction process. The system also has a parasitic load of about 10%, says Riley.

Compressed air energy storage

In many ways, a LAES system is comparable to a compressed air energy storage (CAES) project or the CAES technology that Hydrostor is tweaking by pumping the air that stores the energy into an underground reservoir instead of an underground cavern.

Among the benefits of those systems are that they have a long life span and longer duration or discharge times than battery storage systems. A LAES system could last for 30 years and can discharge for "tens of hours or even days," Riley said. The heat loss of energy from the storage tanks is about 0.1% a day, he said. Those systems also can be configured to very large sizes for energy storage, up to hundreds of megawatts.

That is one of the chief benefits of LAES, Riley said. It can be scaled to very large sizes with very low lifetime costs. That also means that LAES lends itself to certain applications more than others. It would not be good for residential storage, for instance, but could provide peaking power or be used to “chop peaks” or as a non-wires alternative for a substation upgrade, Riley said.

For some applications such as those, “LAES is the lowest cost system that is unconstrained by geography, meaning that it can be located where the value of storage is highest,” Riley said. He cited to Lazard’s levelized cost of energy storage study that put the low end cost of LAES – or thermal storage as Lazard calls it – at $227/MWh compared with $152/MWh for pumped hydro and $116/MWh for compressed air.

Riley said Highview is already “engaging with utilities” in the U.S. for sites and applications for its next installation and hopes to initiate the company’s first commercial projects in the next 12 months.

Output: London firm Highview Power Storage is seeking US projects for its liquid air energy storage (LAES) system, after being granted £1.5m ($2.03m) from the UK government’s Innovate UK programme. Highview's LAES system cools and compresses air into a liquid and stores it in a thermos-like chamber. Upon release, the liquid air expands and drives a turbine, creating electricity. Richard Riley, Highview’s business development manager for North America, said the low-cost system is ideally suited to large-scale projects, while the US is considered to have the healthiest energy storage market.


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Medicaid Has A Bull’s-Eye On Its Back, Which Means No One Is Entirely Safe
 About Capitol Desk Capitol Desk delivers the latest in health care policy and politics from Sacramento and around the state. Have an idea? Let us know.

This special series examines the reach and the role of Medicaid, the federal-state program that began as a medical program for the poor but now provides a wide variety of services for California as well as a large swath of America. More Stories

When high levels of lead were discovered in the public water system in Flint, Mich., in 2015, Medicaid stepped in to help thousands of children get tested for poisoning and receive care.

When disabled children need to get to doctors’ appointments — either across town or hundreds of miles away — Medicaid pays for their transportation.

When middle-class older Americans deplete their savings to pay for costly nursing home care, Medicaid offers coverage.

The United States has become a Medicaid nation.

Although it started as a plan to cover only the poor, Medicaid now touches tens of millions of Americans who live above the poverty line. The program serves as a backstop for America’s scattershot health care system, and as Republicans learned this year in their relentless battle to replace the Affordable Care Act, efforts to drastically change that can spur a backlash.

The latest Republican proposal — by Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (La.) — is being pummeled by doctors, insurers, hospitals and patient advocates because it would scrap the health law’s Medicaid expansion and reduce federal funding for Medicaid. Senate leaders are trying to get a vote before Sept. 30, when special budget rules would allow the package to pass with only 50 votes.

Today, Medicaid is the nation’s largest health insurance program, covering 74 million, or more than 1 in 5 Americans. Over the next weeks, Kaiser Health News will explore the vast reach of the program. About 25 percent of Americans will be on Medicaid at some point over the course of the year — many are just a pink slip away from being eligible.

This KHN story also ran on NPR . It can be republished for free ( details ).

Medicaid funding protects families from having to sell a home or declare bankruptcy to pay for the care of a disabled child or elderly parent. It responds to cover disaster relief, public health emergencies and programs in schools that lack other sources of funding.

Millions of women who don’t qualify for full Medicaid benefits each year obtain family planning services paid for by Medicaid. These women have incomes as high as triple the federal poverty rate, or over $36,000 for an individual. And thousands of women, who otherwise don’t qualify for the program, get treated each year for breast and cervical cancers through Medicaid.

“Instead of cutting Medicaid, [lawmakers] increased public awareness of its value and made it even harder to cut in the future,” said Jonathan Oberlander, professor of health policy and management at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a supporter of the federal health law. The Medicaid cuts passed the House, but the ACA overhaul legislation fell short in the Senate in July.

Medicaid is the workhorse of the health system, covering:

39 percent of all children.

Nearly half of all births in the country.

60 percent of nursing home and other long-term care expenses.

More than one-quarter of all spending on mental health services and over a fifth of all spending on substance abuse treatment.

Unlike Medicare beneficiaries, who keep that insurance for life, most Medicaid enrollees churn in and out of the program every few years, depending on their circumstances.

Such numbers underline the importance of Medicaid, but also provoke alarm among conservatives and some economists who say the U.S. cannot afford the costs over the long run.

Bill Hammond, director of health policy of the fiscally conservative Empire Center for Public Policy in Albany, N.Y., said Medicaid has been a big help for those it was designed to cover — children and the disabled. But it has grown so big that the cost hurts state efforts to pay for other necessary public services, such as education and roads. “I can’t think of any other anti-poverty program that reaches so many people. … It’s too expensive a benefit.”

“We need to transition people to get coverage in the private sector,” he said, noting how millions on the program have incomes above the federal poverty level.

It May Be The Person Down The Block

Joana Weaver, 49, of Salisbury, Md., who has cerebral palsy, has been on and off Medicaid since birth. For the past few years, it’s paid for home nursing services for six hours a day to help her get dressed, bathed and fed. That’s kept her out of a nursing home and enabled her to teach English part time at a local community college.

“For me, Medicaid has meant having my independence,” Weaver said.

Like Weaver, many people getting Medicaid today are not easily typecast. They include grandmothers — one-quarter of Medicaid enrollees are elderly people or disabled adults.

Or the kid next door. About half of Medicaid enrollees are children, many with physical or mental disabilities.

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Many of the rest — about 24 million enrollees — are adults under 65 without disabilities who earn too little to afford health insurance otherwise. About 60 percent of non-disabled adult enrollees have a job. Many of those who don’t work are caregivers.

“It’s the mechanic down the street, the woman waiting tables where you go for breakfast and people working at the grocery store,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health policy expert at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

While all states rely on Medicaid, it’s used more in some places than others because of varying state eligibility rules and poverty rates. As of August, about 44 percent of New Mexico residents are insured by Medicaid. In West Virginia, as in California, the rate is nearly 1 in 3.

Jane and Fred Fergus, in Lawrence, Kan., said Medicaid has been a cornerstone in their lives since their son, Franklin, was born eight years ago with a severe genetic disability that left him unable to speak or walk. He is blind and deaf on one side of his body.

