PBS News Hour - Full Show - August 23, 2025 – PBS News Weekend full episode

Episode Date: August 23, 2025

Saturday on PBS News Weekend, an aid worker inside Gaza on what’s next after famine has been declared and Israel prepares to intensify the war. A look at the future of voting by mail as Trump calls the practice corrupt and vows to end it. Plus, scientists flock to Iceland to see whether melting glaciers could mean more intense earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Tonight on PBS News Weekend, from Inside Gaza, an aid worker on what's next now that famine has been officially declared, and Israel is poised to intensify the war. Then the future of voting by mail as President Trump calls the practice corrupt and vows to end it. And the land of fire and ice. Scientists are flocking to Iceland to see whether melting glaciers could mean, more intense earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Iceland is essentially one of the best places in the world to study this. It's a natural laboratory because we have both volcanism and glaciers. Good evening. I'm John Yang.

day in Gaza. Officials there say at least 33 people have been killed by Israeli strikes and shootings. Among them were Palestinians who were sheltering intense and who were seeking scarce food. It comes a day after a UN-backed group that monitors food crises declared that a half-million Palestinians living in the Gaza city area are in the grips of a potentially life-threatening man-made famine. What's more, the group, the integrated food security phase classification, or IPC, projects that by the end of September, famine will spread to much of the rest of Gaza. Earlier I spoke with Chris McIntosh,

Oxfam's humanitarian response advisor in Gaza. He's in Gaza City. Right now in Gaza, what we're seeing is exactly what we were predicting for months ever since the imposition of the blockade at the beginning of March. And in that time, very few trucks have gotten in, very limited amounts of food.

What we're seeing is people that are gaunt, people that are drawn in the face and they're boning because they haven't eaten because they're fundamentally malnourished. They're not getting enough food. They're not getting the right amounts of food. And this is on top of the devastating bombing that's happening on a daily basis here in the gun strip. The IPC reports that immediate, large-scale, unobstructed, multi-sector humanitarian assistance is needed.

What would that look like? What that would look like is the crossings into Gaza would be opened and unfettered access to supplies would come in, for starters. Secondly, that would require a C-spire. People are in need of nearly everything, including food, of course, access to health care, and they need to start living dignified lives. And that's just not happening, right? Prime Minister Netanyahu called the report an outright lie. U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said tons of food has gone into Gaza, but Hamas savages stole it, ate lots of it to become corpulent, sold it on the black market. What do you say to that? I say that couldn't be further from the truth, John. And just to use basic metrics to get the point across here, prior to the blockade being imposed at the beginning of March, there were approximately 600 trucks being brought into Gaza every day. And now we're looking at one-sixth of that.

These notions that there is tons coming in, it's just not true, and it's missing absolutely critical nuance, but this is how the Israelis operate fundamentally. They will create the conditions by which a simple yes or no question needs to be answered in the affirmative. Is there aid coming into Gaza? The answer is yes. But the next question needs to be, is it enough? And that answer is a resounding, absolutely not.

Is there more aid sitting at the board that is waiting to come in? This is one of the tragic ironies of the situation. without any question, there's a food 360 degrees around the Gaza Strip. And agencies like Oxfam have, for us in particular, to the tune of $2.5 million worth of food and other equipment waiting there at the border. The problem is our organization and about 60 others, we're told that we're simply not authorized to bring in any aid. How is your staff, your workers, how are they dealing with this, coping with this problem?

What I'm seeing right now is our staff and people on the street purely in survival mode of finding that enough clean water for themselves and their family about finding a food that will sustain them through the next day and then doing it all over the next day. But the average gauzin is under a tremendous amount of pressure. Most of their day, 75% of their day is just dedicated to actions that will help them survive and their families. Could there be long-term health effects, even if food started flowing again, has sort of damage already been done to people's health? Unfortunately, yes. Children, if they go of sustained periods of being now nourished, they'll experience developmental problems that can last the rest of their lives. And so that's why it's so critical. And people are starving. Children are now nourished to the degree that it will last, the lasting effects, and people are dying. Give us a sense of what it's like, not just the physical. problems right now, but just what it's like to be there.

