US Support for Israel, a Crypto Crash, and Chinese Nuclear Reactors Economic and Economic News

The heartbreaking headlines from the Middle East have rightly dominated the news cycle for the past week. A ceasefire agreement appeared in place on Friday after Israel’s 11-day bombing of Gaza killed at least 243 Palestinians, including 66 children. At least 12 people in Israel, including two children, were killed in the recent escalation of violence.

The deeply asymmetrical conflict has raised a question that recurs every time it rekindles: Why does the United States clearly support Israel?

We have this story as well as some outside of the Middle East, including a fascinating look at Earth’s growing space debris problem, U.S.-South Korea relations, two nuclear reactors in China raising concerns, and a week of roller coaster for Bitcoin believers and other crypto Enthusiasts.

Prepare your thumb.

$ 30.95 million

The amount that pro-Israel groups donated to U.S. political candidates during the 2020 election cycle is roughly double what it was during the 2016 campaign, according to nonprofit monitoring group OpenSecrets.org.

This money helps explain why the US has clearly supported and continues to support Israel in an astonishingly asymmetrical conflict with Palestine. But that’s not the only reason. William Roberts from Al Jazeera has that story here.

$ 132.5 billion

That’s the value of the goods South Korea exported to China in 2020, almost twice as much as the exports it sent to the US. This is in part why South Korean President Moon Jae-in will find a delicate balance when he meets with US President Joe Biden in the White House on Friday. Al Jazeera’s Dominic Fitzsimmons takes a deeper look at the summit here.

Two

The number of CFR-600 sodium-cooled fast neutron reactors in China is increasing on Changbiao Island in Fujian Province.

When completed, the two reactors will produce plutonium, which can be reprocessed and used as a fuel source for other nuclear reactors – or used to make nuclear warheads.

But no one outside of the Chinese officials and the companies overseeing the construction of the reactors knows whether they will be built for purely civil energy purposes or whether they could serve the additional purpose of acting as a nuclear deterrent. Al Jazeera has the story here.

$ 30,000

That’s roughly what a Bitcoin was worth in morning trading in New York on Wednesday, which is a 31 percent crash from the previous day. However, the world’s largest cryptocurrency rose 33 percent in the early afternoon on Wednesday. Read this story here.

Cryptocurrencies have been particularly volatile since one of their biggest fanboys, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, dumped bitcoin under the bus because of its carbon footprint and tweeted that Tesla would no longer accept it as payment for its electric vehicles. Oh – and on Friday morning a bitcoin was worth around $ 38,000. There’s a reason Bitcoin boosters are called HODLers (as in “Hold On For Dear Life”).

Over 71 percent

The portion of the earth that is made up of water was good news for China’s space agency after one of their Long March rockets, responsible for putting the first part of the country’s new space station into orbit, re-entered the earth’s atmosphere uncontrollably made possible.

Fortunately, most of it burned on reentry, but parts of the missile crashed into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives. The incident has renewed a longstanding debate about space debris: the parts of rockets and other vehicles left behind on their journey into orbit. Al Jazeera’s Amy Thompson has this story here.

1,000

Rats carry more than 35 diseases, including serious diseases such as plague and hantavirus, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [File: Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo]The number of working cats a Chicago animal shelter has used to help tackle the U.S. city’s vermin problem in an environmentally friendly way.

Rats are a big problem: In 2020, the Windy City topped the US pest control company Orkin’s Top 50 Rattiest Cities List for the sixth time in a row.

Their teams of two to three wild cats use their pheromones to scare off rats – and often become part of the family in the shops and homes they live in, according to the Tree House Humane Society.

There is currently a month-long waiting list for the cat entrepreneurs – which means it seems to be working perfectly. #sorrynotsorry. You can read this story here.