El Salvador became the first country to accept bitcoin as legal tender,meaning that businesses will be compelled to accept it as payment along with the American dollar, the official currency.The government hopes the cryptocurrency will appeal to the 70% of the population without access to a bank account.Meanwhile, America’s Justice Department recovered most of the ransom paid in bitcoin to Russian hackers who had shut down a major pipeline.The FBI was able to seize the payment by tracking the bitcoin address used by the gang.It also emerged that JBS, the world’s biggest meat-processor, paid $11m in bitcoin to cyber-criminals after they disrupted its plants.The Keystone XL pipeline was officially scrapped following Joe Biden’s decision not to grant it a permit to cross American territory.The project, opposed for years by greens and Native American groups, would have carried oil from Alberta’s tar sands.Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is focusing on his long-standing passion for spaceflight.He and his brother will be among the first people to fly with Blue Origin, a rocketry company he founded in 2000,when it makes its first flight with crew to 100km above Earth’s surface on July 20th.Mr Bezos is stepping down as Amazon’s chief executive on July 5th.Mr Bezos may well want to escape the blue planet for a while,after revelations by ProPublica, a collection of investigative journalists, that he and the 24 other richest Americans pay little or no federal income tax.
