Like a friendly Pied Piper, the violinist keeps up a toe-tapping beat as dancers weave through busy hospital hallways and into the chemotherapy unit, patients looking up in surprised delight. Upstairs, a cellist plays an Irish folk tune for a patient in intensive care.

Music increasingly is becoming a part of patient care, although it’s still pretty unusual to see roving performers captivating entire wards, as they did at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital one recent fall morning.

“It takes them away for just a few minutes to some other place where they don’t have to think about what’s going on,” said cellist Martha Vance after playing for a patient isolated to avoid spreading infection.

The challenge: harnessing music to do more than comfort the sick. Now, moving beyond programs like Georgetown’s, the National Institutes of Health is bringing together musicians, music therapists and neuroscientists to tap into the brain’s circuitry and figure out how.

“The brain is able to compensate for other deficits sometimes by using music to communicate,” said NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, a geneticist who also plays a mean guitar.

To turn that ability into a successful therapy, “it would be a really good thing to know which parts of the brain are still intact to be called into action — to know the circuits well enough to know the backup plan,” Collins added.

Scientists aren’t starting from scratch. Learning to play an instrument, for example, sharpens how the brain processes sound and can improve children’s reading and other school skills. Stroke survivors who can’t speak sometimes can sing, and music therapy can help them retrain brain pathways to communicate. Similarly, Parkinson’s patients sometimes walk better to the right beat.

Scientific explanation

But what’s missing is rigorous science to better understand how either listening to or creating music might improve health in a range of other ways — research into how the brain processes music that NIH is beginning to fund.

“The water is wide, I cannot cross over,” well-known soprano Renee Fleming belted out, not from a concert stage but from inside an MRI machine at the NIH campus.

The opera star, who partnered with Collins to start the Sound Health initiative, spent two hours in the scanner to help researchers tease out what brain activity is key for singing. How? First, Fleming spoke the lyrics. Then she sang them. Finally, she imagined singing them.

“We’re trying to understand the brain not just so we can address mental disorders or diseases or injuries, but also so we can understand what happens when a brain’s working right and what happens when it’s performing at a really high level,” said NIH researcher David Jangraw, who shared the MRI data with The Associated Press.

To Jangraw’s surprise, several brain regions were more active when Fleming imagined singing than when she actually sang, including the brain’s emotion center and areas involved with motion and vision. One theory: It took more mental effort to keep track of where she was in the song, and to maintain its emotion, without auditory feedback.

Fleming put it more simply: “I’m skilled at singing so I didn’t have to think about it quite so much,” she told a spring workshop at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where she is an artistic adviser.

Indeed, Jangraw notes a saying in neuroscience: Neurons that fire together, wire together. Brain cells communicate by firing messages to each other through junctions called synapses. Cells that regularly connect — for example, when a musician practices — strengthen bonds into circuitry that forms an efficient network for, in Fleming’s case, singing.

But that’s a healthy brain. In North Carolina, a neuroscientist and a dance professor are starting an improvisational dance class for Alzheimer’s to tell whether music and movement enhance a diseased brain’s neural networks.

Well before memory loss becomes severe, Alzheimer’s patients can experience apathy, depression, and gait and balance problems as the brain’s synaptic connections begin to falter. The NIH-funded study at Wake Forest University will randomly assign such patients to the improvisation class — to dance playfully without having to remember choreography — or to other interventions.

What will scans show?

The test: If quality-of-life symptoms improve, will MRI scans show correlating strengthening of neural networks that govern gait or social engagement?

With senior centers increasingly touting arts programs, “having a deeper understanding of how these things are affecting our biology can help us understand how to leverage resources already in our community,” noted Wake Forest lead researcher Christina Hugenschmidt.

Proof may be tough. An international music therapy study failed to significantly help children with autism, the Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported, contradicting earlier promising findings. But experts cited challenges with the study and called for additional research.