Let me put it this way. Having grown up in Northeast Ohio, I wasn't prepared for what I'm seeing on the ground now. There's no aspect of existence that's not polluted by what's happening here. In the mornings in Dira Bala, I look out the window of the kitchen, and I see that there's a yellow dumpster right outside the window down on the street. Lately, on a daily basis, I see children inside that dumpster. searching, rummaging all the way down to the bottom to find a scrap of food, to find something that will burn so that their families can cook or something otherwise that can be sold for food. And I think it says a lot about where we are right now. And nobody should have to experience that, especially not children.

What can be done? I'm a firm believer that periods of darkness are an invitation. It's an invitation to be the light to carry us out of that darkness. This is the darkness that we read about in history books. And that invitation is to be the country that we tell ourselves we are, to be the country that we want to be, and ultimately to be the country that we should be. So the action is in petitioning representatives and making it clear that we don't want to be on the bad side of history.

We want to be the light, and we don't want to contribute to the darkness any longer. Chris McIntosh, a Vox fan from Gaza City. Thank you very much. Thank you. In tonight's other headlines, lawyers for Kilmar-Abrego-Garcia say the Department of Homeland Security has told him that the government plans to deport their client to Uganda. Salvador and National reunited with his family in Maryland last night after being released from a Tennessee jail. He's awaiting trial on human smuggling charges to which he's pleaded not guilty. Today has been a very special day because, thank God, I am back with him.

family after more than 160 days, and I would like to thank all the people who have been supporting me, because after such a long time, I am realizing that many people have been by my side. DHS ordered Brigo Garcia to report by Monday to an ICE removal office in Baltimore. That came after he declined an offer to be sent to Costa Rica in exchange for pleading guilty. A redrawn Texas congressional map is on its way to Texas Governor Greg Abbott for his signature. The Texas State Senate approved the map early this morning in an 18 to 11 party line vote. Republicans designed the map in hopes of winning five additional House seats in next year's

midterm elections. Republicans have a slim majority in the House where there are now 219 Republicans, 212 Democrats, and four vacancies. Federal investigators arrived today at the site of a deadly bus crash in upstate New York. Five people died Friday when a tour bus crashed and rolled on its side on Interstate 90 just outside Buffalo. The passengers were returning to New York City after visiting Niagara Falls. Police say it appears that the bus driver got distracted, lost control, and overcorrected. The bus was carrying 54 people, ranging in age from 1 to 74. The Menendez brothers will remain in prison for the 1989 murder of their parents.

A California parole board denied Lyle Menendez's early release, turning aside pleas from family and supporters. The decision came one day after his younger brother Eric was also denied parole. They became eligible for early release in May when a judge reduced their sentences from life without parole to 50 years. Each will be eligible for parole again in coming years. President Trump supporters say he's been cleared up any suspicion by the transcript and recording of Galane Maxwell's interview with the Deputy Attorney General. The woman who was Jeffrey Epstein's girlfriend characterized the president, a one-time friend of Epstein's, as a gentleman and said she never saw him engage in any kind of sexual misconduct.

President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me, and I just want to say that I find, I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now, and I like him, and I've always liked him. So that is the sum substance of my entire relationship with him. Shortly after the interview, Maxwell, who's serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking, was transferred to a minimum security prison camp. She's seeking a presidential pardon. And if you're expecting a package from overseas, it may be delayed because of confusion over President Trump's decision to stop exempting small value imports from tariffs.

European postal services like UK's Royal Mail and D.HL are suspending shipments until they get more information and clarity about the rule. With the exemption gone, all imports will be subject to the tariff that's imposed on the country of origin. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol says that last year, more than a million packages with goods worth $65 billion were sent under the exemption. Still to come on PBS News weekend, President Trump put mail-in ballots on notice this week, but what power does the president have to end the practice?

And as the world's glaciers melt, scientists investigate the potential for stronger earthquakes and more violent volcanic eruptions. This is PBS News Weekend from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, home of the PBS News Hour. Weeknights on PBS. With control of Congress at stake in next year's midterm elections, President Trump is doubling down on efforts to end mail-in voting. In the 2024 election, nearly 30 percent of Americans who cast their ballots did it by mail. Despite a multi-million dollar Republican drive to encourage supporters to vote by mail last year, the president says it's a fraud.

We, as a Republican Party, are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they're corrupt. He also said that the United States is just about the only country in the world that uses them. Rick Hassan is a professor of law and political science at UCLA. He's also the author of A Real Right to Vote, how a constitutional amendment can safeguard American democracy. Rick, I want to begin by parsing some of what we just heard from the president.

