Freedom Index
The News Roundup
View More News“I’m guessing I’ll be in line,” former FBI Director James Comey quipped after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a “settlement agreement” between President Donald Trump and the IRS that included $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for targets of “lawfare and weaponization.” Comey’s joke encompasses two reasons why the Senate should not confirm Blanche as attorney general: a flagrantly unconstitutional prosecution and a brazenly corrupt arrangement that delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers’ expense. Blanche’s participation in both of those scams demonstrated his eagerness to please his boss, which explains why Trump nominated him…
One of the best bulwarks against monopoly is interoperability—that is making a new product or service work with an existing product or service. Interoperability allows users, and not the manufacturers of their devices or largest player in a market, to decide what application best serves them. Unsurprisingly, companies like Apple have worked hard to resist interoperability requirements. On July 8, the General Court of the European Union (General Court) ruled against Apple in several cases the company brought against the European Commission (joint cases), affirming the company’s obligations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple argued in the cases that…
AI & Crypto
Read MorePolitics
Don't Miss!
Opinions & Debates
Four years ago, a colleague asked me whether I could chair a debate with some guy called ‘Gary Stevenson’, who was, apparently, an anti-inequality campaigner and a YouTube commentator of some description. I had never heard of Stevenson, but accepted. The debate went all right, even though it was mostly a case of talking past each other (which, given that I was the moderator, was probably my fault). It was otherwise not especially memorable. Britain does not exactly have a shortage of left-wing media figures and activists. In the first half of the 2010s, there was the campaign for a…
Latest News
The UK’s tax authority announced that it planned to treat “certain disposals” related to cryptocurrency lending and liquidity pools as transactions that would effectively…
More than eight years after the assassination of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia sent shockwaves through Europe, all eyes are once again on the…
Japanese investment bank Mizuho downgraded Circle (CRCL) to underperform from neutral and slashed its price target to $50 from $85, arguing that OpenUSD’s business…
Japan’s largest domestic payment network, JCB, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Circle to explore using USDC for cross-border payments and merchant transactions.Under…
When Strategy (MSTR) disclosed that it sold 32 bitcoin in May, memories were jogged of the company’s first-ever bitcoin sale in December 2022.Both events…
A group of lawmakers within Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are seeking reforms to the country’s cryptocurrency taxation system, as well as support for…
In brief Florida filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company misled consumers about ChatGPT’s safety and risks. The state…
from the well-look-at-that dept Most legal experts seemed pretty skeptical about the tactic of 35 former federal judges asking federal judge Kathleen Williams to…
As the agriculture sector continues to feel the pain of President Donald Trump’s trade policies and the illegal war in Iran, Washington is bailing…
Crypto investment products recorded their second-largest weekly outflow of 2026 by the end of May, with investors pulling $1.67 billion from digital asset funds…
Gnosis is working to contain an exploit Monday affecting its Gnosis Pay product after co-founder Martin Köppelmann acknowledged an active hack involving the system’s…
In brief Compass Point analysts reiterated a bearish $140 price target for Coinbase, warning of fierce competition in the derivatives space. While Coinbase secured…