Unlike music therapy, which works one on one toward individual outcomes, the arts and humanities program at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center lets musicians-in-residence play throughout the hospital. Palliative care nurses often seek Vance, the cellist, for patients anxious or in pain. She may watch monitors, matching a tune’s tempo to heart rate and then gradually slowing. Sometimes she plays for the dying, choosing a gently arrhythmic background and never a song that might be familiar.

Julia Langley, who directs Georgetown’s program, wants research into the type and dose of music for different health situations: “If we can study the arts in the same way that science studies medication and other therapeutics, I think we will be doing so much good.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Greece’s parliament on Tuesday approved the 2018 state budget, which includes further austerity measures beyond the official end of the country’s third international bailout next summer. 

All 153 lawmakers from the left-led governing coalition backed the budget measures in a late vote, while the 144 opposition lawmakers present rejected them. Three were absent from the vote.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras promised that the country would smoothly exit the eight-year crisis that has seen its economy shrink by a quarter and unemployment hit highs previously unseen during peacetime.

Tsipras argued that international money markets — on whose credit Greece will have to depend once its rescue loan program ends — are showing strong confidence in the country’s prospects, with the yield on Greek government bonds dropping to a pre-crisis low of less than 4 percent.

“The way to exit [the crisis] is for our borrowing costs to return to acceptable levels so the country can finance itself without the restrictive bailout framework,” Tsipras said.

The budget promises Greece’s international lenders continued belt-tightening measures and high primary budget surpluses — the budget balance before debt and interest payments are taken into account.

It sets the primary surplus at 2.44 percent for 2017 and 3.82 percent for 2018, higher than previously estimated. The economy is forecast to grow by 1.6 percent in 2017 and 2.5 percent next year, helped by a return to growth across Europe.

Debt to hold steady

With the Greek economy worth around 185 billion euros ($271 billion) in 2018, the national debt will remain at just under 180 percent of annual GDP, roughly unchanged from the previous year.

Greeks will see new tax hikes and pension cuts over the next two years. Bailout lenders had demanded additional guarantees the Greek economy will be stabilized before considering measures to improve the country’s debt repayment terms.

Opposition parties have criticized the budget, saying it will prolong the pain for Greeks. The main opposition conservative New Democracy party said the budget was “bleeding dry” the Greek people with 1.9 billion euros’ worth of new austerity measures.

Greece’s latest international bailout officially ends in August, more than eight years after the country began receiving emergency loans from the other European Union countries that use the euro currency, as well as from the International Monetary Fund.

In return for the funds, successive governments have had to impose repeated rounds of tax hikes and spending cuts, as well as structural changes aimed at reforming the country’s moribund economy and making it more competitive.

Tsipras first was elected in 2015 on promises to quickly end the painful austerity. But negotiations with bailout creditors soon went awry and, threatened with a disastrous euro exit, he signed on to more income cuts, increased taxation and further spending cuts.

His governing Syriza party is trailing New Democracy in the polls. But Tsipras insisted Tuesday that the government would see out its mandate, which ends in 2019.
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From: MeNeedIt

One of the most prominent people convicted in Latin America’s largest corruption scandal left prison Tuesday for house arrest after serving two-and-a-half years behind bars at a time when many Brazilians are becoming disillusioned with the graft investigation once hailed as a political game-changer.

Marcelo Odebrecht’s release came a day after Brazil’s top court halted investigations into several lawmakers, underscoring the limitations of the “Car Wash” investigation that uncovered nearly institutionalized corruption involving senior politicians in several countries and several major Brazilian companies.

Odebrecht, who was CEO of his family’s company of the same name, cooperated with prosecutors and testified that executives routinely paid bribes and made illegal campaign contributions to politicians in exchange for favors. He was originally sentenced to 19 years in prison but, once he began cooperating, that penalty was reduced to 10, with the agreement that the majority of it would be served under house arrest.

Odebrecht’s conviction and jailing were seen as a major victory for Car Wash prosecutors. The testimony of Odebrecht and other executives revealed that, for years, the company had essentially captured the Brazilian state, paying bribes and kickbacks to whoever was in power.