He says that just about the only country in the world that uses them as the United States. Is that true? No, it's not true. It's used around the world and lots of other democracies, including in Canada and the United Kingdom and Germany. He says he's going to issue an executive order to end mail-in ballots. Is that within his powers? So no. First of all, an executive order is an order to the executive branch as to how to carry out the laws.

It's not a royal edict. He can't just decree that we don't have mail-in-balloting anymore. The Constitution says that each state gets to set its own rules for running elections. And in Article 1, Section 4, it lets Congress override those rules as to congressional elections. Congress also sometimes acts under its powers, for example, to enforce the 15th Amendment to bar race discrimination voting. The president's job is to take care that the laws passed by Congress are faithfully executed. So he's got a lot of powers in terms of how the federal government might interact with states, but it's primarily states that are running elections, and he has no direct authority over how elections are going to

be conducted, whether it's for federal elections or for state and local elections. Well, that counters what he said on Truth Social. He said the states are merely an agent for the federal government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the federal government as represented by the president of the United States tells them. That's just a fiction. That's not how things work.

The Constitution does say that Congress can override. So if Congress passed a law tomorrow, that either outlawed or mandated, mail-in balloting. That law would probably be upheld as applied to congressional elections, couldn't be applied to state or local elections because the power only extends to congressional elections. But the president doesn't have the power. States are more than agents. States, and this goes back to the founding, states were the primary actors that administered elections. There wasn't agreement to have national election administration the way it is in most other countries today. And that diversity of how elections are run, it makes for some confusion

sometimes, but it can be a strength against an executive that's trying to impose its will, as we see the president trying to do here. He says he's doing this because he wants to make sure there's no fraud. We've had a long experience with mail and balance in Oregon for about 25 years. It's the only way you can vote. What's the record? Is there a fraud and corruption in these things? Well, you're right that there are some states, including Oregon, Washington, Utah, and lots of where mail-in-balloting is the primary way that voting is conducted. There are lots of states like California, where I am, where many people vote by bail. And there are some states where mail-in-balloting is not all that common. It did increase during COVID because people didn't want to

go to polling places. What we do know is that the president in 2020 in the midst of the COVID, pandemic when he was running against Joe Biden, railed against mail-in-balloting, said that it was fraudulent. There were tons of investigations. There were 60-plus lawsuits challenging the election on fraud grounds, and there was no evidence of any fraud related to mail-in ballots that could have affected the election anywhere in the United States. There are sometimes small locales where there is election fraud, and it sometimes does occur with mail-in ballots, but not on the kind of scale that the president's talking about, and in his social media post, he talked about getting rid of voting machines as well. And it's not clear what machines he's talking about. I don't know what

he has in mind, not only about what powers he thinks he has, but what exactly he thinks he wants to do, since Republicans in states like Arizona and Florida rely very heavily on mail and balloting to get out the votes of their own supporters. This morning, the Texas legislature sent Governor Abbott there, the newly drawn maps. They're trying to pick up Republican seats in the House. Do mail-in ballots favor one party over another? Well, historically, Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to use mail-in ballots, in part because people who are older, richer, wider, tend to move less, and those are people who tend to use mail-in-balloting more. In more recent years, Democrats have achieved parity,

and in some places exceeded Republican use of vote-by-mail, in part because Democrats realized that if they pushed early voting, they could kind of bank their votes and then they don't have to worry about as many people on election day. I would say that if the president had not been putting out all of these negative tweets and other statements about mail-in-balloting deriding it,

you'd see both Democrats and Republicans using it more and more. We do know that in 2024, an election that Donald Trump won, Republican voters expressed much more confidence in the election process and much more support for vote by mail. In 2024, the president was not really so against vote by mail.

But now he's back on this, and so we'll see where it goes. Election law expert Rick Hassan of UCLA. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure speaking to you. In Hawaii, Kilauea is putting on a spectacular show, spewing fresh lava 100 feet in the air. The eruption, the 31st since December, is contained to the summit crater, so no homes are threatened. Halfway around the world in Iceland, scientists are studying volcanoes to investigate an increasingly crucial question. Will melting glaciers accelerate and intensify eruptions?

William Brangham explains. Getting to the volcanic crater called Vita, which comes from the Icelandic word for hell, involves a bumpy ride, an icy trek, and a steep downward climb. The gas emissions alone can be very dangerous. Here you're taking a greater risk because you're actually in an old friatic explosive crater. And this is a side of active degassing. Michelle Parks is a volcanologist with the Icelandic Meteorological Office. She and her colleagues regularly monitor this deep crater lake, which was created years ago by the volcano Askiya.