Although the family has insurance through Fred’s job as a high school history teacher, Franklin was eligible for Medicaid through an optional program that states use to help families let their children be cared for at home, rather than moving to a hospital or nursing home. Medicaid pays all his medical bills, including monthly transportation costs to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, where for the past 18 months he has been receiving an experimental chemotherapy drug to help shrink tumors blocking his airway, Jane Fergus said. It also covers his wheelchair, walker and daily nursing care at home.

“We have such great health care for him because of Medicaid,” his mother said.

Jane Fergus was never politically active until this year, when she feared that the GOP plans to cut Medicaid funding would reduce services for her son.

“If there is a silver lining in all this debate, it’s that we have been given a voice, and people in power are being educated on the role of Medicaid,” she said.

Moving Beyond Its Roots

Medicaid was born in a 1965 political deal to help bring more support for President Lyndon Johnson’s dream of Medicare, the national health insurance program for the elderly.

Over the past 40 years and in particular since the 1980s, Medicaid expanded beyond its roots as a welfare program. In 1987, Congress added coverage for pregnant women and children living in families with incomes nearly twice the federal poverty level (about $49,200 today for a family of four).

In 1997, Congress added the Children’s Health Insurance Program to help cover kids from families with incomes too high for Medicaid.

And since September 2013, Obamacare allowed states to expand the program to anyone earning under 138 percent of poverty (or $16,394 for an individual in 2016), adding 17 million people.

In addition, more than 11 million Medicare beneficiaries also receive Medicaid coverage, which helps them get long-term care and pay for Medicare premiums.

“Medicaid is plugging the holes in our health system,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, “and our health system has a lot of holes.”

But that comes at a steep price.

A Blessing And A Curse

With increasing enrollments and health costs steadily rising, the cost of Medicaid has soared. Federal and state governments spent about $575 billion combined last year, nearly triple the level of 2000.

Those dollars have become both a blessing and a curse for states.

The federal government matches state Medicaid spending, with Washington paying from half to 74 percent of a state’s costs in 2016. Poorer states get the higher shares.

The funding is provided on an open-ended basis, so the more states spend the more they receive from Washington. That guarantee protects states when they have sudden enrollment spikes because of downturns in the economy, health emergencies such as the opioid crisis or natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

The program is the largest source of federal funding to states. And Medicaid is often the biggest program in state budgets, after public education.

“Medicaid is the elephant in the room for health care,” said Jameson Taylor, vice president for policy for the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank. He said states have become dependent on the federal funding to help fill their state budget coffers. While the poorest states, such as Mississippi, get a higher percentage of federal Medicaid dollars, that still often isn’t enough to keep up with health care costs, he said.

Extensive Benefits

Medicaid provides significant financing for hospitals, community health centers, physicians, nursing homes and jobs in the health care sector.

But the revenue stream flows further. Billions in annual Medicaid spending goes to U.S. schools to pay for nurses; physical, occupational and speech therapists; and school-based screenings and treatment for children from low-income families, as well as wheelchairs and buses to transport kids with special needs.

Medicaid also often covers services that private health insurers and Medicare do not — such as non-emergency transportation to medical appointments, vision care and dental care. To help people with disabilities stay out of expensive nursing homes, Medicaid pays for renovations to their homes, such as wheelchair ramps, and personal care aides.

Rena Schrager, 42, of Jupiter, Fla., who has severe vision problems, has relied on Medicaid for more than 20 years. Although she often has difficulty finding doctors who will accept Medicaid’s reimbursements — which are often lower than private insurance and Medicare — she is grateful for the coverage. “When you do not have anything else, you are glad to have anything,” Schraeger said.

As it’s grown, Medicaid has become more popular, another reason why politicians are cautious to curtail benefits or spending.

A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed three-fourths of the public, including majorities of Democrats (84 percent) and Republicans (61 percent), hold a favorable view of Medicaid. That’s nearly as high as Americans’ views on Medicare. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

But it may still have a bull’s-eye on its back.

“The fact that the House passed a bill to cut $800 billion from Medicaid and it came one vote short to passing the Senate shows Medicaid is stronger than maybe many Republican leaders anticipated,” said Oberlander. “But politically it is still in a precarious position.”

Update: This story was updated on Sept. 25 to clarify that Medicaid doesn’t cover all home modifications for enrollees with disabilities. It was also updated on Nov. 17 to correct a statistic. Twenty-five percent of Americans will be on Medicaid at some point over the course of the year, not over the course of their lives.

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Output: The latest proposal by Republicans in the Senate has been criticised for potentially crippling Medicaid, a system that 74 million Americans, by scrapping present expansions and reducing federal funding. The new proposal is being pushed for a vote before September 30th, when it will only require 50 votes to pass. More than one in five Americans relying on the service for medical assistance from all walks of life, and it is used as and when necessary, particularly for those in poverty. All states use Medicaid, though in New Mexico 44 percent of citizens use the service and in California and West Virginia almost one in three do. Medicaid was created in 1965 as part of a national health insurance program created by President Lyndon Johnson, and has expanded from welfare program to general healthcare cover, now including anyone earning below 138 percent of the poverty line ($16,394). The cost of maintaining the system is significant, with federal and state officials spending approximately $575 billion in the past 12 months. Medicaid’s financial support not only helps those in need of treatment, it helps to pay for school nurses, therapists, screenings, wheelchairs, buses and more. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 75  of the public have a favorable attitude towards Medicaid, including 84 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Republicans. However, Medicaid is a target for cuts, putting it into a potentially dangerous position as a bill has already been passed to cut $800 billion from the service’s funding.


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Samsung to follow Apple and make an AI chip for mobile
 Samsung is joining Apple and Huawei in developing AI-centric CPU cores for its upcoming processors. The new Exynos chips will supposedly be able to process data from AI directly on the smartphone without offloading it to the cloud.

Set to be commercialised in the next couple of years, the new AI co-processor will reduce cloud-base processing dependency by instead processing the data in the smartphone itself. Today’s AI tasks (voice recognition, big data processing) are offloaded to the cloud, and then retrieved when needed by the users.

This will be very useful as Samsung’s Bixby is still in the early days of developing into a proper smart assistant.

As one of the major semiconductor manufacturer, Samsung is well equipped to start developing the co-processor. This will contribute to a 3% global revenue growth that semiconductor manufacturers are expected to see from 2018 until 2022 according to market intelligence firm TrendForce.

With AI Processing becoming a fast growing trend among OEMs, having a leg’s up in the game will benefit Samsung to differentiate it from the other manufacturers in the market.

(Source: Korea Herald via Android Authority )

What’s your Reaction? +1 0 +1 0 +1 0 +1 0 +1 0 +1 0 +1 0

Output: Samsung is joining the likes of Apple and Huawei by developing an AI-centric CPU core for its upcoming smartphone processors. Today’s AI tasks such as voice recognition and big data processing are usually offloaded to the cloud, to be retrieved by the user when needed. Samsung’s new Exynos chip, however, will have AI processing built in and will reduce cloud-based processing dependency. The chip is set to be brought to market in the next couple of years. Samsung's Bixby smart assistant is expected to be a beneficiary of the new technology.


