FSNN | Decentralized News Aggregation for Free Speech

Cointelegraph is committed to providing independent, high-quality journalism across the crypto, blockchain, AI, and fintech industries.All news, reviews, and analyses are produced with full journalistic independence and integrity. For more details on our standards and processes, please read our Editorial Policy. Read the full article here

OpenAI Staff Blame Rush to Ship for Rogue Agent Hack

3 hours ago

Bullish (BLSH), Coinbase (COIN), Circle (CRCL) slide as SEC delay weighs on tokenization trade

4 hours ago0 Views

Fifth Circuit Cites A Ruling Calling Mail-In Ballots “Vital” To Falsely Claim They “Jeopardize Democracy Itself”

4 hours ago2 Views

The DSA’s Agenda Could Cost More Than $200 Trillion—and You’ll Be Picking Up the Tab

4 hours ago2 Views

Brazilian Supreme Court breaks source confidentiality over judge’s ‘stalking’ claims against journalist

4 hours ago2 Views

Bitcoin ETFs Rebound as Crypto Miners Extend AI Pivot

5 hours ago2 Views

Another Bitcoin Miner Sells Off BTC to Fund AI Data Center Pivot

5 hours ago0 Views

I Played a Game Simulating the Aftermath of the 2028 Election. Here’s How It Went.

5 hours ago2 Views

Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

Binance to Restrict Transactions Involving HTX, 10 Other Crypto Platforms

Cointelegraph is committed to providing independent, high-quality journalism across the crypto, blockchain, AI, and fintech industries.All news, reviews, and analyses are produced with full journalistic independence and integrity. For more details on our standards and processes, please read our Editorial Policy. Read the full article here

Trump Wants The DOJ To Go After Olympian David Hearn Again In Reflecting Pool Vandalism Case

Professors’ Speech in Class Has Not Been Regulated; It Has Been Hired

Cameroon journalist held incommunicado for photo of Anglophone unrest

AI & Crypto

Politics

The End of Oak Street Is a Nasty, Effective Exercise in Dino Terror

Media & Culture 6 hours ago

There’s something primordially satisfying about watching a big-screen dinosaur get the what-for from the business end of a just-loaded shotgun. The recent run of Jurassic Park movies sometimes seems to have lost this primal pleasure, replacing it with ho-hum computer-generated…

“Fascist” Menachem Begin was a Champion of Individual Rights and the Rule of Law

7 hours ago

Plaintiffs Contesting Tren de Aragua Membership Claims / Alien Enemies Act Application Can’t Sue Pseudonymously

8 hours ago

Media & Culture

Sixth Circuit Reverses Pretrial Release for Antifa Member Accused of ICE-Related Threats

Media & Culture

Socialists Claim Public Libraries Are Examples of Their Policies. Don’t Believe Them.

Media & Culture

Brickbat: Liberté d’Expression

Pollsters Do Their Autopsy

Court Dismisses Government’s Title VI Anti-Semitism Lawsuit Against Harvard

Puerto Rico Stole Roberto Clemente’s Trademark. The Supreme Court Should Make It Pay.

How Karoline Leavitt Changed the White House Press Room

En Banc Fifth Circuit Dismisses Alien Enemies Act Case as Moot

Woke 1.0, House of the Dragon, and the Absurd Politics of Surveillance

Justice Elena Kagan on the Late, Great Prof. Richard Fallon

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Bank Leumi to Offer BTC, ETH and SOL Trading with Galaxy

Fake LinkedIn Crypto Job Scams Have Cost $11.8M: Singapore

CPJ, partners sound alarm over pre-election media crackdown in Kazakhstan

Strategy responds to MSCI’s proposed index exclusion rules

Morning Minute: Tether Finally Gets An Audit

8 hours ago2 Views

Paramount Promises Meaningless CNN ‘Oversight Board’ To Try And Gain Merger Approval

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Trump family ‘s World Liberty Financial (WLFI) delay plans to sell Maldives resort token

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Gemini posts $108M Q2 net loss despite 37% revenue growth

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Ireland’s New AML Strategy Brings ‘Enhanced Checks’ on Private Crypto Wallets

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Volatility exits crypto, TradFi markets even as U.S.-Iran risks linger, sovereign debt rises: Crypto Daily

10 hours ago0 Views

Shinhan Partners With Plume on Tokenized Fund Pilot

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SEC Shelves Crypto Rule Meeting Days After Senate Punted Clarity Act

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Editor's Picks

Bank Leumi taps Galaxy (GLXY) to offer crypto trading in Israel

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Bitcoin Slips From Weekly Close Target In Drop To $62,500

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Reporters Committee condemns Louisiana courtroom closure, handcuffing of journalist during grand jury indictment

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Stablecoin issuer RedotPay said to put U.S. IPO plan on hold: Bloomberg

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RedotPay US IPO Faces Delay Amid Regulatory, Legal Hurdles: Report

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Opinions & Debates

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Should You Care Who Wrote It?