Askiya last erupted in 1961, but it started stirring again four years ago. It's one of the most active and potentially dangerous volcanoes in Iceland. Scientists flock here for research, and they're asking an increasingly crucial question. As the glaciers that sit atop these volcanoes melt, which is driven in part by a warming planet, will that shrinking accelerate and intensify volcanic eruptions? I think it's very likely that we will see future changes, but the question, of course, is when will this start happening and by how much will it affect volcanic activity? Parks takes acidity and temperature readings from the bubbling, steaming, sulfurous water

of the crater lake. A rise in either figure would indicate that more gases are pushing up from below, suggesting the volcano is moving closer to an eruption. Aske is my favorite volcano in Iceland, as I've been coming here every year since 1990, to follow what the volcano is to win. Freystein Sigmansson is a geophysicist at the University of Iceland. Every year he and his colleagues take precise measurements of the landscape, landscape, and they're finding that the land is shifting considerably.

For my decades of studies here, the changes of the ground here have been on the centimeter scale, but then suddenly when the onus began, we have had over 70 centimeters of uplift. So that's a lot, that's a big pressure increase. That building pressure indicates this volcano could erupt at any moment. Scientists can't rule out that one day, Oskia could erupt with the same ferocity that Mount St. Helens did in 1980 in Washington State. It was one of the most dramatic eruptions in recorded U.S. history. Earlier this summer, Askiya had 129 small earthquakes. Only one was large enough for people to feel. But those small quakes, combined with changes in the

terrain, as well as what's happening with the glaciers, have researchers concerned about the future. So we're working on this large project investigating the effects of climate change and the ice retreat on future volcanic and seismic activity in Iceland. Iceland has long been known as a land of fire and ice. Eons of volcanic eruptions shaped this wild and dramatic landscape. But millions of tourists also come here to see the majestic beauty of its glaciers and ice formations up close, hopefully before they disappear.

At his summer home overlooking the Vaknojokal ice cap, Ragnar Frank Christensen has seen glaciers retreating with his own eyes. Here and here. It was in the first 15 years. It was a little bit forward, 10 meters backward. Nothing big changes. But the last 10 years is going to be 100 meters east here. It's a one football field.

He's been a glacier monitor for more than 25 years, tracking the retreat of two large nearby glaciers. His daughter Iris has also seen the same changes over her lifetime. I've sometimes said to people like, it is like watching your friends disappear and having a very rough time. And we look at the glaciers out of our, you know, kitchen window every day. I think, like, of course, it's just devastating to see, like, looking at photo albums and seeing like, oh my God, you know, when I was growing up, the glaciers were so much bigger. I mean, Iceland is essentially one of the best.

one of the best places in the world to study this. It's a natural laboratory because we have both volcanism and glaciers. Michelle Parks, along with other scientists, are testing to see if these shrinking glaciers could trigger more volcanic eruptions. Ice still covers nearly half of Iceland's 34 active volcanic systems. But as it melts, it lessens the downward pressure on the earth's thin outer crust and much thicker underlying mantle. That allows the earth to rebound, and that change in pressure spurs volcanoes to produce more magma, sending it in different directions and potentially creating new fractures underneath. While it's too early to know for sure, there are potentially grave implications for the tens of millions of people who live near

both glaciers and volcanoes around the world. A 2020 study found 200, 45 volcanoes within 3 miles of a glacier, from the Andes to North America's Cascades to places like the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, where a massive 8.8 magnitude quake struck last month. Six different volcanoes erupted nearby. They'd been dormant since the 16th century. The peninsula is also famous for its extensive glaciers. On the scale of the threat in Iceland, they're in a race to research their own risky future

and potentially help warn others around the world who face a similar threat. For PBS News Weekend, I'm William Brangham. And online, there's more about mail-in voting. Politifact has a fact-check of President Trump's claims that the United States is the only country in the world to use it. That's on our Instagram account at At NewsHour and our website, pbs.org slash news hour. And that is PBS Newsweekend for this Saturday.

On Sunday, three brothers trying to row across the Pacific Ocean without stopping and without any support. I'm John Yang. colleagues. Thanks for joining us. See you tomorrow.