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Amazon to bring AWS cloud to the Middle East by early 2019
 Missed the GamesBeat Summit excitement? Don't worry! Tune in now to catch all of the live and virtual sessions here.

Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has announced its first data center region in the Middle East, with three availability zones planned for Bahrain by “early 2019,” according to the company.

Launched in 2006, AWS serves companies of all sizes with cloud computing capabilities, negating the need for them to have their own on-site servers. AWS currently offers server infrastructure in 16 regions, including seven in the Americas (across the U.S., Canada, and Brazil), three in Europe (across the U.K., Ireland, and Germany), and six in Asia Pacific (across Singapore, Japan, Australia, South Korea, India, and China).

For 2018, Amazon has already announced a host of new regions around the world (including in the Nordics), while additional server infrastructure will also be arriving in new regions in France, China, and Hong Kong over the next year.

Battle heats up

The Middle East represents a notable move for AWS as the battle for the cloud services market intensifies. Earlier this year, rival Microsoft beat both Google and Amazon to announce its first African data centers, which are expected to open in 2018, while last week Microsoft revealed it was adding availability zones (different geographical locations within a region) to its Azure cloud platform. Earlier this month, Google opened its first Cloud Platform regions in Germany and Brazil, the latter representing its first in South America. However, AWS has offered a cloud region in Brazil since way back in 2011, while Microsoft followed suit three years later.

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“AWS customers are already making use of 44 availability zones across 16 geographic regions,” noted Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS. “Today’s announcement brings the total number of global regions — operational and in the works — up to 22.”

Amazon is the first of the three companies to announce a cloud region in the Middle East, and it should go some way toward helping AWS attract new customers in the area — local server infrastructure means lower latency and faster data transfer speeds. The news also comes just a few months after Amazon completed its $580 million acquisition of Souq, the Middle East’s biggest ecommerce site. And the company recently announced plans to open new AWS offices in Dubai and Bahrain.

“As countries in the Middle East look to transform their economies for generations to come, technology will play a major role, and the cloud will be in the middle of that transformation,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy.

Additionally, Amazon revealed plans to open a new CloudFront Edge location (effectively a conduit for end users to access cached content with lower latency) in the United Arab Emirates in 2018.

Output: Amazon is bringing its cloud services to the Middle East, with the opening of three "availability zones" in Bahrain by early 2019. The online retailer's web division, Amazon Web Services, was launched in 2006 and provides IT cloud services to companies around the world. Its rivals in the sector, Microsoft and Google, have announced the introduction of their cloud services into Africa and South America respectively, but Amazon is the first to announce plans for the Middle East. Alongside the expansion, AWS is planning to open new offices in Dubai and Bahrain.


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Chinese insurance regulator plans stricter stance
 China’s top insurance regulator said it will enforce existing rules and strengthen risk control as former chairman is handed over to prosecutors to face criminal charges

Output: The China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) has said it is aiming to put an end to "special companies" playing loose with certain regulations. While acting head of the regulator Chen Wenhui did not expand on the definition of "special" companies, he also said the focus of the CIRC should be to regulate the industry, rather than encouraging its expansion. Spurious capital claims, aggressive acquisitions and volume selling of short-term products are among evidence for the previous loose policy of the regulator, commentators noted.


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Intel experiments with chip that mimics how the brain learns
 Intel just introduced a new type of chip that could have big implications for artificial intelligence.

The company is experimenting with a new "self-learning" chip that's designed to learn like the human brain.

Called the "Intel Loihi test chip,"(opens in a new tab) the processor is what Intel calls a "neuromorphic chip," meaning it's designed to learn from its environment. The chip could be used for an array of AI-intensive applications, but the company says it will be particularly impactful in industrial automation and personal robotics.

"The Intel Loihi research test chip includes digital circuits that mimic the brain’s basic mechanics, making machine learning faster and more efficient while requiring lower compute power," Michael Mayberry, managing director of Intel Labs, wrote in a statement(opens in a new tab).

This could help computers self-organize and make decisions ...

"This could help computers self-organize and make decisions based on patterns and associations."

Intel isn't the first to develop a chip specifically for AI applications. Google has its cloud-based Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), which also aim to speed up machine learning processes. But Intel's approach is different in that the Loihi test chip is designed to work and learn locally on whatever machine it's inside of.

Having self-learning capabilities localized on a chip also has unique advantages over cloud-based systems, according to Intel. It could end up being much faster, for one, since a system can learn without data needing to move back and forth between the chip and the cloud.

Intel says it also doesn't need the same type of training as most AI systems currently do, making it more efficient.

The chip is still a prototype for now, but the company plans to begin working with universities and other researchers next year to develop it further.

Output: Intel is working on a "self-learning" chip that could have big implications for artificial intelligence. The Intel Loihi test chip features "digital circuits that mimic the brain’s basic mechanics, making machine learning faster and more efficient while requiring less compute power", according to Michael Mayberry, the managing director of Intel Labs. The chip could be used for a variety of AI-intensive applications, but may prove particularly useful in industrial automation and personal robotics. Intel plans to begin working with universities and other researchers next year to develop its prototype further. The chip is "neuromorphic", meaning that it is able to learn from its environment.


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Nvidia to supply Chinese tech giants with Volta GPUs to power AI
 The new chip is claimed to be up to five times more powerful than the current Pascal-based chips deployed by the Chinese firms

Output: Nvidia will supply Chinese behemoths Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu with its Volta-based graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware, designed to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI), as the firms upgrade their data centres and cloud services platforms. Nvidia's Volta-based system features the V100 GPU, said to be five times faster than its current Pascal series.


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Nvidia claims its TensorRT will accelerate AI inferencing
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The Chinese are racing ahead with artificial intelligence research, and Nvidia is helping make that possible, as evidenced by several announcements the graphics chip maker’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, made today at a big AI event in Beijing, China.

Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia has pivoted over the past decade, adapting its graphics chips to do artificial intelligence processing. And a number of big Chinese companies — from Baidu to Tencent — are endorsing Nvidia’s approach. That’s important in a world where 60 billion video frames are uploaded per day to YouTube, and where Google Translate translates 140 billion words per day.

Of the multiple announcements made at Nvidia’s GPU Technology conference in Beijing, the most interesting could be about Nvidia’s TensorRT software, which dramatically accelerates AI inferencing, or the process by which a neural network learns how to recognize an object or pattern. Inferencing can take a huge amount of computing power, but Nvidia’s TensorRT enables inferencing to be done as much as 40 times faster, slashing the cost of the inferencing on Nvidia-based AI hardware.

“AI inferencing is exploding,” said Paresh Kharya, Nvidia’s product marketer for accelerated computing, in an interview with VentureBeat.