The corruption was so organized — and endemic — that it had its own department at Odebrecht, blandly named the Division of Structured Operations.

On Tuesday, Odebrecht left prison and went to the federal court in the southern state of Parana, where an electronic bracelet was attached, the court said. Neither the court nor his representatives would say where he was headed next, but local media have reported he will serve out his term in his home in an upscale neighborhood of Sao Paulo.

“The main objective of this new phase of his life is, I repeat, to return to the family fold, which is very dear to him, and to be effective in his collaboration” with prosecutors, Nabor Bulhoes, a lawyer for Odebrecht told reporters outside the court. “Right now, he has no other plan and no other goal.”

Lack of ‘real accountability’

While Odebrecht’s release was expected, it underscored the inequalities in Brazil’s criminal justice system, in which corruption and white-collar crimes generally receive little jail time.

“It’s terrible for the image of Brazil,” said Celcino Rodrigues Junior, a 26-year-old law student in Sao Paulo, referring to Odebrecht’s release. “It’s favorable to him because he will be in a mansion, he will be in total comfort.”

Revealing the extent of corruption in Brazil was one of Car Wash’s great achievements. The other was managing to put some of its masterminds, Odebrecht among them, in jail.

But the investigation has slowed in recent months, and there have been accusations that President Michel Temer and other senior politicians are trying to hinder it. Some fear the new chief of the federal police will be less aggressive in investigating corruption, and others bemoaned the closure earlier this year of the task force dedicated to the probe. Temer has always maintained that he supports the investigation.

Despite its success in sending several businessmen to jail, the Car Wash operation has also struggled to put senior politicians behind bars. That’s at least partially because sitting politicians have the right to be tried in the Supreme Court, where justice is slow and often deferential.

On Monday, a Supreme Court panel voted 2-1 to stop Car Wash investigations against four members of Congress. The decision effectively shields them from investigation while they remain in office.

Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes also ordered house arrest instead of jail for Adriana Anselmo, wife of former Rio de Janeiro Gov. Sergio Cabral. Cabral has been convicted of corruption and is in prison, while his wife has been in jail accused of several crimes.

“Brazilians, as a whole, are exhausted by this marathon of scandal, and it’s only natural that they would be disappointed by and exhausted by the absence of any real accountability,” said Matthew Taylor, an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington.

Even though the operation, known as Lava Jato in Portugese, hasn’t always lived up to Brazil’s highest hopes, Taylor says it has made significant progress.

“The fact that Odebrecht went to jail at all is a paradigm-shifting event in Brazilian history,” he said. “Lava Jato has moved the needle.”
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From: MeNeedIt

U.S. health officials on Tuesday approved the nation’s first gene therapy for an inherited, rare form of blindness, marking another major advance for the emerging field of genetic medicine.

The approval for pharmaceutical company Spark Therapeutics offers a life-changing intervention for a small group of patients with a vision-destroying genetic mutation and hope for many more people with other inherited diseases.

The drugmaker said it would not disclose the price until next month, delaying debate about the affordability of a treatment that analysts predict will be priced around $1 million.

The injection, called Luxturna, is the first gene therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration in which a corrective gene is given directly to patients. The gene mutation interferes with the production of an enzyme needed for normal vision.

Patients who got the treatment have described seeing snow, stars or the moon for the first time.

“One of the best things I’ve ever seen since surgery are the stars. I never knew that they were little dots that twinkled,” said Mistie Lovelace of Kentucky, one of several patients who urged the FDA to approve the therapy at a public hearing in October.

Patients with the condition generally start losing their sight before 18, almost always progressing to total blindness. The defective gene that causes the disease can be passed down for generations undetected before suddenly appearing when a child inherits a copy from both parents. Only a few thousand people in the U.S. are thought to have the condition.

One injection per eye

Luxturna is delivered via an injection for each eye; they replace the defective gene that prevents the retina — tissue at the back of the eye — from converting light into electronic signals sent to the brain.