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“Dogma,” Albert Einstein told an audience at the Sorbonne in 1929, “is the enemy of progress.” Just kidding—it’s what ChatGPT whispered in the ear of the rector of my university at the start of this academic year after she decided to outsource her inaugural address to AI. The speech she delivered was a string of grammatically impeccable platitudes garnished with four quotations, three of which turned out to be hallucinations—the kind of false erudition that academics like to flaunt. The fourth quotation was real, but it was a cringeworthy piece of self-flattery lifted from an obscure 1946 speech: “There are…

Debates

Australia’s Productivity Crisis: McKinsey’s Chris Bradley

Debates

Cambridge and the Stigmatisation of Intelligence Research

Debates

Taylor Sheridan and the Cowboy Myth

Debates

Amnesty, Rowling, and NGO Accountability

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Jason Arday: The Scandal Academia Enabled

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Jordan’s Missing Plan for the Post-War Middle East

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Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

JPMorgan cut Polymarket banking ties over regulatory concerns: Report

JPMorgan Chase reportedly cut banking ties with Polymarket in October 2025 over regulatory concerns but remains open to an underwriting role if the platform…

Global Free Speech

Women in burqa with their children in Herat, Afghanistan. Photo: Marius Arnesen/CC BY-SA 2.0 A grim milestone this Saturday – five years since the fall of Kabul. That’s 1,826 days of Taliban rule. In that time the pillars sustaining a free and pluralistic society have crumbled. Press freedom has been dismantled and political opposition made obsolete. Women and girls have borne the brunt of the Taliban’s repressive regime. Removed from public life – not even allowed to be seen at windows – they now have fewer rights than people in closed societies like North Korea. While enforcement of the Taliban’s seemingly endless edicts has been patchy, even under more moderate officials life is relentlessly tough, with women’s freedoms nothing on what they were before the Taliban’s return. “Gender apartheid” is the phrase most commonly used to describe this dreadful state of affairs. As part of our Letters from Afghan Women project, which was inspired by our Letters from Lukashenka’s Prisoners, we’ve called Afghanistan “a domestic prison”. It has also been referred to as a lockdown, only one with no end in sight. Five years ago, people in the UK were on the other side of the last and longest pandemic lockdown. Five years on, Afghan women are still trapped in one. This June, a group of women protested the arrest of other women for alleged violations of dress-code rules. Taliban authorities responded with brute force, shooting at them and killing at least two. But the episode, rare as it was, at least revealed one positive – parts of Afghan society remain willing to challenge the authority of the Taliban. The Taliban know there are chinks in their armour. This probably explains why officials and government employees were recently ordered to stop using smartphones. Videos making the rounds online showed Taliban members destroying their phones in compliance. Many fear that these restrictions may yet be extended to everyone, thus severing an essential lifeline. So much has been lost but not everything: we must continue fighting to ensure that when the Taliban does eventually fall, some infrastructure for freedom of expression remains. That has been a motivator over the last five years when it has all felt bleak, and it fits into Index’s broader theory of change: one voice amplified helps many. Since 2021 we’ve arranged fundraisers for Afghan journalists, we’ve given an award to a brave educator with a mobile school, we’ve created the aforementioned letters project and we’ve published the words of Afghan women (and others) many times. We have provided an essential platform for them to speak, because in the words of Rahmati, a 24-year-old from Kabul: “I realised that I wanted to scream. Not just a sound, something deeper. I wanted to scream that I exist. That I am a human being. That I have thoughts and a heart and a voice.” Index became her place to scream. We offered her momentary respite from an otherwise grim reality. We won’t stop, for Rahmati and the millions of others like her, human beings with thoughts, hearts and voices. If you want to help, read their words, share them, donate to us, become an Index member. Just please don’t look away. READ MORE

A grim milestone this Saturday – five years since the fall of Kabul. That’s 1,826 days of Taliban rule. In that time the pillars…

Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

ECB Finds Crypto Payment Acceptance Below 1% in Euro Area

Crypto remains a marginal payment option among euro area businesses even as other forms of digital payments gain ground, according to a new European…

Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

Cluster of headwinds gang up on bitcoin and wider crypto market

Fund flows aren’t helping either. Spot bitcoin ETFs are bleeding again, with U.S.-listed funds shedding $333 million in net outflows so far this week.…