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Image Credit: Nvidia/JD.com

With better inferencing, we’ll get much faster image and speech recognition, which in turn will improve everything from self-driving cars to robots. With Nvidia Tesla graphics processing units, the TensorRT software can accelerate processing up to 40 times faster than central processing units (CPUs) at a tenth of the cost.

“Internet companies are racing to infuse AI into services used by billions of people. As a result, AI inference workloads are growing exponentially,” said Nvidia’s Huang, in a statement. “Nvidia TensorRT is the world’s first programmable inference accelerator. With CUDA programmability, TensorRT will be able to accelerate the growing diversity and complexity of deep neural networks. And with TensorRT’s dramatic speed-up, service providers can affordably deploy these compute intensive AI workloads.”

More than 1,200 companies have already begun using Nvidia’s inference platform across a wide spectrum of industries to discover new insights from data and deploy intelligent services to businesses and consumers. Among them are Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google; as well as leading Chinese enterprise companies like Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, iFflytek, Hikvision, Tencent and WeChat.

TensorRT 3 is a high-performance optimizing compiler and runtime engine for production deployment of AI applications. It can rapidly optimize, validate, and deploy trained neural networks for inference to big data centers and other AI platforms.

In other news, Huang said that China’s big hardware makers — Huawei, Inspur, and Lenovo — are using the Nvidia HGX AI server technology across their data centers. Nvidia is providing those companies with early access to its HGX reference designs for data centers. Those companies will use HGX as a starter recipe for using graphics processing units (GPUs) in the data center. The HGX has eight Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs on a single server board.

“The V100 deployment in Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are extremely remarkable,” said analyst Chirag Dekate at Gartner, in an email. “Hyperscale/webscale companies like Baidu, AWS, Azure, Tencent, Alibaba, and others are working aggressively to provision [service] solutions for deep learning environments. And users are increasingly exploring clouds as a means of starting their AI journeys. Nvidia through its global strategy of engaging leaders across cloud service providers is embedding itself to be the main architecture of choice for deep learning workloads.”

Image Credit: Nvidia/JD.com

Nvidia also announced today that Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are incorporating new Volta architecture-based Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU accelerators into their data centers and cloud-service infrastructures. All three of the major companies are upgrading their data centers with the new Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs.

In addition, Nvidia is announcing that its Jetson-based robotics platform will be used by ecommerce firm JD.com in its JDrone and JDrover automated delivery drones and robots to delivery packages to consumers. Nvidia and JD.com are collaborating on using AI in logistics and delivery machines. JD.com’s JD X lab is doing pilot testing of drones and robots to deliver packages to consumers. JD X estimates it will release more than 1 million drones over the next five years, and it plans to use Nvidia’s Jetson platform.

“AI is the most important technology development of our time, with the greatest potential to help society,” Huang said. “As the world’s leading cloud providers deploy the world’s best AI platform, with Volta GPUs and Nvidia software, we’ll see amazing breakthroughs in medicine, autonomous transportation, precision manufacturing, and much more.”

Lastly, Nvidia said that Alibaba and Huawei are adopting Nvidia’s Metropolis AI Smart Cities platform, which simplifies the process for getting data from Internet of Things sensors, such as smart traffic lights, to data centers where the information can be analyzed and used to improve overall traffic. A total of 50 companies are currenty using Nvidia’s Metropolis platform.

Output: California-based Nvidia has unveiled its TensorRT software, which it claims speeds up artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing by as much as 40 times. Revealed during a series of announcements at the company's GPU Technology conference in Beijing, the TensorRT software is the world’s first programmable inference accelerator, and could lead to improvements in self-driving cars and robots. Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Baidu and Alibaba are among the big-name companies already using Nvidia's inference platform. Inferencing is the process by which a neural network learns to recognise objects or patterns.


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Kanye West denies Lloyd's counterclaim in $10m no-show row
 Los Angeles, CA -

The abrupt end to Kanye West’s Saint Pablo Tour last year caused an ensuing legal fiasco that has yet to be resolved.

After West canceled the remainder of the tour due to sleep deprivation and exhaustion, the belief of West’s camp was an insurance policy filed with Lloyd’s of London would bail him out.

A little over a year later, with a lawsuit filed by West as well as a countersuit filed by Lloyd’s denying his claim, it looks like the legal firestorm has only intensified.

After the countersuit denied West’s claim, West’s camp responded in a new court document to refute Lloyd’s claims.

Back in August 2017, West and his Very Good Touring, Inc. moved to receive the insurance claim that had been delayed for eight months at that point. To do this, they filed a $10 million lawsuit against Lloyd’s.

A couple of weeks later after the initial suit, Lloyd’s fired right back with its own countersuit against Very Good Touring, INC. saying the 40-year-old rapper’s cancellation reasons weren’t beyond his control, denying his claim. In the response, West said the reasons for denial weren’t legitimate and reiterated points from the first lawsuit.

According to the original suit filed by West, it states that insurance company employees “suggested that they may deny coverage of the claim on the unsupportable contention that use of marijuana by Kanye caused the medical condition.

Read West’s original suit in full below and the new one above.

Output: Rapper Kanye West has fired another salvo in his $10m legal row over a series of gig no-shows last year, demanding that the matter be taken before a jury. West's lawyers lodged a document with US courts, saying that insurers at Lloyd's of London had no legitimate reason to refuse his claim for lost earnings. The filing also denied allegations made by the insurance market that West had brought the illness, which led to the cancellation of the tour, on himself.


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Number of UK working mothers with dependent children on the rise
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Output: The number of UK working mothers with dependent children has risen by over a million in the past 20 years, according to the country’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). Nearly 73.7% of women in this category are now employed, up 11.8% from 1996. Women with children aged between three and four were the least likely to work full-time, and the most likely to have part-time employment, though even this group has seen drastic growth.


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Number of UK working mothers with dependent children on the rise
 The number of mothers with dependent children employed in England has surged by more than a million over the past two decades, according to official figures.

The Office for National Statistics said there had been a step-change in the employment rate for working mothers since records began in 1996 with almost three-quarters of women with dependent children either in full-time or part-time work.

Encouraging women with young children back into the jobs market has been a priority for Labour and Conservative governments, with the latest initiative an offer of 30 hours free childcare for eligible working families.

The ONS said the figures showed there were 4.9 million mothers with dependent children in work in 2017, up from 3.7 million in 1996. The employment rate rose by 11.8 percentage points to 73.7% over the same period.

Although the ONS said women with three- and four-year-old children were least likely to work full-time – and the most likely to work part-time – it found there had been a marked increase in employment among this group.

Mothers were more likely to have a full-time job when their children went to secondary school at 11, the ONS said. Childcare responsibilities tended to make it more likely that mothers of younger children worked part-time.

The ONS statistician Emily Glastonbury said: “The continuing rise in the number of working mothers has been a major feature of the labour market in England in the last two decades. Reasons for this might include more flexible working practices, shared parental leave and changes to government policy on the availability of childcare.”