The FDA has approved three gene therapies since August, as decades of research into the genetic building blocks of life begin translating into marketable treatments. The previous two were custom-made treatments for forms of blood cancer. Novartis’ Kymriah is priced at $475,000 for a one-time infusion of genetically enhanced cells. Gilead Sciences’ similar treatment, Yescarta, costs $373,000 per treatment.

Philadelphia-based Spark Therapeutics said it would announce its price in early January, but suggested its own analysis put the value of the therapy at about $1 million. Key to the company’s reasoning is the assumption that Luxturna will be given once, with lasting benefits. To date, the company has tracked patients enrolled in a key study for as long as four years and hasn’t seen their vision deteriorate.

“All the data we have today suggests it’s long-lasting, if not lifelong,” said Spark CEO Jeffrey Marrazzo.

Given Luxturna’s FDA approval and strong study results, many experts expect U.S. insurers, including both the federal government and private plans, to cover the treatment.

The spate of new genetic therapies marks a boom for a field once plagued by safety concerns. Gene therapy research suffered a setback in 1999 with the death of a patient treated for a rare metabolic disorder at the University of Pennsylvania. In another case, patients treated for an immune disorder later developed leukemia.

Dr. David Valle said initial excitement about the wide-ranging possibilities for genetic medicine has given way to a more deliberative approach focused on individual diseases. He applauded researchers at the University of Pennsylvania for decades of work that led to the treatment.

“The hype for gene therapy has been without many successes and actually a few failures, so chalk this one up in the win column,” said Valle, a geneticist and pediatrician at Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved in Luxturna’s development.

Development took years

University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Jean Bennett said she and her husband, Dr. Albert Maguire, first imagined using genetic medicine to treat retinal blindness in the mid-1980s. But it took decades to develop the science and technology, with the first animal tests in 2000 and the first human trials in 2007.

“We didn’t know what genes caused the disease, we didn’t have animal models with those genes, we didn’t have the ability to clone genes and deliver them to the retina, so it took time to develop all that,” said Bennett, an eye specialist.

Bennett and Maguire tested the treatment by recording patients’ ability to complete an obstacle course at varying levels of light, simulating real-world conditions. A hallmark of the disorder is difficulty seeing at night.

One year after treatment, patients who received the injection showed significant improvements in navigating the obstacle course at low-light levels compared with those who had not received the therapy.

Goldman Sachs analyst Salveen Richter predicted Luxturna would cost $500,000 per injection, or $1 million for both eyes. She pointed out that many current drugs for ultra-rare diseases were priced at $250,000 per year or more, putting their long-term cost over $1 million after several years.

But David Mitchell, a cancer patient and advocate for lower drug prices, worries that the cost of genetic therapies won’t be sustainable.

“We don’t have unlimited dollars in this country,” said Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs. “You get 50 of these drugs in the system and I don’t know how we will handle it as a country.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Artist Carlos Carmonamedina is curious about his surroundings. Since growing up in Mexico, traveling around to Europe for school, he’s always seen the cultures in a city’s periphery. When he moved to Washington D.C. two years ago, he was inspired to create a work that represents the city’s visual identity. 

“This project was for me a perfect excuse to get to know the city better and get out there and discover what’s going on around me,” Carmonamedina said. He has created almost 100 postcards in his DC series.

What was originally intended as a personal challenge, has gained popularity online and in the DC community. Carmonamedina sees it as documenting how people live in Washington D.C. at this current point in history.

“It’s just an extension of my personal curiosity and how I approach the world I live in,” Carmonamedina said. “So right now if I’m interested about how the city behaves and how the city changes, it’s natural that my art is gonna reflect that as well.”

Carmonamedina brings a perspective to the city that is different from its political reputation. His postcards include images of everyday human behavior: white collar workers taking their lunch at the fountain in DuPont Circle, a man and his child watching planes take off from Reagan Airport from Gravely Park, local musicians and artists celebrating their work at the DC Funk Parade—all parts of the city that are lost amid the headlines of Washington insiders, backdoor deals in Congress and the influence of K Street.