5 years after Taliban takeover, CPJ calls for an end to deepening repression of journalists

15 hours ago

Bitcoin (BTC) holding firms Strategy and Metaplanet face stock-index exclusion under MSCI’s new proposal

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JPMorgan debanked Polymarket in late 2025

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NUSD Redemptions Paused as Neutrl Reviews Reserves

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Copper US arm becomes FINRA member, SEC-registered broker-dealer

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Twitch Turns On Amazon AI Training by Default: ‘Nobody Would Opt In’

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Doctors, Medical Associations Already Giving A Giant Middle Finger To Trump’s Vaccine EO

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Bitcoin Price Range Breakout Rests On Short-Term Holders, Analysis Shows

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Trezor Customer Data Exposed in Shipping Partner Breach

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Bitcoin slips back even as Fed rate hike expectations dwindle

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Figure Loan Marketplace Volume Reaches $4.3B in Q2

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Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

Terraform Accuses Jane Street of Leveraging Secret Telegram Group

In brief Terraform Labs’ administrator has alleged in an amended complaint that Jane Street used a secret Telegram chat to receive insider information from…

Media & Culture

Racial Slurs as Actionable Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress

From Allen v. Noble, decided last week by Judge Latonia Williams (Conn. Super. Ct. New Haven), plaintiff’s factual allegations (for Noble’s side of the…

Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

It’s not all HYPE: Privacy and quantum-resistant coins surge as bitcoin marks time: Crypto Daily

This is an excerpt from CoinDesk newsletter ‘Daybook.’ Sign up here, if you haven’t already.Bitcoin BTC$77,196.00, ether (ETH), XRP (XRP), solana (SOL) and other…

Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

OSL Strengthens Asia’s Digital Asset Ecosystem with Listing of State-Supervised Gold-Backed Stablecoin USDKG

HONG KONG, May 21 — OSL Group (863.HK) (OSL), a global stablecoin payment and trading platform, today announced that its Hong Kong-licensed digital asset…

Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

HYPE Jumps Double Digits as Hyperliquid ETFs Add $25.5M

In brief Inflows to Hyperliquid ETFs hit $25.5M Wednesday, higher than the first five days of inflows combined. ETF demand follows HYPE’s stellar performance,…

Media & Culture

Today in Supreme Court History: May 21, 2007

I WANT FREE MINDS AND FREE MARKETS! Help Reason push back with more of the fact-based reporting we do best. Your support means more…

