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Russia’s largest bank, Sber, plans to expand its crypto-backed lending to accept Tether’s USDt stablecoin and Ether as collateral alongside Bitcoin, according to a senior executive.Sber will adapt its existing products and gradually expand its offerings as Russia’s new crypto law takes effect, Deputy Chairman Anatoly Popov said, according to a Friday TASS report. The bank plans to add the assets as collateral after the Bank of Russia permits them for public trading, he said.The plans come as Russia rolls out a regulated crypto market under a law signed by president Vladimir Putin on Aug. 4, with core provisions taking…

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Swift’s $1.5 quadrillion network faces a blockchain test

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Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

Ripple is preparing XRP Ledger for quantum computers before ‘Q-Day’ arrives

An Anthropic model cut the work needed to break a leading post-quantum signature candidate by a factor of 67 million last month, while Bitcoin and Ethereum published their own migration plans this week. Read the full article here

A $1.1 million crypto card hack crashed a neobank's token 49%

First Amendment Broadly Protects Against Speech-Based Deportation of Noncitizens, Court Rules

The next trillion-dollar currency may not be a stablecoin — it might not even have a name yet

AI & Crypto

Politics

Lawmakers Want To Stop Kids From Nicknaming Their Pokémon

Media & Culture 1 day ago

It may sound Farfetch’d, but lawmakers are advancing a bill that would stop minors from nicknaming their Pokémon online—in violation of the First Amendment. Last month, the House of Representatives passed the KIDS Act, a wide-ranging package of youth online…

Today in Supreme Court History: August 29, 1967

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Haidt’s Moment

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Federal Judge Concludes Then-Candidate Trump’s Attempt to Remove N.Y. Hush Money Non-Reporting Prosecution to Federal Court Came Too Late

Milo Yiannopoulos Wanted More ICE Raids. Now He’s in ICE Detention.

Judge Says Trump’s Clampdown on Anthropic Violates the First Amendment

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“This Case Begins with a Viral Video” (and Goes on to Involve “the Anti-Doxing League”)

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Slayer’s Reign in Blood at 40: Thrash Metal’s Purest Album

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In January 1986, four skinny, long-haired twenty-somethings from Huntington Park, California, walked into a recording studio in Los Angeles. Three weeks later, they emerged with Reign in Blood—a 28-minute and 55-second sonic blitzkrieg that became an instant thrash-metal classic. This wasn’t just another metal album. It was an assault that redefined just how fast and just how uncompromising music could be. If John Coltrane pioneered sheets of sound, Slayer fired sheets of shrapnel from the opening bars of “Angel of Death.” There is no atmospheric intro, no fade-in, and no warning—just a surgically precise cymbal and guitar punch before vocalist Tom…

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Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

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Cryptocurrency & Free Speech Finance

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London’s Africa Centre faces closure Earlier this month, I was saddened to learn that The Africa Centre in London may once again be shutting its doors. It won’t be the first time the centre has had to close – but it may be the last time, although the chief executive is still hopeful he can raise the millions of pounds needed to save it. There’s no point dwelling on the reasons, speculative or factual, behind its current crisis. I did though, looking through a list of its recent events, feel a pang of guilt. I could have done more to support The Africa Centre – turning up, talking to people about it, taking cognisance of the real value it has added over the years to London’s political and social life. When the Africa Centre was founded in 1961, its primary objective was to “educate about, connect to and [advocate] for Africa and its diaspora through arts, innovation, culture, thought leadership and education”. In 1964 it found a home in London’s Covent Garden – the Catholic church purchased an old tomato warehouse on King Street and gifted it “to the people of Africa in perpetuity”. When my parents emigrated to the United Kingdom in the mid-1960s, The Africa Centre was one of the very few places where people like them could find space to negotiate the cultural and social differences between them and the unfamiliar wider world. This process of cultural pollination process worked both ways, mind. Intellectuals, activists and dissidents from across the continent spoke at King Street about the political challenges faced by post-colonial African countries, educating curious audiences who wanted to learn more about a part of the world that for many was at best a construct of the imagination, if even that. For two days last June, the London Archives presented to the public a cross-section of documents, photographs and ephemera from its Africa Centre Collection. The archives were a revealing and at times startling record of political and social openness and curiosity. On one table, a poster from 1968 announced a talk about The Future of the Portuguese Territories – long before Angola and Mozambique became proxy battlegrounds for the Cold War between the Soviets and the West. From 1970, an invitation to a talk by Mrs Lydia Osiyemi, “sociology student and mother”, about The African mother and child in Britain. Judging from the poster (left), I fancy that Mrs Osiyemi’s talk was proposing African solutions to a dilemma that remains very real today – to London’s new arrivals and veterans alike. And then, from the early 1990s, in the centre’s guest book (below right), a tribute from a vanguard of democracy. “I pay tribute to those who founded this institution, and those who run it,” the scrawly script read. “This is … a major cultural shop-window for Africa of which every African should be proud.” The author: “M.K.O. Abiola of Africa.” The Nigeria I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, after my parents moved back there for a while, was defined by the ever-present cloud of military dictatorship. I can say that now, in hindsight; it’s strange how one normalises the abnormal when we have nothing to compare it against. When Abiola, a business magnate and politician, ran for president in Nigeria in 1993 for a short while it seemed that the country would escape its history of ethnic strife. But then the military snatched victory from him and imprisoned him, extending their malign grip on the country for another half decade. The BAFTA-winning My Father’s Son is set against the backdrop of that very period. A generation before this, the Africa at the Pictures film festival curated by the centre had offered London similar context to political and social concerns across the continent. Abiola’s entry reminded me that it was in the London, on King Street, that I first began to think more clearly about the right to free expression and what happens when this is curtailed. When Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, an acerbic observation on life under military dictatorship in a fictional west African country, was shortlisted for the Booker in 1987 it couldn’t be bought in Nigeria. I got hold of my copy in London – in the Africa Centre’s cramped and musty bookshop, stuffed with books on and from the continent. It wasn’t all high-minded intellectualism on King Street. The Africa Centre was home to one of the few restaurants in London featuring cuisine from here and there across the continent – Mauritian lamb curry, Algerian couscous, fried plantain and boiled yam. Cost? Dishes were, according to a caption, “between 20p and £3”. Happy days. (An early menu is shown below left). In 2012, the Africa Centre left Covent Garden. Maintaining the Grade II-listed building proved too expensive, some said. Perhaps more to the point, it was no longer a good fit for the commercialised ambience that had sprung up around Covent Garden. The historic building on King Street was sold, and with the support of the Mayor of London and the Arts Council, the Centre relocated itself across the river in 2022, to new premises in Southwark. The last time I was there, in the summer of 2023, was to see a fascinating multi-floor exhibition about Nigeria’s Fuji music. Once again, I was surprised and delighted to learn in the Africa Centre something new about my childhood home, so very far away from it. London of the 1980s and 1990s was nothing like the crucible of cultures that it is today. While migrant communities were not quite silenced, they certainly did not have the right to a voice in the public sphere such as they do today. We complain, correctly, about febrile attempts to exclude inconvenient minority voices from the general discourse today. But we don’t, unfortunately, acknowledge enough the real contribution that physical community spaces, big and small, have made over the years to give London the cultural texture and viscera that makes the challenging and contradictory but still very charming city that it is. I’m going to miss the Africa Centre when it’s gone, and places like it, that helped shaped a city where the right to free expression is still, on the whole, seen to be a good thing. READ MORE