The ONS said single parents were less likely to be in employment than parents in a couple. In 2017, 71.7% of single fathers were working, compared with 93% of fathers in a couple; and 68.5% of single mothers were in employment, as opposed to 75% of mothers in a couple.

Single mothers were least likely to be employed when the youngest dependent child was aged under three, at 48.4%. Single fathers were least likely to be in employment when their youngest dependent child was aged three or four (62.3%).

Output: The number of UK working mothers with dependent children has risen by over a million in the past 20 years, according to the country’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). Nearly 73.7% of women in this category are now employed, up 11.8% from 1996. Women with children aged between three and four were the least likely to work full-time, and the most likely to have part-time employment, though even this group has seen drastic growth.


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UK clothing company relocates to renewable factory
 COWES – Garment manufacturer, UK T-Shirt Printing, has moved its operations to a new low carbon factory on the Isle of Wight, which is powered entirely by renewable energy.

The company is a division of fashion brand Rapanui, and says the decision was a result of a substantial upturn in business related to its sustainable branded merchandise and in recognition of its supply chain’s commitment to sustainability and traceability.

Output: UK T-Shirt Printing, a division of fashion brand Rapanui, has relocated to a low-carbon factory on the Isle of Wight. The new 12,000 sq ft facility runs entirely on renewable energy, including hydroelectric, solar and wind power. The company prints onto organic cotton t-shirts produced by Rapanui in an “ethically accredited” factory in India, and creates branded items for groups including Lush Cosmetics, The Marine Conservation Society and the RSPCA.


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Fitbit to provide wearables to Fujitsu for employee wellness
 Fitbit’s wearable devices and services will soon be included in Japanese tech company Fujitsu’s corporate wellness program. The program will offer 10,000 employees of Mitsubishi Motors Health Insurance Society a chance to earn redeemable fitness points using the Fitbit Charge 2 and a cloud-based data system, thereby making it one of Fitbit’s largest corporate wellness agreements in Japan. According to a statement, Fujitsu chose to partner with Fitbit due to their device’s ease of use, and because the fitness wearable company’s open API allows easy incorporation into Fujitsu’s existing Health Points environment. Read more

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At Home Healthcare has tapped mobile care device company Vivify Health to provide technological support for patients transitioning from hospitals throughout Texas. Vivify’s remote patient monitoring kits will support At Home’s in-home nursing staff, and provide an additional layer of care that At Home believes will stand out from the rest of the state’s home care market. “We know that care transitions are particularly vulnerable times for these patients, which is why we are taking additional measures to assure they are continuously monitored by our professional care teams, enabled by the Vivify remote monitoring platform,” Michelle Maiorka, At Home’s vice president of Business Development and Transitional Care, said in a statement. Read more

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Healthcare networking companies HealthXL and WEGO Health have announced a partnership to connect digital health companies with healthcare experts. Members on HealthXL’s platform will be able to access WEGO Health’s network through its member portal. The companies say that the integration will enable executives to more fluidly connect with experts in patient-driven digital health. Read more

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GNS Healthcare, a precision medicine technology company, and the Swedish Cancer Institute have announced a collaboration to bring machine learning to breast cancer care. GNS’ Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation (REFS) platform will provide computer models and a software interface tool linking clinical and molecular data to breast cancer patients’ treatments and outcomes. The partnership aims to provide caregivers with focused, personalized treatment options for their patients, and according to a statement could be a foundation for other more expansive programs. Read more

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iMedicare, a pharmacy-focused decision automation platform available on tablets and computers through a web app, has teamed up with the Mirixa Corporation to bring patient counseling opportunities to thousands of community pharmacies. The new integration will be delivered alongside medication therapy management, adherence, and other services already implemented in the MirixaPro proprietary platform, and will allow pharmacies to make the most of medication-related opportunities by prioritizing available interventions for each patient. The partnership follows an announcement that iMedicare will be implementing other technologies, such as augmented reality, to deliver its services. Read more

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Aliso Viejo, California-based Ambry Genetics will integrate its AmbryPort 2.0 (AP2) clinician ordering platform with FDNA’s Face2Gene suite of applications. The partnership will allow clinicians evaluating patients with Face2Gene’s AI and facial analysis technologies to securely pass data along to AP2, increasing the diagnostic value of patients’ genetic tests. FDNA CEO Dekel Gelbman said in a statement that combining his company’s technologies with Ambry’s genetic testing services will facilitate a “new age in precision medicine.” Read more

Output: Fujitsu will soon be handing out Fitbit devices and services to its employees as part of its corporate wellness programme. The services will be offered to 10,000 members of the Mitsubishi Motors Health Insurance Society and the programme represents one of Fitbit's largest corporate wellness agreements in Japan.


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Index launched to boost investment in biodiversity and food chain
 A “sixth mass extinction” is already under way, scientists are now warning us. Species such as the Bengal tiger and blue whale are vanishing at an alarming rate, and mournful eulogies are being written on how those born in 20 years’ time may never see an African elephant. But who is writing the eulogy for our food? Huge proportions of the plant and animal species that form the foundation of our food supply – known as agrobiodiversity – are just as endangered and are getting almost no attention.

Take some consumer favourites: chips, chocolate and coffee. Up to 22% of wild potato species are predicted to become extinct by 2055 due to climate change. In Ghana and Ivory Coast, where the raw ingredient for 70% of our chocolate is grown, cacao trees will not be able to survive as temperatures rise by two degrees over the next 40 years. Coffee yields in Tanzania have dropped 50% since 1960.

These crops are the tip of the iceberg. Across the world, 940 cultivated species are threatened. Agrobiodiversity is a precious resource that we are losing, and yet it can also help solve or mitigate many challenges the world is facing. It has a critical yet overlooked role in helping us improve global nutrition, reduce our impact on the environment and adapt to climate change.

According to the World Health Organisation, poor diet is the biggest cause of early death and disability. Globally, 2 billion people are undernourished, while 2 billion are obese and at risk of contracting diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Focusing on large-scale intensive production of starchy crops for calories rather than nutritious diets has led to serious levels of obesity around the world, from the US to Kenya. Our agrobiodiversity base can be a source of affordable, nutritious food – provided we don’t let it disappear.

Take gac, a fiery red fruit from Vietnam with astronomical levels of beta carotene (which the body converts to vitamin A). Or the orange-fleshed Asupina banana, which has such high levels of carotenoids that a preschool child could meet 50% of their vitamin A requirement by consuming just one per day, when they would need to eat 1kg of some other varieties to reach the equivalent nutritional benefit.

These relatively obscure species can offer incredible levels of nutrition, but only if they are still around and available to us. Food biodiversity is full of superfoods like gac – but perhaps even more important is the fact these foods are also readily available and adapted to local farming conditions. They open the way to year-round nutrition security.

