Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Aura Ogumbi.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Vietnamese children are racing ahead of those in neighboring countries.

We take a closer look at the secret source of their first class education system.

Could the rest of the world take a leaf out of their books?

And Islamic scholars are divided on whether cryptocurrencies violate prohibitions on the charging of interest and speculation, gambling.

Whether crypto ends up decreed as halal or haram, plenty of Muslim investors and countries are already in the market.

First up though.

In Israel's parliament yesterday, opposition lawmakers chanted shame, shame, shame in Hebrew.

Then they walked out, refusing to vote on legislation that will limit the powers of the country's supreme court.

Their boycott, Menthelaul was passed, 64 votes in favor, zero against zero abstainers.

The changes were pushed through by the most religious nationalist element of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government,

even after months of protests.

Yesterday, those protests intensified.

The demonstrators were met with Water Cannon.

The new law will crimp the supreme court's ability to strike down laws it sees as unreasonable,

and is just the first of a series of votes that threaten the country's democratic functioning.

For the first time in 40 years or so since the supreme court began what was seen at the time as its judicial activism revolution,

the powers of the supreme court to hold the Israeli government to account have been rolled back.

Anshul Fafir writes about Israel for the economist.

The law passed by the Knesset yesterday takes away one of the main judicial review tools of the supreme court,

the reasonableness standard, and it means that the supreme court now has a lot less power to intervene in government decisions or appointments,

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