‘I essentially have a filthy secret’: After I fly, I erase ‘in model economy’ on my label to skip the boarding line. My buddy says it’s cheating. Who’s correct?
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OEIS Surveillance Private Investigator: Lawyers for the BBC have written to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over allegations that the Police Service of Northern Ireland spied on investigative journalist Vincent Kearney
Lawyers acting for the BBC have written to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) over allegations that one of its journalists was subject to police surveillance.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is alleged to have spied on journalist Vincent Kearney during his work on a 2011 Spotlight documentary investigating the independence of the police watchdog in Northern Ireland.
Kearney, currently the northern editor at RTE, said journalists must be free to carry out their work without fear that the police may secretly attempt to identify their sources. He said he was determined to find out what happened.
The allegations emerged during a hearing by the IPT in February following a complaint from journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey that they had been subject to unlawful surveillance by the PSNI after making a documentary that exposed police failures to investigate the murder of six innocent people by a paramilitary group.
Durham Police, working with the PSNI, raided the journalists’ homes and the film production company, Fine Point Films, as part of a “covert strategy” to identify the source of a leaked document.
The chief constable of the PSNI apologised for the unlawful raids and agreed to pay damages of £875,000 after the journalists were exonerated in 2019 by the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland.
Following this, the journalists asked the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to investigate whether they had been unlawfully subjected to police surveillance.
OEIS Surveillance Private Investigator: Phone and email surveillance
During a hearing in February, the PSNI acknowledged that it unlawfully accessed McCaffrey’s phone data in 2013. McCaffrey’s phone was also subject to surveillance by the Metropolitan Police in 2011 and it emerged that Durham Police attempted to obtain access to Birney’s work emails in 2018.
L-R: Barry McCaffrey, Grahame Morris MP and Trevor Birney outside court in February 2024
Disclosures made during the case suggested that Kearney had also been subject to police surveillance while making a documentary for the BBC’s Spotlight series.
A spokesperson for the BBC said: “We have instructed lawyers to write to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal about the alleged PSNI surveillance of telephone data linked to the work of Vincent Kearney during his employment with the BBC, in connection with a BBC Northern Ireland Spotlight programme broadcast in 2011.”
“We think that serious issues of public interest are involved, including in relation to the adverse effects that surveillance may have on journalistic investigations and freedoms,” the spokesperson added.
The claims relate to Kearney’s 2011 Spotlight documentary, The whistleblower and the watchdog, which reported on the crisis in the Police Ombudsman’s Office and investigated how the work of the PSNI watchdog had become infected by internal difficulties.
Kearney said: “The programme investigated allegations that the independence of the Police Ombudsman had been compromised and that it was not investigating complaints about police activities with sufficient rigour.”
The programme resulted in calls for the resignation of the ombudsman at the time, Al Hutchinson, and he announced his intention to step down shortly after it was broadcast.
Kearney said: “I am concerned that the police may have attempted to identify sources of information within a programme that was actually about the independence of the office of the Police Ombudsman.”
“Journalists must be free to carry out their work without fear that the police may secretly try to identify sources, and I am determined to find out what happened,” he added.
The latest allegations come as the Northern Ireland Policing Board is conducting a probe into allegations that the PSNI has carried out surveillance on lawyers and journalists by accessing their phone data to identify their sources.
The PSNI’s chief constable, Jon Boutcher, handed a confidential report to the Policing Board in April at the request of board members.
We are extremely concerned that the revelations to date in this case point to a much wider pattern of covert police surveillance of journalists and other human rights defenders Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty International
The report, which has been passed to the Policing Board’s human rights advisor, John Wadham, is understood to suggest that the PSNI may have been involved in up to 18 incidents of surveillance against journalists and lawyers.
The Law Society of Northern Ireland has also written to Boutcher asking for an explanation of disclosures in the report, including “the statutory or other authority under which any such surveillance operations were undertaken”.
Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland director, urged other journalists and media organisations to make complaints to the IPT if they were concerned about surveillance by the PSNI.
“We are extremely concerned that the revelations to date in this case point to a much wider pattern of covert police surveillance of journalists and other human rights defenders,” he said. “Freedom of the press, including the right to protect sources, is a cornerstone of any rights-respecting society.”
Daniel Holder, director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, said there was a need for full accountability. “This issue of the extent and lawfulness of PSNI surveillance on journalists, lawyers and potentially other members of civil society really needs to be nailed now,” he said.
Jon Boutcher told the Policing Board in April that he would provide a public version of the report.
The IPT is due to continue hearings into allegations of unlawful surveillance against Birney and McCaffrey later in the year.
Www.oeisdigitalinvestigator.com: —
Agency’s advisors will discuss efficacy, safety of investigational donanemab
by Judy George,
Deputy Managing Editor, MedPage Today
June 6, 2024
Whether certain groups of early Alzheimer’s patients are more likely than others to benefit from investigational donanemab is a key question FDA advisors will try to untangle when they meet on June 10.
In briefing documents released ahead of next Monday’s meeting of the agency’s advisory committee, FDA staffers questioned whether tau levels should play a role in determining who might qualify for donanemab treatment, if the drug is eventually approved.
The Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs committee will discuss whether the benefits of donanemab outweigh its risks for people with early Alzheimer’s disease. If approved, donanemab will be the third amyloid-targeted drug to come to market: the first being the controversial aducanumab (Aduhelm), which received accelerated approval but was subsequently abandoned, and the second being lecanemab (Leqembi), which received full FDA approval last year.