About 33% of the world’s farmland is estimated to be degraded, lacking the nutrients essential for growing crops. Agrobiodiversity once again has a solution. Planting cold-tolerant legumes and forages throughout winter has helped farmers in France naturally reduce weed infestation as well as increasing soil’s nutrient content and capacity to hold water. Natural remedies such as this can enhance the sustainability of farms worldwide, reducing the sector’s impact on the environment.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global warming will reduce agricultural production by 2% every decade, while demand will increase every decade by 14% until 2050. Yet a wealth of traditional seed varieties have unique traits that make them tolerant to heat, drought and floods. They must be found, preserved and put to use in crop-breeding programmes.

A cocoa farmer holds dried cocoa pods in Ivory Coast where insects have eaten the cocoa trees. Photograph: Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images

This year in Ethiopia, researchers at Bioversity International discovered two varieties of durum wheat that were not previously on the market, but yield remarkably well in dry, marginal areas. Work is now underway to breed superior durum wheat crops using these high-performing traditional seeds, to help buffer farmers against recurring droughts and combat hunger in the region.

Global efforts to protect agrobiodiversity need to be stepped up urgently. But where can governments and agribusinesses start? A new scientific review of the evidence the agrobiodiversity can contribute to a better food system and wider sustainable development issues has been produced to answer this very question.

This assessment forms the basis for an Agrobiodiversity Index that can guide countries and companies towards the most impactful investment opportunities. These can range from increasing research and development on agrobiodiversity, to introducing more diversity into food supply chains. It will enable agribusinesses to estimate and monitor the impact of their supply chain investments and ensure future product lines are both sustainable and resilient. Similarly, governments will be able to channel funding into agrobiodiversity interventions that will safeguard domestic food supply and simultaneously improve environmental sustainability.

While wild elephants and rhinos thoroughly deserve our support, we should also be raising the alarm for our disappearing agrobiodiversity. After all, if there is one thing we cannot allow to become extinct, it is the species that provide the food that sustains the 7 billion people on our planet.

Output: Bioversity International has launched the Agrobiodiversity Index, providing tools for governments and companies to invest in ways that support the plant and animal species that underpin human food supplies. The Index is based on the first ever scientific review of the potential of agrobiodiversity to combat issues including climate change and malnutrition. In total, 940 cultivated species are threatened across the world, and an estimated 33% of global farmland is believed to be degraded. The Agrobiodiversity Index aims to ensure that food supplies and suppliers become more resilient and sustainable.


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Green credits scheme has netted Tesla $1bn from rival car makers
 Tesla Inc. has generated nearly $1 billion in revenue the last five years from an unlikely source: Rival automakers. The payments are part of an unpopular system in California that’s poised to proliferate elsewhere.

California requires that automakers sell electric and other non-polluting vehicles in proportion to their market share. If the manufacturers don’t sell enough of them, they have to purchase credits from competitors like Tesla to make up the difference.

Tesla, which exclusively sells battery-powered models, sold $302.3 million in regulatory credits last year alone. China and the European Union — two of the world’s biggest auto markets — are considering mandates and credit systems similar to California’s. If California is any guide, automakers will resent having to buy from peers, including the electric-car maker led by Elon Musk.

“It really makes them mad that Tesla got so much of a boost out of being the only purely electric car manufacturer out there,” Mary Nichols, the chair of the California Air Resources Board, said in an interview Friday at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. “In effect, they helped to finance this upstart company which now has all the glamour.”

For all the flack California has taken from traditional carmakers for how its mandate system has benefited Tesla, Musk also has been a critic. Tesla’s chief executive officer last year said the Air Resources Board was being “incredibly weak” and called its standards “pathetically low.” Rules should be tougher and the credits should be worth more, he said.

“Nobody’s happy,” Nichols said. “That’s my mantra.”

Output: Tesla has generated almost $1bn in revenue over five years from rival car makers due to a system in California that requires car makers to sell electric and other non-polluting vehicles in proportion to their market share. If manufacturers fail to sell enough they are required by law to purchase credits elsewhere – from competitors such as Tesla that sells only battery-powered models. Tesla sold $302.3m in regulatory credits last year alone and dominates the electric vehicle industry. China and the European Union are considering adopting a credit system similar to California’s.


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SEC announces initiatives to tackle cyber threats
 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

2017-176

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced two new initiatives that will build on its Enforcement Division’s ongoing efforts to address cyber-based threats and protect retail investors. The creation of a Cyber Unit that will focus on targeting cyber-related misconduct and the establishment of a retail strategy task force that will implement initiatives that directly affect retail investors reflect SEC Chairman Jay Clayton’s priorities in these important areas.

Cyber Unit

The Cyber Unit will focus the Enforcement Division’s substantial cyber-related expertise on targeting cyber-related misconduct, such as:

Market manipulation schemes involving false information spread through electronic and social media

Hacking to obtain material nonpublic information

Violations involving distributed ledger technology and initial coin offerings

Misconduct perpetrated using the dark web

Intrusions into retail brokerage accounts

Cyber-related threats to trading platforms and other critical market infrastructure

The unit, which has been in the planning stages for months, complements the Chairman’s initiatives to implement an internal cybersecurity risk profile and create a cybersecurity working group to coordinate information sharing, risk monitoring, and incident response efforts throughout the agency.

“Cyber-related threats and misconduct are among the greatest risks facing investors and the securities industry,” said Stephanie Avakian, Co-Director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division. “The Cyber Unit will enhance our ability to detect and investigate cyber threats through increasing expertise in an area of critical national importance.”

Over the past several years, the Enforcement Division has developed substantial expertise in the detection and pursuit of fraudulent conduct in an increasingly technological and data-driven landscape. The Cyber Unit will consolidate and advance these efforts, and include staff from across the Enforcement Division.

Robert A. Cohen has been appointed Chief of the Cyber Unit. Since 2015, he and Joseph Sansone have been Co-Chiefs of the Market Abuse Unit. Mr. Sansone will continue to lead the Market Abuse Unit as its Chief.

Retail Strategy Task Force

The Retail Strategy Task Force will develop proactive, targeted initiatives to identify misconduct impacting retail investors. The Enforcement Division has a long and successful history of bringing cases involving fraud targeting retail investors, from everything involving the sale of unsuitable structured products to microcap pump-and-dump schemes.

This task force will apply the lessons learned from those cases and leverage data analytics and technology to identify large-scale misconduct affecting retail investors. The task force will include enforcement personnel from around the country and will work with staff across the SEC, including from the SEC’s National Exam Program and the Office of Investor Education and Advocacy.

“Protecting the welfare of the Main Street investor has long been a priority for the Commission,” said Steven Peikin, Co-Director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division. “By dedicating additional resources and expertise to developing strategies to address misconduct that victimizes retail investors, the division will better protect our most vulnerable market participants.”

Statement from Chairman Clayton

“When Stephanie and Steve approached me with these initiatives, I endorsed them wholeheartedly. They reflect the division’s continual efforts to pursue new forms of misconduct while keeping a watchful eye out for our Main Street investors,” said SEC Chairman Jay Clayton.

