A weaker renminbi makes China’s exports to the rest of the world cheaper and therefore more competitive against those of the U.S. That could encourage rising purchases of Chinese goods in the U.S. and elsewhere and further widen a growing trade deficit with China.

Traders are interpreting the yuan’s drop past the 7 mark as a signal that Beijing is prepared to wield its currency as a tool amid a widening rift with Washington. The People’s Bank of China pledged to keep the yuan stable after it dropped beyond 7 and said the decline was fueled by expectations of further tariffs on Chinese goods.

One shouldn’t assume, of course, that a U.S.-China currency war – to sit alongside the trade war – is inevitable. The yuan is not a fully free-floating currency, which means Beijing is nominally in control of where it ends up (although things got out of hand back in 2016). And while China might be happy to send a signal that it can weaponize its currency, this is no doubt just a warning shot…

You could call the killer who shot up a Walmart in El Paso evil, a madman, or a lone wolf, if you like. But it would be an intolerable omission if we did not also call him a white nationalist terrorist. This ideology is a growing sickness in America, and President Trump has a duty to thoroughly and roundly denounce it.

So what role does mental illness play in these mass killings? Multiple studies done between 2000 and 2015 suggest that about a third of mass killers have an untreated severe mental illness. If mental illness is defined more broadly, the percentage is higher.

Trump can’t fix this problem. To a large extent, he is the problem. Americans looking to confront and defeat white nationalism and gun violence almost certainly have no choice but to look elsewhere for leadership.

The popular desire for a unity government is also evident in the success of Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman, who has reinvented himself. Lieberman has made a unity government a key element of his campaign, and so far the polls show the public rewarding him.

A majority of the Israeli public opposes a unity government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that brings together the ruling Likud party and its centrist competitor Blue and White, a poll for the Walla news site has found.

The opposition spans the political spectrum.

The challenge now ahead for Gantz, a former army chief of staff, is to keep the disparate elements of Blue and White together if and when Netanyahu offers him a government partnership. The offer could result in a Blue and White split that would provide Netanyahu with the oxygen he needs for political survival. Gantz will try to play the same trick on Netanyahu, by encouraging senior Likud members to rebel against him and join a unity government led by Blue and White.

…in 2019 8chan is no longer a refuge for extremist hate — it is a window opening onto a much broader landscape of racism, radicalization and terrorism. Shutting down the site is unlikely to eradicate this new extremist culture, because 8chan is anywhere. Pull the plug, it will appear somewhere else, in whatever locale will host it.

Cloudflare’s decision on Sunday may jeopardize 8chan’s ability to remain on the open web in the near term, because the company has been protecting 8chan from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and the site is a likely target for internet vigilantes. It is also represents a complete reversal of Cloudflare’s position from less than 24 hours earlier…

The founder of 8chan, an internet messaging board that is a haven for extremist content online, is calling for the site to be shut down in the wake of a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas which left 20 people dead and dozens more injured… “Once again, a terrorist used 8chan to spread his message as he knew people would save it and spread it,” Brennan told the Post. “The board is a receptive audience for domestic terrorists.”

Some critics have lambasted esports as nothing more than product marketing. But while esports athletes may not have to run, jump or throw, their training regimens are intense. Kyle Giersdorf practices for six hours a day. And researchers are only just starting to investigate the cognitive abilities required by elite esports athletes…

…For all the potential physical dangers of sporting activities such as cycling, football or cricket, the upsides are immense. Real sport typically offers physical exercise, face-to-face social interaction and, in many cases, an authentic sense of belonging and team spirit. Gaming and sport are not mutually exclusive; you can do both. The problem with a gaming obsession, however, is that it leaves little time for anything else. No doubt gaming is here to stay but let us not mistake it for a real sport

Fortnite is a lot of things: a game, a social network, a sport, an ever-evolving piece of fiction. Up until now, all of these aspects of Fornite had remained largely separate. The World Cup showed what could happen if you brought all of those elements together, and it was amazing.

The surveillance dystopia is on the horizon, and companies like Microsoft and Amazon are helping build it. Despite their platitudes of caution and ethics, we’ve seen the consequences of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos. And if we don’t stop the spread of facial recognition, its latest lucrative surveillance product, we’ll soon count our most basic freedoms among the things they’ve broken.

Facial recognition will only get better. But we ought to can the hysteria. So long as the tech is properly limited in use to avoid fishing expeditions, we’ll all be safer.

Some municipalities—San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts, among them—have proactively banned law enforcement’s use of facial recognition. And more localized entities, like the New York State Education Department, have barred it in certain circumstances as well. And even police bodycam maker Axon has declined to incorporate it into its products. But the longer Congress waits to act on a broader level, the more entrenched the technology becomes and the harder it will be for opponents to overcome its inertia.