Game of Thrones fans, want to have real currency in the world of Westeros — and amongst your fellow diehard fans here on earth? Then you might want to look into a new Kickstarter that’s planning on minting “pre-conquest coins of Westeros. The designs even have the stamp of approval from A Song of Ice and Fire author George R. R. Martin himself, who has licensed them to proceed with minting the metal pieces.

“The coin makers of Shire Post Mint bring you solid metal coins from the thousands of years of history before the Targaryen dynasty in Westeros,” the campaign explains. They’ve also put together maps of Westeros for the coins to be displayed in, 50 of which are signed by Martin himself. The project was launched on Oct. 2 — and fully funded within a mere four hours. By Friday, it had already racked up nearly $30,000 in pledges from over 200 backers.

Made of bronze, copper, iron, nickel and brass, the Arkansas-based family company has designed over 40 different pieces with Martin’s ..

“Child bride.” “Criminal.” “Juvenile offender.” These are some of the many labels assigned to Zeinab Sekaanvand during her far too short life. Sekaanvand, who was executed on Tuesday in Urumieh prison in Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, was rarely seen for who she really was: a vulnerable young woman trapped in a cycle of violence and sexual abuse since childhood.

Sekaanvand, who was 24 when she was hanged, had spent almost a third of her life in detention. In February 2012, she was arrested and put on trial over the murder of her husband, a crime that took place when she was 17 years old. She had reported being raped by her brother-in-law and tortured by police after her arrest. What’s especially chilling about Sekaanvand’s case is the number of points at which the Iranian authorities could have intervened to help her. Sekaanvand reported the abuse she suffered. She spoke out, yet she was ignored.

It’s a scenario that is all too familiar to many women and girls. But because Sekaanva..

The audience sat in silence. Nadia Murad had just wrapped up a speaking event at the Carr Centre at Harvard University. The room had been full, as it usually was when Nadia spoke to an audience. “I can take more questions,” she said. But none came. The crowd had listened intently and seemed empathetic, yet was seemingly too shy to ask much of the slight, 23-year-old woman they saw before them.

Nadia had come here for the questions. It was March 2016, and the ISIS battle was still raging. With 3,000 women from her Yazidi tribe in northern Iraq still under ISIS control, she wanted the world to know about how her people were suffering. She had come to get them involved.

Nadia often wondered if people attended her events, she later told me, to hear more about the story of Islamic State brutalities than to help the Yazidi people. She wanted them to know her cause was something the world could address. “Everyone cannot control or defeat Daesh” she’d say, using a disparaging Arabic term for..