SUMMARY: January marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, but there is growing concern throughout Europe that anti-Semitism is on the rise. Historically tolerant Denmark, for example, has seen a resurgence of neo-Nazi groups opposed to immigration. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports from Denmark, where he met a Jewish Auschwitz survivor worried about her family amid the hate.
SUMMARY: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the world's largest private philanthropic organization, with an endowment of $50 billion. Melinda Gates plays a huge role in shaping its work, and her new book, "The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World," chronicles some of the inspiring men and women she has met through it. Judy Woodruff talks to Gates about politics and equality.
SUMMARY: A new UN report reveals the extent to which mankind is changing life on Earth. Written by an international panel of experts, it concludes that nearly a quarter of animal and plant groups are at risk of extinction, some within decades. William Brangham talks to one of the report’s authors, the National University of Mexico's Patricia Balvanera, about what’s driving the changes and how to stop them.
SUMMARY: Heat waves broke records around the world this week. While Burbank airport in California touched 114 degrees, Montreal in Canada recorded a high of 97.9 degrees. In Glasgow, Scotland, the temperature was a record-breaking 89.4 degrees on June 28 and a new world record was set off the coast of Oman, where the temperature never dropped below 108.7 degrees for 24 hours. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
SUMMARY: In Syria, almost every conceivable atrocity has been committed in the last few years, says UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein. Al Hussein joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the U.S. role in the destruction of Raqqa, the investigation into a suspected chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime, as well as the “horrific” conflict and humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
SUMMARY: When journalist Anjan Sundaram traveled to Rwanda in 2009, he encountered a repressive government that targeted and imprisoned the journalists he worked with. His experience opened his eyes to the courage needed to report on the stories and people that can easily hide from the world's collective consciousness. Sundaram offers his Brief but Spectacular take on covering the forgotten.
When the world looks at the United States, it sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and film.
But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America's fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?
Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.
These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.
The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.
What Explains Mass Shootings
The top-line numbers suggest a correlation that, on further investigation, grows only clearer.
Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world's guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American, according to a 2015 study by Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama.
Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people — a distinction Mr. Lankford urged to avoid outliers. Yemen has the world's second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.
Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country's rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society's access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.
What Doesn't: Crime, Race or Mental Health
If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.
A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues. And Mr. Lankford, in an email, said countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.
Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country.
Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.
A Violent Country
America's gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.
Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.
Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.
They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.
More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.
This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.
Mass Shootings Happen Everywhere
Skeptics of gun control sometimes point to a 2016 study. From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.
But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.
As with any crime, the underlying risk is impossible to fully erase. Any individual can snap or become entranced by a violent ideology. What is different is the likelihood that this will lead to mass murder.
In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun.
By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.
Beyond the Statistics
In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America's population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths.
This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America's gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan's. That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different.
The United States also has some of the world's weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.
Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States.
Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.
The Difference Is Culture
The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.
The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.
After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 incident. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.
That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.
“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
SUMMARY: In his inaugural address to the U.N. General Assembly, President Trump laid out a broad vision for self-interest and nationalism across the world, while directing criticism toward the “wicked few” he singled out: North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela. Lisa Desjardins reports on the President's address and some of the responses it drew.
Equifax, a major credit reporting agency, announced Thursday that hackers had gained access to personal data from approximately 143 million of its customers.
Here's what we know.
What happened?
Sometime between mid-May and July, hackers breached an Equifax web application, gaining access to the names, birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers and, in some cases, driver's license numbers of some 143 million customers, the company said in a blog post Thursday.
Equifax discovered the breach July 29. The company says it has “no evidence of unauthorized activity on Equifax's core consumer or commercial credit reporting databases.”
Who's affected?
Equifax is one of the three major credit tracking companies in the country.
The number of customers affected in this breach amounts to nearly half of the entire U.S. population, which was 324 million in a U.S. census count in January, CNBC points out.
Along with the sensitive personal data, hackers also gained access to credit card numbers of 209,000 U.S. customers and documents related to credit report disputes from another 182,000 American consumers.
TechCrunch says citizens of Canada and the UK were also affected by the breach.
