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    Bankman-Fried heads to Brooklyn jail notorious for poor conditions

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    NEW YORK (Reuters) – Sam Bankman-Fried will prepare for his fraud trial from a Brooklyn jail where inmates ranging from convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to Honduras’ former president have complained of subpar conditions.U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan ruled on Friday that Bankman-Fried, the founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, must be jailed for tampering with witnesses while free on $250 million bond at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California. Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges over FTX’s collapse, will now be housed before his Oct. 2 trial in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, a far cry from the luxurious Bahamas resort where he lived until his December 2022 arrest and extradition to the United States. In recent years, MDC has been plagued by persistent staffing shortages, power outages and maggots in inmates’ food. Earlier this year, a guard pleaded guilty to accepting bribes to smuggle in drugs. Public defenders have called conditions “inhumane.” In the winter of 2019, an electrical fire cut off the jail’s lighting and heat for days as temperatures fell to near zero Fahrenheit (minus 18 Celsius). Lawyers for Maxwell, who was convicted of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for abuse by the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, said raw sewage seeped into her MDC cell. Her attorneys compared the “reprehensible and utterly inappropriate” conditions there to Hannibal Lecter’s incarceration in the 1991 movie “The Silence of the Lambs”, “despite the absence of the cage and plastic face guard.” They also cited “hyper-surveillance” by overbearing guards, a bad diet, and sleep deprivation. Maxwell was sentenced last year to 20 years and is being held at a prison in Florida.The U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which runs MDC, did not respond to a request for comment. The agency previously has said it is committed to the safety of inmates and staff, and that humane treatment of inmates is a top priority. Founded in 1994, MDC currently hosts 1,608 inmates. It is now the jail housing detainees awaiting federal trials in New York City, after the Manhattan Correctional Center closed in 2021 for improvements. Epstein killed himself in his MCC cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.Bankman-Fried’s lawyers had urged Kaplan not to jail the 31-year-old former billionaire, in part because a “staffing crisis” at MDC meant there would be too few guards to escort him to a room where he could access computers to review prosecutors’ evidence against him.Kaplan said during the hearing that while MDC “is not on anybody’s list of five star facilities,” he was not sure whether housing Bankman-Fried at a minimum security jail in Putnam County, about 50 miles (80 km) north of New York City, as prosecutors had requested, was “doable.” It is not Bankman-Fried’s first time behind bars. In the Bahamas, he was held for nearly a week at the Fox Hill Prison, which a 2021 U.S. State Department report said was plagued by rodents and a lack of toilets. Local authorities said in December conditions had improved. Other high-profile inmates currently being held at MDC include Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras who has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges, and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese businessman who has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges. Hernandez’ lawyers have likened his confinement conditions to those of a “prisoner of war.” Guo’s lawyers in March called MDC “an extraordinarily dangerous environment,” citing a recent lockdown in response to an increase in contraband including weapons. More

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    Hut 8 Mining Receives Interim Order and Filing of Management Information Circular in Connection with the Business Combination with US Bitcoin

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    The Company has filed the management information circular and related materials in respect of the Special Meeting that will be mailed to Shareholders under the Company’s profile on SEDAR at www.sedarplus.ca and EDGAR at www.sec.gov, and on Hut8.io. The management information circular and related materials provide details of the Special Meeting and how Shareholders or their duly appointed proxyholders can attend, access, and participate in the Special Meeting.The completion of the Transaction is subject to certain conditions, including the receipt of the requisite approval from the Shareholders, the final order of the Supreme Court of British Columbia at an application which is scheduled for September 15, 2023, and other closing conditions customary in transactions of this nature. If all necessary approvals are obtained and the conditions to the completion of the Transaction are satisfied or waived, it is currently anticipated that the Transaction will be completed by September 30, 2023. More

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    Pro-Bitcoin candidate wins primary elections in Argentina

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    With 95% of votes counted, Millei is currently leading the pools of the primary elections with 30.1% of the votes. He is part of the political party known as Freedom Advances.The candidate is known for his political views about abolishing the Central Bank in Argentina and having a free market economy.According to the votes, Together for Change, led by Patricia Bulrich, is in second place with 28.2% of the votes. The current political party leading the presidency in Argentina, known as Peronismo, took third place.The voting participation of Argentinean citizens was around 70%, one of the lowest in democratic history. The polling stations closed at six in the afternoon, local time, but voting in the City of Buenos Aires was extended due to problems with the electronic voting machines, which has delayed the start of counting and the dissemination of data preliminariesArgentina is known for having a complex economic scenario for years. The country has one of the highest inflation rates in the Latin American continent and the world.According to the local Government Inflation Index, the general level of the consumer price index registered a monthly rise of 6.0% in June 2023, and accumulated a variation of 50.7%. In the year-on-year comparison, the increase reached 115.6%.Due to the inflation problem and the loss of confidence in the local currency, Argentine Peso, the number of cryptocurrency holders has been growing fast.According to Statista, Argentina holds 26% of cryptocurrency holders in its population, ranking among the top 10 countries with the highest number of cryptocurrency holders worldwide.This article was originally published on Crypto.news More