Output: The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has launched two programmes aimed at handling digital threats and protecting retail investors. The Cyber Unit will focus on market manipulation schemes and dark web activity, while the Retail Strategy Task Force will identify criminal behaviours impacting negatively on retail investors, using analytics to uncover large-scale misconduct. "They reflect the division’s continual efforts to pursue new forms of misconduct while keeping a watchful eye out for our Main Street investors”, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said of the initiatives.


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Fitbit finds purpose in medical studies
 If you’re trying to get in shape and you want a tiny, wrist-bound computer to help you do it, you have more options than ever before. Fitness trackers come in all shapes, colors, and price tags, with newfangled sensors and features to stand out to customers. But for doctors and scientists studying how exercise can help people deal with disease, the landscape is much simpler. There’s Fitbit, and then there’s everyone else.

Like most fitness trackers, Fitbit’s devices are far from perfect. They can count steps pretty well and give a good idea of activity levels day to day. But they haven’t yet cracked the code on caloric burn—which is kind of a big deal for understanding weight loss. And the ones equipped with Fitbit’s proprietary heart rate monitoring tech are on even shakier ground; the company is part of an ongoing class action lawsuit alleging dangerous inaccuracies. But that’s not stopping a growing number of medical researchers from flocking to Fitbit for use in clinical studies of everything from arthritis to sleep apnea to cancer.

Since 2012, scientists have published 457 studies using Fitbit device data, nearly half of them in 2017 alone. According to a recent analysis in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, that puts the company well ahead of its competition. In clinical trials that used consumer activity monitors, a full 83 percent outfitted trial participants with a Fitbit. For NIH-funded research, that number rose to 95 percent.

Some researchers, like Sheri Hartman, a psychologist at the University of California San Diego, gravitate toward Fitbit devices because they deliver information without being burdensome for her patients—breast cancer survivors struggling with brain fogginess and other cognitive declines following treatment. They just have to keep it charged and wear it, that’s it. Fitbit, and its data-crunching research facilitation partner, Fitabase, do the rest.

Fitabase, if you haven’t heard of it, is like Fitbit’s personal digital plumber. The company has built a connection to Fitbit’s API that allows it to pipe out user data to scientists. Since it launched in 2012, Fitabase has collected over 3.5 billion minutes of Fitbit data on behalf of research customers at places like John Hopkins, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

For Hartman, Fitabase collected three months’ worth of data on a randomly-selected group of 43 women who had recently received chemotherapy or surgery for breast cancer. They, along with a control group which received health-related emails, were given the goal of exercising 150 minutes per week. Both groups were asked to wear a clinical-grade accelerometer for a week before and after the study to see how much their baseline activity had improved in three months' time. But only half of them received fitness trackers and access to a UCSD researcher to track their goals. Sticking with new lifestyle changes is hard, and Hartman’s team was testing how well the wearables helped keep subjects accountable to their plans.

Output: While Fitbit struggles in the consumer market, it is becoming increasingly popular among medical trials that require participant monitoring. Fitbit's ease-of-use and reliability make it the device of choice for medical studies, with the device seeing use in 83% of clinical trials requiring consumer activity monitors. Some 457 studies have been published by scientists since 2012 using Fitbit device data, with almost half that number published this year. The devices are being adopted in trials tracking a range of conditions from cancer to arthritis.


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ECB president states it is not his job to regulate or ban cryptos
 Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, has stated that it’s not within ECB’s powers to regulate or prohibit digital currencies like bitcoin at the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament.

Asked what are the material risks of bitcoin for the economy, he said there were three considerations, one was the size, two the extent of its use, third being their impact on the economy.

Output: The president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, said it was not the role of the institution to "regulate or prohibit digital currencies like bitcoin". Speaking at the committee on economic and monetary affairs of the European Parliament, Draghi added that the EBC had concluded, after considering bitcoin's size, the extent of its use and its impact on the economy, that it was "absolutely premature to consider it as a means of payment in the future". Draghi recently prohibited the Estonian government from issuing its own digital tokens.


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Everyone Says We Must Control Exorbitant Drug Prices. So, Why Don’t We?
 Of all the promises President Donald Trump made for the early part of his term, controlling stinging drug prices might have seemed the easiest to achieve.

An angry public overwhelmingly wants change in an easily vilified industry. Big pharma’s recent publicity nightmare included thousand-percent price increases and a smirking CEO who said, “I liken myself to the robber barons.” Even powerful members of Congress from both parties have said that drug prices are too high.

But any momentum to address prescription drug costs — a problem that a large number of Americans now believe government should solve — has been lost amid rancorous debates over replacing Obamacare and stalled by roadblocks erected via lobbying and industry cash.

“There is a very aggressive lobby that is finding any and all means to thwart any reform to a system that has produced very lucrative profits,” said Ameet Sarpatwari, an epidemiologist and lawyer at Harvard Medical School who follows drug legislation. “Everything that’s coming out is being hit and hit hard — even stuff that’s commonsensical.”

Those in Congress concerned with health policy have spent much of the year advancing proposals to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, none of which would affect pharmaceutical pricing. The latest Republican proposal, by Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, is no different.

Meanwhile, more than two dozen bills aimed at curbing drug costs have been introduced in this or the previous Congress, according to the Drug Pricing Lab, a Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center program that has catalogued ideas for reducing prices. Many have bipartisan support.

Proposals include importation from other developed countries, where regulations keep prices down; allowing government to negotiate the price of Medicare-covered drugs; speeding approval of cheaper generics; requiring notification before raising drug prices; and restricting consumer drug ads.

(Story continues below.) Other ideas that haven’t made it to legislation include banning patents for pills that simply copy or repackage existing medicines; and adjusting prices according to a drug’s effectiveness.

“There’s clearly no single solution out there that will solve this rapidly rising spending,” said Dr. Peter Bach, who leads the lab. But, he added, “there’s not a lot of fundamental disagreement about the direction this needs to move.”

Trump drew new attention to the issue last month by tweeting that Merck’s chief executive, Kenneth Frazier, “will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!” after Frazier quit the president’s manufacturing council to protest his remarks about white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.

Those comments matched Trump’s characterization earlier this year of drug companies as “getting away with murder.” That same January day, a dozen Republican senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, John McCain of Arizona and Mike Lee of Utah, voted for the old liberal idea of letting Americans buy less-expensive drugs from Canada.

The measure was attached to a budget resolution and wouldn’t, by itself, have allowed importation. It failed 52 to 46 after 13 Democrats voted against it, with some citing safety concerns about foreign-sourced medicine — an idea promoted by American drugmakers.

Even so, the vote prompted speculation that a pharma price deal might be within reach.

Sen. Lee is one of the Republicans who favor importation as a way to increase competition. “When we’re talking about garden-variety, generic drugs that can be easily imported from another country that has regulatory procedures that make them safe?” he said in an interview. “I don’t see why not.”

In response to the new threats, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, already one of Washington’s biggest-spending trade groups, increased member dues by half last year to prepare for battle.