His ideas come from what he sees on a daily basis. He bikes around the city, looking for an area that he hasn’t been to before, and then sketches what he sees—the architecture, people and natural environment.

His most popular postcard, however, is from the Women’s March last January.

“I try to avoid any political involvement in my art, just because I want people in different audiences to feel comfortable with what they are looking at,” Carmonamedina. “But also, at the same time, I cannot avoid to escape the fact that we live in a very political city and protests and situations that they affect the rest of the country are happening right here.”

Christmas market

For two years now, Carmonamedina has also sold his postcards and prints at the Heinrich Christmas Market in downtown Washington. It’s one of the few times where he gets to interact with multiple fans of his work, rather than just one at a time. DC locals come by often looking for a postcard of their home neighborhood, or they request that he visit their neighborhood or favorite part of the city to draw next.

“I wanted to reach a larger audience,” Carmonamedina said. “Before I was working mostly in gallery circuits where very few people will attend. And this project allows to me interact with a different broader group of people.”

Carmonamedina grew up in Mexico, but left for Romania when he was 24 to pursue a career as an artist. He lived in the UK, Slovakia and France before moving to Washington D.C.

“I’ve been very much into the gallery circuit, trying to get exhibitions here and there, organizing residencies,” Carmonamedina said. ”But I have always been interested in comics and illustration and I wanted to do something a little bit more down to earth which I could also reach, again, a larger audience.”

This project is different from his pervious endeavors, but his art has always had similar elements. “How I approach things like humor, death, peripheries, and how people who live outside of the typical economic cultures … behave,” Carmonamedina said. “So it’s always about empathy and having a little bit of, putting yourself in other people’s shoes.”

As his project gains popularity, Carmonamedina is looking for new sources of inspiration that represent the city not only through his eyes, but through the eyes of the community.

“I feel like, so far has been very much my perspective as a newcomer, but I want to get to know people who have been here for a longer period.” Carmonamedina said. “I’m sure that they are going to give me a different insight of how the things are here.”
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From: MeNeedIt

In the two years since he came to Washington, D.C., Carlos Carmonamedina has created almost 100 postcards of everyday scenes in the nation’s capital. Many have DC landmarks in the background, like the White House, the Capitol and the Washington Monument, but all give a taste of what life in D.C. is like. Niki Papadogiannakis spoke to Carlos about why he documents D.C.
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From: MeNeedIt

Nepali migrant workers are trapped in a vicious cycle of debt and exploitation due to a failure by authorities to crack down on recruitment firms that charge illegally high fees for jobs abroad, human rights group Amnesty International said on Monday.

Wages sent back by an estimated four million Nepalis – mainly employed working in construction or as domestic workers in the Middle East, Malaysia and South Korea – make up more than a quarter of the poor Himalayan nation’s gross domestic product.

Nepal permits recruitment agencies to charge 10,000 rupees ($100) from each migrant as a service charge for finding them work with foreign firms, who pay for workers’ travel and visa.

But a survey of over 400 Nepali migrants by Amnesty found workers are not only forced up to 12 times more the permitted amount to agencies, but also that most are forced to borrow the money from unscrupulous money lenders at high interest rates.

“Migrant workers all too often end up trapped in the soul-destroying situation of working abroad for years simply to pay off the huge, often illegal fees they were charged to take the job,” said Amnesty International’s James Lynch.

“The Nepali government’s weak enforcement of the law is playing straight into the hands of extortionists and loan sharks. Tackling this exploitative industry is a matter of urgency,” Lynch added in a statement.

The London-based human rights group said almost two-thirds of the migrant workers, who responded to a telephone survey conducted in Nepal and Malaysia, had paid excessive, illegal recruitment fees to hiring firms.

Workers’ calculations about how to repay these loans were often derailed by unpaid wages or other forms of labor exploitation overseas. More than half of respondents said they received lower monthly salaries than promised by the agencies.

Bhuban K.C., a senior official in Nepal’s labor ministry, said authorities had launched awareness programs for potential migrants to ensure they are not cheated by agencies, adding that compensation was being provided to victims.