How bad is this?
As TechCrunch put it: “pretty bad.”
Reporter Ron Miller writes:
This is not the worst breach of all time by a long shot in terms of pure numbers. That distinction goes to Yahoo, now part of Oath (which was acquired by our parent company, Verizon). They had a leak involving more than a billion users.
But this leak is particularly worrisome because Equifax is a credit reporting service and tracks a history of your consumer life, credit cards, credit scores and more — and it gives the black market a potential gold mine of information about people's financial lives.
“In addition to the number [of victims] being really large, the type of information that has been exposed is really sensitive,” said Beth Givens, executive director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, told the Washington Post. “All in all, this has the potential to be a very harmful breach to those who are affected by it.”
What's next?
Equifax's stock fell 9 percent after the news broke, USA Today noted.
The company has set up a website — www.equifaxsecurity2017.com — for consumers to see whether, and how much of, their data was breached. It's offering free credit monitoring to all those affected by the hack.
Meanwhile, law enforcement and an independent cybersecurity firm are investigating the scope of the hack and how it occurred. They're expecting to release their findings in the coming weeks.
SUMMARY: Half of all Americans could have had their sensitive data compromised by a security breach at the credit reporting agency Equifax. William Brangham joins John Yang to discuss what happened and what consumers should do to safeguard their credit.
SUMMARY: Since it was introduced eight years ago, the digital currency Bitcoin has drawn attention for its rise in value. Like other digital currencies, it uses “blockchain” technology, which helps conduct transactions without using banks or credit card companies as conduits. Hari Sreenivasan spoke with Don Tapscott, co-author of "Blockchain Revolution," about the technology's potential.
SUMMARY: New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week's news, including President Trump's tough words for North Korea over its nuclear threat, as well as his thanking Russian President Vladimir Putin for expelling hundreds of U.S. diplomats, plus his attacking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): And to the analysis of Brooks and Marcus. That's New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus. Mark Shields is away.
And we welcome both of you.
So, you just heard two very different views from our earlier expert guests on North Korea.
You heard the President again commenting, David, and now Senator Risch. How do you assess the President's management of this North Korea situation?
DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Unusual, I guess.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID BROOKS: It will come after the war in Venezuela, apparently, we just learned. I don't know what that was all about.
Listen, there's been a consensus of how to deal with this extremely knotty problem. And that is, at least on the rhetorical level, the North Korean regime is extremely fiery, extremely insecure, sometimes hysterical.
And when you're around somebody who's screaming and unstable, the last thing you want to do is add to the instability with your own unstable, hysterical rhetoric.
And so most administrations, Republican and Democrats, when the North Koreans say they're going to Seoul into a lake of fire, whatever their rhetoric is, have just ignored it and relied on some underlying sense that the North Koreans don't want to commit national suicide.
Donald Trump has gone the other way. Now, I think that is still — that sense that neither party wants to go into a war is still there. But the psychological probabilities that you're going to enter into some August 1914 miscalculation certainly go up when both people are screaming at the top of their lungs.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But, Ruth, you Justice Department heard Senator Risch, who says he talks to the White House. And he said: I have talked to the President, and we think being very clear with North Korea is the best way to go.
RUTH MARCUS, The Washington Post: Yes.
Well, David used the term unusual. I think it's just absolutely scary. And I didn't feel calmed down listening to Senator Risch, I have to say.
But there's a couple of positive things to say about President Trump here, just to surprise people for a second. One is that this situation with North Korea is not his fault. In other words, we were going to get to this. Some President was going to end up in the terrible situation we have with the progress that North Korea has made with nuclear weapons. He [Trump] just happens to be the President.
Number two, they were doing a very good job, until this latest eruptions of kind of bullying testosterone this week, in terms of pursuing what needs to be done, which is the diplomatic sanctions. Senator Risch is right about the achievement in the Security Council.
But, all of a sudden, we saw this week these statements, and you would have thought Tuesday that maybe it was an eruption and they'd tamp it down. And, instead, day after day after day, he's coming out saying more scary and dangerous things.
And I do not understand how that is anything but destabilizing, and with a very already unstable ally [enemy?].