The pharmaceutical and health products industries spent $145 million on lobbying for the first half of 2017, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Drug manufacturers gave $4.5 million to congressional campaigns in that period, including six-figure donations to House Speaker Paul Ryan; Rep. Greg Walden, head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee; and Sen. Orrin Hatch, head of the Senate Finance Committee, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis.

PhRMA’s “Go Boldly” campaign, showing heroic researchers seeking cures, has spent $28 million so far this year on six ads shown on about 4,600 national TV channels, according to iSpot.tv, an ad tracker.

The industry hired former FBI director Louis Freeh to study the impact of importation. He concluded that it would “leave the safety of the U.S. prescription drug supply vulnerable to criminals seeking to harm patients.” Import proponents argue the Food and Drug Administration could easily ensure safety by licensing and inspecting Canadian suppliers.

Drugmakers say that high prices reflect heavy investment in innovation and drug development. They reject the notion that the industry wields too much influence in Washington.

“These are important issues with significant ramifications,” Holly Campbell, a PhRMA spokeswoman, said. “So we will continue to be engaged with the administration to advance solutions that improve the marketplace and make it more responsive to the needs of patients.”

The top 10 publicly traded U.S. drug companies made $67.8 billion last year, after taxes, regulatory filings show.

Efforts to restrain prices have made little progress in the executive branch, either.

The White House has long been expected to issue an executive order on drug costs. But leaked documents show that deliberations have focused on things the industry wants, such as extending overseas patents and changing a drug-discount program for hospitals, and not so much on lowering prices.

Gerard Anderson, a health policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, said Trump’s draft order “did not talk at all about branded drugs or about specialty drugs,” including for rheumatoid arthritis and cancer, that have seen especially steep price increases. “If that represents the administration’s thinking, then my guess is there is not much effort.”

Trump’s ongoing feud with congressional Republicans, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, means “you’re not going to get any strong direction or leadership out of the White House” on drug prices, said Vishnu Lekraj, who follows pharma stocks for Morningstar, an investment research firm.

Trump isn’t the only one in his administration criticizing drug companies. Scott Gottlieb, the FDA commissioner, has accused the industry of “gaming” the system to delay the appearance of cheap generics after patents expire. He has pledged to speed applications for generics when there is little competition as part of a “drug competition action plan” while opposing stronger measures like allowing importation.

But promoting generics is “reasonably small potatoes” compared with the money that could be saved by putting direct pressure on brand-drug prices, Anderson said. Gottlieb has served on the boards of several pharmaceutical companies and reaped large consulting and speaking fees from the industry.

Yet even small potatoes might be a long shot — despite widespread agreement that change is needed.

“It is sort of remarkable to see just how far the system can bend before meaningful reform is taken,” said Sarpatwari of Harvard. “If there ever was a time to strike while it’s hot, it’s now.”

Elizabeth Lucas and Sydney Lupkin contributed to this report.

KHN’s coverage of prescription drug development, costs and pricing is supported in part by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Output: Of all the promises President Donald Trump made for the early part of his term, controlling stinging drug prices might have seemed the easiest to achieve. An angry public overwhelmingly wants change in an easily vilified industry. Big pharma’s recent publicity nightmare included thousand-percent price increases and a smirking CEO who said, “I liken myself to the robber barons.” Even powerful members of Congress from both parties have said that drug prices are too high.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
When a Drug Coupon Helps You but Hurts Fellow Citizens
 It’s completely rational for you to use coupons to reduce the cost of your brand-name drug purchase.

But if the coupon is causing you to switch away from a generic drug with an overall lower cost, you may be playing a role in pushing up drug spending and premiums for others.

Let’s say that I needed the brand drug Effexor XR, used to treat depression and anxiety disorders. It would cost me at least $65 a month on my health insurance plan. It retails for about twice that amount, and the difference would be picked up by my insurer. But the generic version, Venlafaxine, would cost my insurer far less, and my co-payment would be only $10 per month.

My insurer and I would both save money if I purchased the generic. Pfizer, which sells Effexor XR, would lose a sale.

Output: It’s completely rational for you to use coupons to reduce the cost of your brand-name drug purchase. But if the coupon is causing you to switch away from a generic drug with an overall lower cost, you may be playing a role in pushing up drug spending and premiums for others.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Data sharing needed to help motor insurance pricing: Liberty
 The cost of car insurance can only be brought under control if fraud is tackled and data is shared more effectively, according to insurer Liberty. Liberty is set to unveil a series of proposals which, it believes, can help reform the car insurance market.

Deirdre Ashe, director of personal lines at Liberty Insurance, said the company is highly committed and engaged with the Cost of Insurance Working Group and the 88 actions that group is pursuing. She said Liberty is now keen to facilitate further on those actions and is shining a light on two aspects of the problem - fraud and increased data sharing.

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Ms Ashe said the company is looking for more rigid enforcement of existing legislation on the prosecution of insurance fraud, adding that no actual legislative change is needed to do this. Liberty is seeking a dedicated Garda insurance fraud unit, she added. At the moment, a regionalised system is in place where an insurance company contacts the local superintendent and share a case and a decision is then taken as to whether it will be pursued or not. But Liberty wants this process centralised and with more oversight.

Liberty is also suggesting enhanced training for judges to ensure greater consistency in the level of personal injuries compensation awarded. Ms Ashe said this is something other countries have applied and it would have merits here.

According to Deirdre Ashe, the company is also seeking the setting up of a national fraud database, which would be specific for the purposes of sharing fraud experiences across the industry and important for all insurers in the Irish market to access. Ms Ashe said that fraud in the industry is costing €200m a year, with fraud putting a minimum of €50 extra on insurance policies. All of the insurance companies are investing in both technology and resources to try and prevent fraud, but Ms Ashe said the main thing they have to do is to share the data and experience, which will give visibility of where fraud is occurring across the market.

***

MORNING BRIEFS - Ryanair has concluded a €600m share buyback programme announced in May. A statement to the stock exchange this morning notes the airline purchased 445,000 of its shares for €7.3m yesterday. Ironically the impact on its share price of the spate of flight cancellations due to mismanagement of its flight rosters has reduced the cost of the buybacks. Ryanair took advantage of the recent softness in its share price as it purchased the final blocks of shares in a number of transactions over the past week while the price was falling.

*** Apple shares fell overnight and have now lost 9% of their value since the beginning of the month the equivalent of $77 billion. A report from Asian technology journal Digitimes, as yet unconfirmed, suggested Apple had told suppliers of components used in its phones to scale back shipments to 40% of the levels originally planned for its upcoming iPhone X.

Output: In order for the cost of car insurance to come down firms need to share data tackling fraud, according to Ireland-based Liberty Insurance. The firm is calling for greater enforcement of insurance fraud prosecution. It is also encouraging the establishment of an insurance fraud database where insurance companies can share experiences with the goal of cracking down on fraudulent activity.