Nepal was working with India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka which also send migrant workers to the Middle East and Malaysia to ensure that the workers’ interests are protected, he added.

“We are raising our voice internationally to ensure that migrants are not cheated. What we are doing may not be adequate, but we are concerned about our workers welfare,” K.C. told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Amnesty said the Nepali government must do more to enforce laws penalizing exploitative recruitment agencies and urged overseas companies – who use the agencies to source workers – to check abuse within their supply chains.

“Companies who employ migrant workers in the Gulf and Malaysia directly or through their suppliers or subcontractors also have a responsibility,” said Lynch. “Until they take action, they are reinforcing the debt trap that is destroying so many lives in Nepal.”
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From: MeNeedIt

How do you explain the abstract concepts of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies?

With adorable, digital kittens of course.

CryptoKitties, an online game and marketplace featuring virtual kittens, has become an entry point for curious outsiders looking to dabble in cryptocurrencies – decentralized digital monies that rely on blockchain technology to enable peer-to-peer transactions.

Company reps say their main goal is to teach people how to use blockchains; open, distributed ledgers of cryptocurrency transactions. Bitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency and blockchain protocol, but there are others.

“As part of launching this project, we were really trying to educate people who haven’t perhaps bought Ethereum before, people who aren’t in the crypto space.” said Elsa Wilk, marketing director at Axiom Zen, the Canadian tech consultancy that created CryptoKitties.

That may have been the initial idea. But marry cute kittens and a buzzy, emerging tech phenomenon and kitten chaos ensued.

CryptoKitties’ cheerful, user-friendly interface has caused its popularity to surge among blockchain products and services. To date, there have been over $16 million USD in transactions resulting from the purchase, breeding and sale of digital kittens.

“Using something like cats is a very unintimidating, friendly, cuddly way to be introduced to a very hard, technical subject like the blockchain,” said Wilk. “We really took the approach of making the blockchain more approachable.”

How it works

CryptoKitties is built on the Ethereum blockchain. Purchases are made using the Ether cryptocurrency, which can be purchased with real money through a digital currency exchange like Coinbase. To begin buying and selling CryptoKitties, users first set up a digital wallet with MetaMask, an Ether wallet and browser for applications built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Kittens cost anywhere from .004 ether (about $3 USD) to upwards of 100,000 ether (a whopping $79.3 million USD). Wilk said the objective of the game is to make more kitties, but one of the company’s ultimate goals was to test whether a blockchain platform could support the buying and trading of unique, digital cats – what Wilk calls “crypto collectibles.”

At launch, the company released about 250 “Gen Zero” kittens, that is, those with no “parents.” Thereafter, a new kitten is released every 15 minutes. According to Wilk, the number of original kittens that will ever be released is approximately 50,000.

Critics of CryptoKitties contend that because the game is only partially decentralized, it is not a true representation of an Ethereum “DApp” or decentralized application. Despite being built on the open-source Ethereum platform, CryptoKitties’ interactions exist within a centralized database and are beholden to policies established by Axiom Zen.

“We really wanted to test the technology, to be able to put cats on the blockchain. We had to develop a new protocol in the process of doing this,” said Wilk.

The game’s popularity has also stalled traffic on the Ethereum network and created delays in the rate of Ethereum transactions processed. All blockchain transactions must first be “mined” or processed by a computer within a blockchain’s decentralized network.

“Because we’re building something that has never really been done before, just the sheer volume of traffic that we received initially caused some scaling problems,” said Wilk.

Still, for Wilk and Axiom Zen, CryptoKitties so far has been a success.

“It is one of the first, I would say, tangible use cases for a cryptocurrency project,” said Wilk, “Being able to actually take an action and have something real and tangible, I think is driving a lot of the interest that we’re seeing.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Jazz superstar Keely Smith, best known for her immortal duets with her late husband Louis Prima, has died of heart failure at 89.

Smith began her professional career her hometown of Norfolk, Virginia when Prima hired her to sing with his band while she still a teenager.

