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Israeli protesters demonstrate against the right-wing government outside the Knesset in Jerusalem.
Hard Numbers: “Anarchy” in Israel, Michigan State University shooting, the plight of Black mothers and babies, alleged abuses in Portuguese Catholic Church, the new promised land for Scotch
90,000: As Israel’s Knesset began a contentious debate over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms on Monday, a whopping 90,000 people hit the streets of Jerusalem to protest against the measures, with another 100,000 joining demonstrations nationwide. Netanyahu accused his opponents of “pushing the country to anarchy.” Here’s more from GZERO on the back story.
3: At least three people were killed, and five injured, when a gunman opened fire at Michigan State University on Monday night. The assailant then turned the gun on himself. It is the latest in a string of mass shootings on college campuses and schools across the country in recent years.
87: New data on US childbirths shows that, even when correcting for income, Black mothers and their babies fare worse than white ones. The infant mortality rate for rich Black mothers is 87 points higher than that for poor White mothers, according to a decade-long study, which was conducted in California.
4,815: A new report commissioned by the Portuguese Catholic Church alleges that its priests and other authority figures sexually abused at least 4,815 children over the past seven decades. The investigating commission says this number is merely the “tip of the iceberg.” But under Portuguese law, only 25 of those cases are recent enough to be prosecuted.
219 million: India is now the world’s leading importer of Scotch by volume, taking in 219 million bottles of the stuff last year. An increase of some 60% over 2021 helped to push India past France for the top spot. Still, billion-strong India remains a tiny part of the global scotch market — the industry hopes that a long-awaited UK-India trade deal could help to crack things open more.
No second-class citizens: the challenge of diversity in democracy
In his new book The Great Experiment, political scientist Yascha Mounk digs into how tough it is for very diverse democracies to treat all their citizens equally. The price to pay if it goes wrong is high: society falls apart.
The US faces many ongoing challenges, especially on race relations, but has done much better in some areas than was predicted decades ago – for example, the increasing frequency of interracial marriages, Mounk tells Ian Bremmer.
Where America has made much less progress, Mounk admits, is on racial disparities in wealth — which he says is the deepest problem we have in the US today. Still, "it's important to see the nuances": accumulating wealth takes long, and the income gap between Black and white Americans has been reduced in recent decades.
"There is a real pocket of poverty because of [the] long-term structural impacts of all the injustice in American history ... but the modal experience of African Americans today is hopeful," Mounk says. "And actually, when you ask African Americans how they feel about the American Dream, how they feel about the future of America, they are more optimistic than white Americans."
Watch the GZERO World episode: Authoritarians gone wild