The Wisconsin Senate has passed a bill designed to prevent Milwaukee from going bankrupt

Warning: This article does contain images some readers might find disturbing. Investigators have been left puzzled after finding a man’s body in a stage of “complete mummification” just 16 days after he was last seen alive. The man was found alongside a railway line in Bulgaria on 3 September. Identity checks later found he was 34 when he died, with a history of alcoholism, and was last seen alive on 16 August. However, his insides had been reduced to “structureless masses”, and case workers have been unable to explain how the body reached such an advanced state of mummification so quickly. A report published in Cureus journal shows a full set of pictures of the corpse – linked at the foot of this article. Trigger warning, they’re pretty gruesome. It has got scientists fascinated though. The report’s authors reveal that the “skin surface showed coloration ranging from light to dark brown, and it was hard and leathery.” “The internal examination of the body showed that the internal organs in the cranial, thoracic, and abdominal cavities had decayed into dried, brownish-black masses,” they write. Researchers stressed that natural mummification “usually takes several weeks to 6-12 months”, and that such a fast transformation would only normally happen in extreme heat. The temperature in Sofia has ranged from 16 to 33 degrees Celsius in the time period, which scientists said is not hot enough. The authors speculated that passing trains could have created a windy environment that could have contributed to drying out the body and causing bodily fluids to evaporate. They said it almost certainly wasn’t the weather in Sofia that caused the bizarrely fast mummification process. As of yet, it remains a mystery. Here’s the journal article. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

There has never been a better selection of fitness trackers available, but with choice comes

The White House held its first-ever cybersecurity “summit” on the ransomware attacks plaguing U.S. schools

By Arriana McLymore NEW YORK Amazon is excluding its new competitor Temu from its price searching algorithm that

Some of the content creators who will be attending the Paris TwitchCon are AngleDroit, Avamind, Bulledop, Domingo, Etoiles, Ultia, TonTon, and others

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Elon Musk’s X is now valued at about $19bn or less than half of what he paid to buy the social media company, according to a new report. The multibillionaire Tesla and SpaceX chief last year finally bought the microblogging platform that was formerly called Twitter for the price of $44bn or $54.20 per share. Mr Musk’s purchase was completed after a months-long legal battle with the company. A new internal valuation has now found there to have been a 56 per cent decrease in the company’s value over the last 12 months, suggested internal documents. Stock grants handed out to employees showed X/Twitter is now worth about $19bn, Fortune reported on Monday. Mr Musk earlier said he had overpaid for the social media platform that he called “an inverse start-up.” In March, he told employees in an email that they would receive stock awards based on a $20bn valuation of the firm. The valuation drop comes as several high-profile advertisers have withdrawn after the Tesla titan’s controversial takeover of the company. Mr Musk’s reign of the platform has been marred by mass layoffs, the chaotic roll out of a number of new features, including the site’s verification process, and the reinstatement of previously suspended high-profile accounts. The company was also rebranded X along with a new logo to replace the bird icon that had been there since the platform’s creation. There have also been rising concerns around X’s content moderation approach. The EU recently opened an investigation into the company as misinformation linked to the Israel-Hamas conflict began to spread on the platform. In July, Mr Musk shared that X is “still negative cash flow” with a “50 per cent drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load”. Banks involved in financing the multibillionaire’s deal to buy Twitter are also reportedly struggling to mitigate the impact of platform’s decline in value on their balance sheets. The Tesla and SpaceX boss, however, has remained optimistic about the future of the platform. Mr Musk claimed in an email last year that he saw a “clear, but difficult, path to a >$250B valuation” for the company. In a recent company meeting, he also reportedly expressed his belief that the rebranded X could serve as an all-purpose app with a range of features like job recruitment and dating services. “We’re rapidly transforming the company from sort of what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app with an all-inclusive feature app where you can basically do anything you want on our system,” he said, according to The New York Times. The Independent has reached out to X for a comment. Read More Elon Musk slammed by Israel for offering to send Starlink to Gaza Elon Musk says X posts with misinformation are ‘ineligible for revenue share’ Twitter adds video calling – and lets strangers ring you Elon Musk was ‘almost in tears’ on Tesla earnings call, analyst claims Slack to retire its status account on Elon Musk’s X Tesla’s profits dip as Musk goes on rant about staff working from home

Hi, it’s Lisa, your Pursuits correspondent in Dubai. A year ago, people here were looking at home prices

Music is the ideal accompaniment to exercise, but you shouldn't just grab any old headphones

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 24, 2023--

The mother of murdered two-year-old James Bulger has condemned “sick” AI-generated clips of her son circulating on social media three decades after his death. An animated version of the dead toddler discussed his abduction and murder by two 10-year-old boys in 1993, in videos shared on TikTok which James’ mother Denise Fergus condemned as “disgusting” in an interview with The Mirror. The social media app said the clips have since been removed for violating its guidelines. James was tortured and killed by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson after they snatched him from a shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside, on February 12 1993. The pair were jailed for life but released on licence with new identities in 2001. Venables, 40, was sent back to prison in 2010 and 2017, the latter for possessing indecent images of children, and was turned down for parole in 2020. The videos on TikTok showed animated children, including one depicting James, detailing his abduction and murder. James’ body was found on a railway line two days after his abduction and some of the animated clips reportedly showed an avatar by train tracks. A slew of AI-generated likenesses of other missing or murdered children had also been shared on TikTok, according to reports. Others showed Madeleine McCann, who disappeared aged three while on a holiday in Portugal in 2007; 11-year-old Rhys Jones, who was murdered in Liverpool as he walked home from school in 2007, and Peter Connelly, also known as Baby P, who died after months of abuse in 2007. Ms Fergus, 55, told The Mirror the clips were “disgusting” and she is reportedly particularly upset by an avatar which looked like a photo of James and appeared to speak. She told the paper: “It is one thing to tell the story, I have not got a problem with that. “Everyone knows the story of James anyway. “But to actually put a dead child’s face, speaking about what happened to him, is absolutely disgusting. “It is bringing a dead child back to life. “It is wrong. “To use the face and a moving mouth of a child who is no longer here, who has been brutally taken away from us, there are no words. “I think these people must be disturbed. “They have got to be. “It is not just not nice for the parents to see. “I don’t think anyone at all should be able to see stuff like this. “To see his little face moving when he is no longer here, it is disgusting. “It all should be taken down and stopped. “It is not fair on the people who have lost children, or lost anyone. “We are not just saying take James down, we are saying take it all down. “It is beyond sick. “Who can sit there and think of such a thing?” Ms Fergus’ husband Stuart reportedly contacted one produce of the animated videos, who appeared to be in the Philippines, and asked for the videos to be removed. The Mirror reported that the clips were often voiced in American accents, and also had Spanish and French versions. A TikTok spokesperson said: “We want TikTok to be a welcoming place for everyone, and there is no place on our platform for disturbing content of this nature. “Our community guidelines are clear that we do not allow synthetic media that contains the likeness of a young person. “We continue to remove content of this nature as we find it.”