By Elizabeth Howcroft and Raphael Satter LONDON Blockchain researchers say North Korea-linked hackers are likely behind a $70

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Two days after his second recent meeting in the Oval Office to discuss raising the debt ceiling, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy sounded positive about the direction of debt limit talks, telling CNN he sees how they can get to a deal and that he wants a bill on the floor next week.

The ex-wife of slain Microsoft executive Jared Bridegan, who was fatally shot by a gunman as he drove home with his two-year-old daughter, has been arrested and charged with his murder. Shanna Gardner-Fernandez was arrested in Washington state on Thursday and will be extradited back to Duval County, Florida, where she has been indicted by a grand jury on a charge of first-degree murder and child abuse. “We promised at the outset of this investigation we would not relent until we uncovered the truth of Jared’s murder, the whole and entire truth,” State Attorney Melissa Nelson told reporters. Prosecutors say they will push for the death penalty for both Ms Gardner-Fernandez and her husband, Mario Fernandez. He and his former tenant, Henry Tenon, have both already been charged for their alleged roles in the February 2022 murder in a wealthy suburb of Jacksonville Beach. Bridegan, a father of four, was murdered after he had dropped off the twins he shares with his ex-wife and was headed back to the house he lived at with his second wife, Kristen Bridegan. Investigators say that he stopped his vehicle when he was a tire in the middle of the road, and when he got out to move it he was shot multiple times in front of his daughter Bexley. Court documents say that several bullets came within inches of hitting the youngster, who was strapped into her car seat. Bridegan and his ex-wife divorced in 2015 but had been involved in court battles over custody of their twins and finances. Ms Gardner-Fernandez hired a prominent criminal defence lawyer following the murder and then moved back to the Pacific Northwest and prevented the twin from having any contact with their half-sisters, reported Fox News. Mr Tenon, 62, was charged on 25 January with conspiracy to commit murder, second-degree murder with a weapon, accessory after the fact to a capital felony and child abuse. Authorities say that he was a former tenant of Mr Fernandez. He has a long criminal history and was already behind bars awaiting trial on unrelated charges. Police announced on 16 March that Mr Fernandez had been arrested in Orlando and he was charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, solicitation to commit a capital felony and child abuse. On the same day, it was announced that Mr Tenon had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and agreed to testify against him and anyone else potentially involved in the killing. The state attorney said that Mr Tenon had admitted that he was the gunman and he faces up to 15 years in prison under the plea agreement. Mr Fernandez pleaded not guilty when he was arraigned in July and prosecutors say that he will not be offered a plea deal. According to the indictment, he wrote Tenon three checks and phone records show the men made more than 70 phone calls to each other before and after the killing. Read More An ambush on a quiet road, a fatal shooting and a year-long mystery: A breakthrough in Jared Bridegan’s murder case Husband of Microsoft executive’s ex-wife could face death penalty for roadside murder Husband of Microsoft executive’s ex-wife is charged with his murder on Florida roadside Arrest made in mysterious murder of Microsoft executive Jared Bridegan, police say more suspects likely Widow of Microsoft executive gunned down in front of 2-year-old daughter prays ‘evil and cowardly’ killers are brought to justice

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“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room." So says Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in sci-fi classic ‘The Matrix’ as he offers Keanu Reeves’s Neo the choice to find out just how “deep the rabbit hole goes”. Now, just as Neo discovered that the "life" he'd been living was little more than an algorithmic construct, scientists and philosophers are arguing that we could be stuck inside a simulation ourselves. In a paper published earlier this month, physicist Melvin Vopson, of the University of Portsmouth, offered scientific evidence for a philosophical theory known as the simulation hypothesis. This, in a nutshell, posits that the entire universe and our objective reality are just super-advanced virtual reality illusions. Elon Musk is among the well-known fans of the theory, which – as Dr Vopson notes in his paper – has been “gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry”. The university lecturer also pointed out that recent developments in a branch of science known as information physics “appear to support this possibility”. Information physics suggests that physical reality is made up of bits of information. However, Dr Vopson has gone further and is working to prove that information has a physical mass and is a fundamental building block of the universe. He even claims that information could be the mysterious dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe. In previous research, the physicist proposed that all elementary particles (the smallest known building blocks in the universe), store information about themselves, much like DNA in humans. Then, in 2022, he discovered a new law of physics, christened the second law of infodynamics, which states that entropy – the degree of randomness or disorder – within an isolated information system either remains constant or decreases over time. In other words, the system becomes less and less chaotic, implying that there is some kind of mechanism governing it rather than random chance. “I knew then that this revelation had far-reaching implications across various scientific disciplines,” Dr Vopson said in a statement released by the University of Portsmouth. “What I wanted to do next is put the law to the test and see if it could further support the simulation hypothesis by moving it on from the philosophical realm to mainstream science.” Is the Universe a Simulation? | Melvin Vopson www.youtube.com Dr Vopson employed the law in a range of different fields, including genetics, cosmology and even symmetry. Here, he found that the abundance of symmetry in the Universe (think snowflakes and facial structures) could be explained by the second law of infodynamics. "Symmetry principles play an important role with respect to the laws of nature, but until now there has been little explanation as to why that could be,” he said. “My findings demonstrate that high symmetry corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, potentially explaining nature's inclination towards it." Again, put simply, nature prefers things to be as well-ordered as possible. He continued: “This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimise power consumption.” As a result, this “supports the idea that we’re living in a simulation.” Dr Vopson is serious about this idea and, last year, even launched a crowdfunding campaign to test it. At the time, he announced that he had designed an experiment to determine whether we are all just characters in an advanced virtual world. “There is a growing community out there looking seriously at the possibility that information is more fundamental to everything than we think,” he said in a statement released back in December. “If information is a key component of everything in the universe, it would make sense that a vast computer somewhere is in control. “Assuming the universe is indeed a simulation, then it must contain a lot of information bits hidden everywhere around us. I’ve devised an experiment that proposes a way of extracting this information to prove it’s there.” His proposed experiment is based on his conclusion that information is physical and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves. He posited that the information in an elementary particle could be detected and measured by using particle-antiparticle collision. “We can measure the information content of a particle by erasing it. If we delete the information from the particles, we can then look at what’s left,” he said in the December statement. “This experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and I’m hoping the crowdfunding site will help us achieve it.” And whilst the crowdfunder closed well before reaching its proposed £185,000 target, Dr Vopson still hopes to carry out the ambitious test. Following his most recent paper, he suggested the experiment had the power to confirm the “fifth state of matter in the universe” and “change physics as we know it.” Sign up for 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.

Pac-12 Conference leaders are scheduled to meet this week and commissioner George Kliavkoff is expected to present members with details of a long-awaited, potential media rights deal

By Dietrich Knauth NEW YORK Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX received U.S. court permission on Wednesday to liquidate cryptocurrency