Smith was known for her cool demeanor, her deep smoky voice, and distinct black pageboy haircut, a counter-balance to the high-energy trumpet-playing Prima.

They won the very first Grammy award for best pop vocal performance by a duo for their 1959 hit “That Old Black Magic.”

Smth’s solo career thrived after divorcing Prima in 1961, making albums and becoming a top attraction in nightclubs in Las Vegas and New York.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Another security based on the price of bitcoin, the digital currency that has soared in value and volatility this year, began trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Sunday.

The CME Group, which owns the exchange, opened up bitcoin futures for trading at 6 p.m. EST on Sunday. The futures contract that expires in January opened higher at $20,650, then declined steadily. The futures were trading at $18,775 at 9:00 p.m. EST, down $725.

The CME futures, like the ones that CME competitor the Cboe started trading last week, do not involve actual bitcoin. The CME’s futures will track an index of bitcoin prices pulled from several private exchanges. The Cboe’s futures track the price of bitcoin prices on the particular private exchange known as Gemini.

Each contract sold on the CME will be for five bitcoin.

As bitcoin’s price has skyrocketed on private exchanges this year, largely under its own momentum, interest on Wall Street has grown. The virtual currency was trading below $1,000 at the beginning of the year, and rose to more than $19,000 on some exchanges in the days leading up to its debut on the Cboe and CME. Bitcoin was trading at $18,417 Sunday evening on Coinbase.

But the growing interest in bitcoin has raised questions on whether its value has gotten too frothy. The Securities and Exchange Commission put out a statement last week warning investors to be careful with any investment in bitcoin or other digital currencies. Further, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission has proposed regulating bitcoin like a commodity, not unlike gold, silver, platinum or oil.

Futures are a type of contract where a buyer and seller agree on a price on a particular item to be delivered on a certain date in the future, hence the name. Futures are available for nearly every type of security out there, but are most familiarly used in commodities, like oil wheat, soy and gold.

Bitcoin is the world’s most popular virtual currency. Such currencies are not tied to a bank or government and allow users to spend money anonymously. They are basically lines of computer code that are digitally signed each time they are traded.

A debate is raging on the merits of such currencies. Some say they serve merely to facilitate money laundering and illicit, anonymous payments. Others say they can be helpful methods of payment, such as in crisis situations where national currencies have collapsed.
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From: MeNeedIt

The United Nations is calling on all parties in the Afghan conflict to facilitate health workers in conducting Monday’s urgent polio vaccination campaign in a volatile southern district with the highest number of polio virus cases of any district in the world.

U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator Toby Lanzer warned Sunday the situation in Shahwalikot district in Kandahar province puts hundreds of thousands of children at risk. He said a polio vaccination campaign throughout the district is more urgent than ever

Afghan officials last week reported a new case of wild polio virus, raising the number of cases in Kandahar to five and the nationwide total to 12 in 2017.

Afghan authorities with support from UNICEF and WHO are to vaccinate thousands of children in Shahwalikot starting Monday.

“The outbreak of polio in Shahwalikot means that Afghanistan remains one of only three countries in the world that is still polio-endemic and polio eradication is at risk globally,” Lanzer noted.

“I call on the authorities and all people with influence, including the leaders of the communities in Shahwalikot, to ensure that this polio vaccination campaign takes place by helping health workers, facilitating their task and protecting them and their supplies so that all children are protected against polio.”

Shahwalikot has been the scene of deadly clashes between Afghan security forces and Taliban insurgents. Southern Afghan provinces, including Kandahar, have been hub of insurgent activities.

Lanzer said that International humanitarian law stipulates clear responsibilities for all warring sides to facilitate the anti-polio drive.

“Together, with the support of all actors on the ground, we can help Afghans rid themselves once and for all of this terrible disease,” emphasized the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator.

Afghanistan and Pakistan officially are now the only two nations across the globe to have reported wild polio virus cases so far this year, though the numbers of cases have dipped to historic lows. Pakistani authorities have reported six cases so far in 2017.