Donanemab, which targets a modified form of beta amyloid known as N3pG, was tested in the phase III TRAILBLAZER-ALZ 2 trial (referred to as Study AACI in the FDA’s briefing documents) of 1,736 early Alzheimer’s patients.
The drug met the primary endpoint of change from baseline in the Integrated Alzheimer’s Disease Rating Scale (iADRS), slowing decline relative to placebo. At 76 weeks, mean change on the iADRS was -10.19 in the donanemab group versus -13.11 in the placebo group for all participants in the study (P<0.001).
Among those who had low or medium tau pathology — 68.1% of the study population — mean change was -6.02 in the donanemab group versus -9.27 in the placebo group (P<0.001). Scores on the iADRS range from 0 to 144, with lower scores indicating greater impairment.
On a key secondary endpoint, the Clinical Dementia Rating-Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB) score, mean change at 76 weeks was 1.72 with donanemab and 2.42 with placebo (P<0.001) in the total study population. For those with low or medium tau, CDR-SB change was 1.20 with donanemab and 1.88 with placebo (P<0.001). CDR-SB scores range from 0 to 18 with higher scores indicating greater impairment.
People with no or very low tau were excluded from the study, leading FDA reviewers to question whether donanemab should be restricted to Alzheimer’s patients with a specific tau burden. In documents drugmaker Eli Lilly prepared before the meeting, however, the company argued that they expected donanemab to show benefits regardless of tau levels and that tau can be an important marker of disease progression but does not predict drug response.
FDA staffers pointed out that Lilly changed the primary endpoint from CDR-SB to iADRS during the pivotal trial, and the FDA did not agree with the change.
Like other anti-amyloid drugs, donanemab’s safety issues center around amyloid-related imaging abnormalities with edema or effusion (ARIA-E), ARIA with microhemorrhages and hemosiderin deposits (ARIA-H), cerebral hemorrhage, and infusion-related reactions. Lecanemab carries a black box warning for ARIA, which occurs more frequently in APOE4 homozygotes.
In TRAILBLAZER-ALZ 2, 24% of donanemab-treated participants had ARIA-E and 31.4% had ARIA-H. Two ARIA-related deaths were attributed to donanemab. Intracerebral hemorrhages greater than 1 cm in diameter were reported in 0.5% of donanemab-treated patients, and infusion reactions occurred in 8.7% of the donanemab group.
Data from a third-party vendor that included mortality outcomes for participants who discontinued the trial suggested that 19 deaths occurred among people on donanemab (2.3%) compared with 16 deaths among people on placebo (1.9%) during the study period, the FDA noted. But other than ARIA-related deaths, “the deaths did not appear to be causally related to donanemab and there was no unusual grouping of deaths that would suggest a causal relationship,” the agency wrote.
In TRAILBLAZER-ALZ 2, donanemab was dosed until amyloid was cleared, not continuously like other anti-amyloid agents. The FDA has asked its advisory committee to discuss this idea Monday.
The committee will vote on two questions: whether available data show that donanemab effectively treats the Alzheimer’s population that was enrolled in the drug’s clinical trials and whether the drug’s benefits outweigh its risks. The FDA isn’t required to follow its advisory committees’ recommendations, but it often does.
Judy George covers neurology and neuroscience news for MedPage Today, writing about brain aging, Alzheimer’s, dementia, MS, rare diseases, epilepsy, autism, headache, stroke, Parkinson’s, ALS, concussion, CTE, sleep, pain, and more. Follow
Northern Minerals issued an announcement earlier today warning that it suffered a cybersecurity breach resulting in some of its stolen data being published on the dark web.
Northern Minerals is an Australian company focused on the exploration and development of heavy rare earth elements (HRE), specifically dysprosium and terbium, used in electronics, batteries, and aircraft.
It is considered of critical strategic importance for the Australian government, as evidenced by a recent call to Chinese shareholders to offload their shares in the rare earth miner.
The firm is publicly traded on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) under the ticker ‘NTU,’ so it is legally obliged to disclose any data breach incidents promptly.
The firm disclosed today, without naming the perpetrators, that data had been stolen from its systems in late March 2024 and subsequently published on the dark web.
“Northern Minerals Limited advises that it has been the subject of a cyber security breach and was today advised by its cyber security consultant that some of the exfiltrated data has now been released on the dark web,” reads the ASX announcement.
“The exfiltrated data included corporate, operational and financial information and some details relating to current and former personnel and some shareholder information,” continues the announcement.
The company says it informed the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner accordingly, while impacted individuals will also be informed via personalized notices.
Northern Minerals notes that this incident does not impact its mining or business operations.
Oeisdigitalinvestigator.com: BianLian claims the attack
Yesterday, the BianLian ransomware group claimed responsibility for the attack by adding Northern Minerals to its extortion page on the dark web.
The cybercriminals, who have started to move towards data-theft-based extortion over ransomware, published the following data:
Operational details
Australian and foreign projects’ documents
Research and development data
Financial information
Personal data of employees
Data of shareholders and potential investors
Email archives of Northern Minerals’ chairman and those of the executive director and CFO
The full publication of the stolen data indicates that the company refused to pay a ransom demand.
BianLian remains an active player in the ransomware space in 2024, with recent victims listed on its extortion page concerning firms engaging in healthcare, industrial, legal services, financial services, and construction.
