Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm your host, Patrick Lane, filling in for Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Cubans have eagerly embraced cryptocurrencies as a clever way of bypassing American financial sanctions.

But centralised communism and decentralised digitisation are an uneasy mix.

The government wants to muscle in.

And for thousands of years, observers of the natural world have pondered on how eels find their spawning grounds and where exactly they mate anyway.

New research offers an answer to this slippery mystery.

But first.

Today in Minneapolis, voters will decide whether or not the city's police department should be reformed.

It's nearly 18 months since the murder of George Floyd shook the city.

In the protests around America, in the wake of his death, one slogan took hold.

You need to defund our law enforcement. We need to be militant and strong and demanding that we defund the police.

Since then, there has been a lot of debate over what defund the police actually means, or rather

about how American police forces might be reformed. At times, anything from abolition to increasing

mental health provision has been argued over.

At the federal level, a much-vaunted bipartisan reform deal fizzled out in Congress,

and rising rates of violent crime have made cuts in police budgets look hasty.

Today's vote is crunch time for the defunding debate.

Voters in Minneapolis are deciding whether or not to keep their mayor, Jacob Fry,

but they're also deciding on a referendum on whether or not to replace their police department

with an entirely new one, which they're going to call the Department of Public Safety.

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