Nigeria is the third country in the world with ongoing wild polio-virus transmission, but so far this year no new cases have been reported.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Controversy is swirling around the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World.  This new non-profit organization has come under intense criticism from health agencies and anti-tobacco campaigners who accuse it of acting as a smoke-screen for Big Tobacco, a charge vigorously denied by the foundation’s president.  

Derek Yach, who created and heads the foundation, was one of the architects of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which came into force February 27, 2005.   

He said he believes the provisions of the Convention were still valid and have been largely successful in preventing people from smoking and “in slowing the increase in kids through higher taxes, marketing and so on.”  

But, he told VOA that the Convention focuses little attention on trying to get the billion current smokers in the world to quit the habit.

“To actually accelerate the decline in the billion smokers, we need to have better cessation, harm reduction and better product regulation,” he said.  “And, I think those elements, I do not think have got the energy that we actually require.”

Yach said more than seven million people globally die prematurely each year from tobacco.  He said his foundation’s mission was to wean these smokers away from their deadly addiction by using new harm reduction tools such as e-cigarettes and vaping.

“If these products have an impact,” he said, “we need to have independent research to show that they should be given more support.  

“So, our work will not be to simply push them out, but to do high quality research to look at the negative and positive sides.”

Philip Morris is a producer of an e-cigarette-type product and is pushing hard into the vaping market.

The foundation is being subsidized by a $1 billion grant from tobacco giant Philip Morris, to be paid in $80 million yearly increments over the next 12 years.  This eye-popping amount of money makes people like Vince Willmore, Vice-President of Communications at the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, cringe.

He told VOA that the alliance between the foundation and Philip Morris has no credibility.

“This foundation is really a smoke-screen designed to promote Philip Morris’ business interests and undermine real efforts to reduce the death and disease caused by tobacco use around the world.  

“It is hard to take Philip Morris seriously that they want a smoke-free world when they are marketing cigarettes as aggressively as ever and they are fighting real solutions to reduce smoking.”

If Philip Morris really was serious about bringing smoking rates down, he said, it would embrace proven solutions, such as higher tobacco taxes, smoke-free policies, advertising bans and graphic health warnings on cigarette packages.

He said that “The actions of Philip Morris show that they are the main cause of the problem and not part of the solution”

Yach assured VOA that he had not “gone over to the dark side.”

He suggested that some people “could never understand that profitability and public health can actually work together.”

He said his relationship with Philip Morris was not based on trust.  “I am not naïve enough to believe that Philip Morris is doing this because of the warm fuzzy feeling that they want to lower the death rates.

“No.  What they want to do is have a product that is less risky and that makes them profits.  That is the beginning and end of it.”

Yach recognizes that many of his former colleagues at the World Health Organization disagree with his approach.  He said he shared their passion to rid the world of tobacco products entirely, but “with one billion lives hanging in the balance, we urgently must do more to cut the adult smoking rate,” he said.  “Too much is at stake.”

WHO would not comment for this article.  However, it did issue the following statement, which calls into question the tobacco harm reduction work of the foundation.

“The tobacco industry and its front groups have misled the public about risks associated with other tobacco products.  This includes promoting so-called light and mild tobacco products as an alternative to quitting, while being fully aware that those products were not less harmful to health.”

WHO noted the many “conflicts of interest” involved in the foundation’s alliance with a tobacco company “funding a purported health foundation.”

It stated that “WHO will not partner with the foundation. Governments should not partner with the foundation and the public health community should follow this lead.”

Foundation Chief Derek Yach told VOA that stringent safeguards were in place and that he had set up a legal firewall to insulate the foundation from the influence of the tobacco company.

“These are legally binding agreements under U.S. laws,” he said.  “If they are found to be inappropriately influencing, adversely influencing, we would lose our tax exempt status and under the law the foundation would be closed.”

Despite his many protestations, Yach acknowledged that he had a tough time dealing with his tobacco business partner.

“When I go into meetings with Philip Morris, I feel I have to hold my nose and that is something I suspect will continue for a long time,” he said.

 
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From: MeNeedIt