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ABC Shows A Backbone In FCC Fight, Shows FCC Manufactured A Controversy Surrounding James Talarico

from the censorial-fascist-weirdos dept ABC/Disney, like most major media companies, has spent much of its time during America’s bout with authoritarianism being a feckless…

Media & Culture

Lawsuit Against UW Social Work School Over Retaliation for Allegedly Anti-Trans Essay Can Go Forward

From yesterday’s decision by Judge David Estudillo (W.D. Wash.) in Arias v. Univ. of Wash. Tacoma: For purposes of the present motion, and resolving…

Global Free Speech

Sarah Wynn-Williams delivers her acceptance speech at the British Book Awards 2026 Index on Censorship last night honoured two women at the British Book Awards in London who showed bravery in standing up to rich and powerful people. Both authors refused to be silenced despite legal threats and went on to write international bestsellers. The first was Virginia Giuffre’s book Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice and the second Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism. Co-presenting the award with Index was Yulia Navalnya, the activist, publisher and wife of the late Alexei Navalny. The Freedom to Publish Award has been supported by Index for the last four years. CEO Jemimah Steinfeld not only praised both women but also the tenacious publishers Transworld and Pan Macmillan. She said: “This year’s freedom to publish award will honour two different books and authors. These books are not the same story. They are not the same abuses. What happened to them is not morally comparable,” she said, adding: “But both books experienced a series of legal hurdles before they were published. Both authors were silenced, repeatedly. Both authors continued still to speak up because they believed their stories were of public interest. And both authors were fortunate to find tenacious publishers who refused to back down.” Yulia Navalnya said: “History knows one thing: a forbidden word does not disappear. It always returns.” Giuffre began work on her book, a testimony of her abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, his partner Ghislaine Maxwell and others, with journalist Amy Wallace in 2020 and it was published posthumously, following her death in April 2025. Legal teams in the US and UK worked extremely hard to build a defence for publication that would stand up in court. Go ahead was only given six weeks before publication. Giuffre’s editor and publisher at Transworld, Susanna Wadeson, said: “Virginia’s book puts their victims back at the centre of our concerns. It was essential that we find a way to publish it and give her a platform – perhaps even more so after she had died.” The publication of Wynn-Williams’ book was equally challenging. An account of her time at Facebook, the book makes allegations about the company’s internal culture and practices. Meta dispute the claims. They secured a ruling on the eve of publication to stop her from publicising the book. She runs the risk of a US$50,000 fine if she does so, a figure that apparently represents damages Wynn-Williams has to pay for breaching the separation agreement she signed with Meta in 2017. Joanna Prior OBE, CEO, Pan Macmillan, said: “Sarah Wynn William’s courage is extraordinary and Pan Macmillan is proud to stand with her and ensure her voice is heard. We believe the book remains the ultimate authenticated record – a vital weapon against those who use power and money to silence inconvenient stories. Careless People speaks for everyone who cares about the safety of our children and the transparency of the global platforms that shape our lives. No individual should be silenced by corporate tactics, especially when the public interest is this high.” The Freedom to Publish award serves a double purpose – to highlight censorious practices impacting the book industry and to celebrate those who fight back. Arabella Pike, a publishing director at HarperCollins UK, was the inaugural winner of the prize in 2022 for her work defending Catherine Belton’s book Putin’s People and Tom Burgis’s Kleptopia from SLAPP libel actions. Since then, it has been awarded to Salman Rushdie following his brutal attack, Margaret Atwood whose books are constantly the subject of book challenges in the USA, and Boris Akunin, Russia’s bestseller writer who was labelled a “terrorist” by Vladimir Putin, which led to his books being pulled from distribution across Russia. Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller and chair of The British Book Awards, said of last night’s winners: “The Freedom to Publish Award acts as our response to those who would silence the truth, and this year recognises the bravest of people, Virginia Roberts Giuffre and Sarah Wynn-Williams. READ MORE

Index on Censorship last night honoured two women at the British Book Awards in London who showed bravery in standing up to rich and…

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