DAVID BROOKS: Yes.
Well, it could be that he thinks the North Koreans are undeterrable, and that this is not a usual regime, maybe because they have this new leader, and that you actually do have to take action. He could be — he believes that.
It could be he just likes to blunder. It’s always dangerous to overinterpret what Donald Trump says at any one moment. And it could be he thinks the 'madman theory' is right theory here. And the madman…
JUDY WOODRUFF: Remind everybody what the madman — because it sounds scary.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID BROOKS: The 'madman theory' is that you can be a successful deterrer if you — if they think you could be crazy.
And so I think it can be very effective, so long as you’re not actually crazy. And so we have a North Korean, we’re not really sure. We have a President who has his moments.
And so the 'madman theory,' when both people could actually be crazy, is actually a very dangerous situation.
[ 😲 ]
SUMMARY: President Trump began his second overseas trip in Poland by doing something he was criticized for not doing on his first, [this time] offering America's full commitment to the NATO alliance. The President also declared that the West would triumph over its many adversaries, offering his sharpest condemnation yet of Russia. Special correspondent Ryan Chilcote joins Judy Woodruff from Hamburg for more.
SUMMARY: As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump downplayed the importance of NATO and the role of the European Union, while promoting improved U.S.-Russia ties. On Thursday, President Trump tried to reassure European allies that his administration is in sync with them. Judy Woodruff talks to Karen Donfried and Paula Dobriansky, two former state department officials, about Trump on the world stage.
SUMMARY: North Korea's Tuesday missile launch crossed the intercontinental threshold the U.S. had been hoping to prevent. At the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, the U.S. tried to rally the world to punish and isolate the regime. Meanwhile, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un insisted he will never negotiate away his missile and nuclear programs. Nick Schifrin reports on the American response so far.
SUMMARY: When it comes to facing the threat of North Korea, there are no easy answers and few good options. Could new economic sanctions change the trajectory of the country’s? Judy Woodruff gets views from John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, and David S. Cohen a former CIA and Treasury Department official.
SUMMARY: Clubfoot, a treatable birth defect that can bring pain and social isolation, is often not treated in the developing world. But a treatment developed a half century ago by a doctor in Iowa is less invasive, less expensive and less painful than the corrective surgery that was once required. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on how a charity is trying to bring the cure to children in India.
SUMMARY: Scientists predict a sheet of ice 110 miles long -- the size of Delaware -- will break off Antarctica in the coming days or weeks. In its July issue, National Geographic covers the effects that warming oceans will have on global sea level rise. Robert Kunzig, the magazine's senior environment editor, joins Hari Sreenivasan from Birmingham, Ala.
SUMMARY: The hottest curve in economics right now helps explain the rise of China, the rise of populism in Europe, and the rise of Donald Trump. From a global perspective, income inequality has gone down. But if you're middle class in the U.S. or Europe, you see the rich getting richer and inequality growing. Economics correspondent Paul Solman examines the widening gap.
SUMMARY: Governments and industries the world over are trying to deal with a new cyberattack, originating Tuesday in Ukraine and spreading rapidly through Europe and beyond. The new attack shows signs of greater technical sophistication than one in early May, but both apparently used a leaked tool developed by the NSA. Hari Sreenivasan speaks with Rodney Joffe of Neustar, Inc., about what's at stake.
SUMMARY: More than three million women are forced into servitude as domestic workers every year, often lured to other countries in the Persian Gulf or Middle East under false pretenses. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on ways some advocates are working to protect workers, as well as women in low-income countries who may be vulnerable to human traffickers.
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| As of 2009, 58 countries have legislation mandating universal health care and have actually reached >90% health insurance coverage and >90% skilled birth attendance. |
SUMMARY: Investigators say they have "very important" clues to what drove an attacker to bomb a concert in Manchester, England. But they face an unwelcome obstacle; intelligence leaks to the American press, fueling a diplomatic fight, and a pause in intelligence sharing. Ciaran Jenkins of Independent Television News reports, and William Brangham talks to former FBI counterterrorism investigator Ali Soufan.