Global Free Speech

Kurt Vonnegut and his daughter Nanette in 1997. Photo: Family handout This article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Index on Censorship, The monster unleashed: How Hungary’s illliberal vision is seducing the Western world published on 2 April 2026. “My mother warned me early on that my father was going to get in trouble for writing dirty books.” Nanette Vonnegut, youngest daughter of the late American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, remembers these words vividly. Even though she was around eight years old at the time, she recognised the real fear in her mother’s voice. At the time, she didn’t quite know what to do with the warning. But through a serendipitous encounter, she now has a much better idea. When she was invited, along with her brother, to represent the Vonnegut Estate at a meeting about book censorship hosted by publisher Penguin Random House, she had what she describes as a conversion experience. Now, she is taking on the State of Utah alongside other plaintiffs, in a case defending the freedom to read, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Utah Foundation. “I was blown away by the urgency,” she told Index, recalling the passion and bravery of the librarians and lawyers who spoke at the meeting. Each person took their turn to make a speech, “like one sermon after another”. Vonnegut spoke about her own childhood memories, when she was afraid of what might happen to her father. One speaker in particular, she remembered, described how book bans in the USA are not about words or even sex, but about ideas. “Not until now, did I ever feel afraid for what’s going on. These books in Utah are being thrown away. They’re just pulled off the shelves,” Vonnegut said. But this, she added, has always been a lurking threat. No sex please, we’re prudish At the meeting, she discovered that in Utah, any mention of sex in a book was sufficient reason for it to be pulled from any school library in the state. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, an anti-war novel first published in 1969, remains hugely controversial; it has already been banned in two school districts in Utah, labelled as pornographic. If the book is successfully challenged in a third district, the ban automatically becomes state-wide, as has already happened with 28 other books. Nanette Vonnegut can’t recall the book being particularly pornographic in nature. Interviewed on National Public Radio, Terry Hutchinson, a former member of a Utah schoolboard, said: “I am not a big Kurt Vonnegut fan. Not really because of subject matter, but because of style.” He believed that Slaughterhouse-Five should be removed from school libraries. For him, the book crossed the line when a character gets an erection. When Vonnegut and her attorney Tom Ford were invited to discuss the lawsuit on WHMP Radio, Ford explained that Utah’s book removal law, HB29 (passed in 2022 and amended in 2024), prohibits public school libraries from carrying any book that contains a description of a sex act. In Vonnegut v. Utah, the plaintiffs will argue that sections of HB29 are overbroad and in violation of First Amendment rights. “It prohibits a remarkably sweeping range of literature from every school library in the state,” Ford told the radio station. Appropriate age categories are irrelevant where this law is concerned – all sex is bad sex. The law itself, Ford said, springs from the false narrative created by conservative lawmakers in Utah that the state’s school libraries were full of pornographic books. In fact, Ford continued, the real targets of this censorship were ideas, messages and lived experiences. The earliest memory Vonnegut has of her father being a target of literary censorship is not one of quiet removal from a library shelf, but rather something more dramatic. In 1973, a school in Drake, North Dakota threw copies of Slaughterhouse-Five into its furnace. The books were burnt on the orders of the local school board, which had deemed the novel “profane”. Ironically, Vonnegut’s novel was inspired by his experiences as a prisoner of war in Germany during the Second World War. Before the war the Nazis had organised public burnings of books that they deemed “un-German”. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter to the school in response. “You can feel his rage and his hurt,” his daughter told Index, recalling the letter. Putting the Vonnegut name to good use Now, she said, she can’t believe that book banning is back in the USA, and “worse than ever”. She fears for the teenagers who don’t have access to the right resources and how much trouble it’s going to leave them in. For the first time, she feels she can really put her Vonnegut name to good use. Nanette Vonnegut grew up in a creative household, with her mother guarding the door to protect her father’s writing space. “You were scared of that door, because you knew that he was he was trying to write.” He worked hard, she remembered, all the time, and there was a sense that it was serious work. She described to Index how her father would come out from his writing for a snack (usually pumpernickel loaded with butter). The kitchen would be full of the kids and their friends, but he’d barely register them. Often, he would be muttering to himself; sometimes, he’d stop and talk to his youngest daughter, verbally working through an idea. Once, on his way back to his study, he paused and said to her: “You know, the unstructured life is not worth living.” Kurt rarely left the house. His wife, Jane Marie Cox, maintained the family’s social front by doing all the expected things like going to cocktail parties and playing tennis. She was his biggest supporter. Cox was passionate about reading too, and the Vonnegut house was always full of books. At the end of each day, the couple would discuss Vonnegut’s day of writing. “She was like his editor,” Nanette said, describing how when it came to stories, “she was the midwife.” A Vonnegut family trip Niagara Falls circa 1964. Photo: Family handout Memories of Slaughterhouse-Five Her father, she explained, was always writing to tell the truth. Slaughterhouse-Five was a particular challenge, because he struggled to get the information he needed about the fire-bombing of Dresden, which he had experienced. When he did finally finish the book, he left the galleys out for the children to read. When it was published, he became an overnight sensation. It was a writer’s house, and as the children got older, it became a party house too. According to Nanette Vonnegut, “It was a very heady, exciting time.” Her parents often had other creatives over at the Vonnegut home. Once, it was actor and director Peter Fonda, to talk about film rights for Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle. Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road, visited before he was famous. After having a little too much to drink, his bad language ramped up. Nanette and a friend, aged around nine, were told to leave the room and go upstairs. “But we did not go upstairs,” she recalled. “We stayed behind the door. It was sort of thrilling and exciting. He was like a wild man, and he seemed to be a lot of fun. We didn’t want to miss any of it.” Growing up in this household, she internalised a strong faith in the creative process. She has inherited this “creative groove” as an artist. Take, for example, the day she snapped, for no particular reason, a photo of the Senate floor being shown on a television screen. A few days later, on 6 January 2021, came the US Capitol riot. Following her creativity, Vonnegut created a huge six-foot painting (opposite) from the photograph. Although mostly found in her art studio, Vonnegut feels a strong sense of the power of words, and is a writer too. “Words are the most sacred things that we have, and that’s something I grew up with,” she told Index. And above all, evident in her fight against Utah, she has always taken for granted the belief that there are no “dirty words”. READ MORE

This article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Index on Censorship, The monster unleashed: How Hungary’s illliberal vision is seducing the Western world published…

Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

TradFi giant IG set to expand crypto trading across Europe

Trading giant IG (IGG), which started offering cryptocurrency trading in the U.K. a year ago, said it plans to expand the service across Europe,…

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