Novo Nordisk shares slide after Ozempic pill fails in Alzheimer’s trials

Novo Nordisk shares slumped on Monday after the drugmaker said the pill version of its weight-loss drug Ozempic had failed to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in two large studies.The Danish company said patients who took the drug did not see their disease progress more slowly, dashing hopes for a new use for the blockbuster diabetes drug.Shares in Novo, which are listed in Copenhagen, dropped by more than 10% in early trading on Monday.The pharmaceutical company has grown to be one of the biggest in Europe on the back of the success of its semaglutide-based drugs, Ozempic and weight-loss jab Wegovy. But it has lost more than half its value this year amid concerns that it cannot win back its early lead in the market

‘Friends end up blocking you’: Northwestern Mutual sold college grads a dream job. They left in ruin and debt

Expecting to be financial advisers at the Fortune 500 firm, some hires say they were ‘gaslit’ into peddling ‘terrible’ life insurance to all their contactsNorthwestern Mutual likes to think of itself as a storied American institution offering specialized financial advice. The 168-year-old financial giant, ranked 109 on the Fortune 500, and regularly anointed one of the World’s Most Admired Companies by the magazine, describes its financial advisers as “expert listeners” or a “trusted partner who helps you continue to reach goal after goal”.It also tops Forbes’s list of Best Employers for New Grads, a title that makes it attractive to hundreds of college students desperate for an internship that could launch them into a career in financial services. Each year they file into Northwestern’s glassy offices across the country for a three-month internship that they hope could change their lives. There, they are slotted in beside thousands of full-time “financial representatives”, many of them recent graduates themselves

Civil liberties groups call for inquiry into UK data protection watchdog

Dozens of civil liberties campaigners and legal professionals are calling for an inquiry into the UK’s data protection watchdog, after what they describe as “a collapse in enforcement activity” after the scandal of the Afghan data breach.A total of 73 academics, senior lawyers, data protection experts and organisations including Statewatch and the Good Law Project, have written a letter to Chi Onwurah, the chair of the cross-party Commons science, innovation and technology committee, coordinated by Open Rights Group, calling for an inquiry to be held into the office of the information commissioner, John Edwards.“We are concerned about the collapse in enforcement activity by the Information Commissioner’s Office, which culminated in the decision to not formally investigate the Ministry of Defence (MoD) following the Afghan data breach,” the signatories state. They warn of “deeper structural failures” beyond that data breach.The Afghan data breach was a particularly serious leak of information relating to individual Afghans who worked with British forces before the Taliban seized control of the country in August 2021

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI

When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts sayKrista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk – a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output – Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking.Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read “Listen to that mooncricket sing”, she almost clicked on the “no” button before deciding to check the meaning of the word “mooncricket”, which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.“I sat there considering how many times I may have made the same mistake and not caught myself,” said Pawloski

England batters opt out of pink-ball warm-up match despite first Ashes Test failures

To hell with the optics was the message from England on Monday after confirmation that none of the players who collapsed to the shattering two-day defeat in the first Ashes Test will change tack and travel to Canberra.In a move that risks drawing further ire, only Jacob Bethell, Josh Tongue and Matthew Potts – all unused in Perth – will join the Lions at Manuka Oval, where Andrew Flintoff’s shadow touring party will take on a Prime Minister’s XI in a two-day floodlit fixture that starts on Saturday.Cricket Australia originally slated the fixture for England’s first team as a warm-up for the day-night second Test that starts in Brisbane on 4 December, only to be informed a number of weeks ago that the Lions would be taking their place instead. It was felt the ground’s slow pitch would not prepare the players adequately before the traditional bounce of the Gabba.Although the head coach, Brendon McCullum, did then offer individuals the chance to divert to Canberra after the defeat in Perth, only three fringe players took up the offer

Tom Brady’s part-time side hustle with the Raiders is an unholy mess

The most successful quarterback of all-time approached his playing career with ruthless focus. He could do with the same intensity in his retirement projectsTom Brady played for 23 NFL seasons with a single, maniacal goal: to become the greatest quarterback who ever lived. He achieved it. Now, in retirement, Brady has dabbled in everything. He calls games for Fox