PBS News Hour - Full Show - December 27, 2025 - PBS News Weekend full episode

Episode Date: December 27, 2025

Saturday on PBS News Weekend, a deadly wave of Russian strikes hit Ukraine's capital as Zelenskyy heads to Florida for talks with Trump. How a company in landlocked Nebraska is connected to efforts to combat plastic pollution in oceans. Plus, scientists in Yellowstone National Park use artificial intelligence to try to decode the language of wolves. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Tonight on PBS News Weekend. A deadly wave of Russian strikes on Ukraine's capital city, Kyiv, as Volody Mayor Zelensky heads to Florida for talks with President Trump. Then, the connection between a company in Landlock, Nebraska, and efforts to combat plastic pollution in oceans. And how scientists in Yellowstone National Park are using AI to try to decode the language of wolves. Not only can we hear them here and record their howling 24-7, 365 days a year,

but we often can link behaviors of wolves by observing them when they are vocalizing. What is the cause and effect of howling? Good evening. I'm John Yang. Russia attacked Ukraine's capital city Kyiv overnight with a barrage of ballistic missiles and drones. It came just a day before President Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky are to meet in Florida to talk about prospects for peace. On his way to the U.S., Zelensky met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Halifax. He said Russia's attack was revealing. This attack is, again, Russia's answer on our peace. efforts, and it's really a show that Putin doesn't want peace, and we want peace.

In Kiev, residents and first responders assessed the damage from the attacks. Several apartment buildings and key energy infrastructure facilities were hit. At least one person was killed and nearly 30 others were injured. A quick-moving winter storm swept across the Great Lakes in northeast overnight, dumping snow and ice that snarled post-Christmas travel in the air and on the roads. More than 1,500 flights have been canceled since last night and thousands more delayed. The National Weather Service warned people to stay off the roads.

The storm had largely wound down by this afternoon. California has dropped its lawsuit against the Trump administration over the cancellation of more than $4 billion in federal grants for a high-speed rail project. Plans for a high-speed rail train between San Francisco and Los Angeles have been in the works for more than 15 years. The California High Speed Rail Authority said the federal government is no longer a trustworthy partner and that they'll move forward with its own funding. Earlier this month, the report from the Pew Charitable Trust and its partners predicted that plastic pollution will more than double over the next 15 years.

That's the equivalent of dumping nearly a garbage truck full of plastic waste every second. In the middle of America, hundreds of miles from an ocean, Cassidy Arena of PBS, Nebraska, visited, an innovative company that wants to turn plastic pollution into something constructive. When people walk into this crowded warehouse in Omaha, Nebraska, the first thing they'll see are bags of what looks like garbage, piled floor to ceiling. But First Star CEO, Patrick Leahy, explains this is not trash. It's his company's treasure. What makes First Star recycling unique is then we take hard to recycle plastics. We take those, re-recycle them in-house. We don't ship them out to another place and we make plastic lumber or pellets with it.

Leahy's company has long been a leader in plastic waste management in Nebraska, and it's now trying out a new type of recycling, taking plastics cold from oceans around the world and turning them into building materials. Leahy says his company is one of the few in the U.S. that processes trash considered too hard to recycle. Things like gum wrappers, plastic silver. and grocery bags. 4,000 miles across the Pacific, word of Leahy's innovative business impressed the Center for Marine

Debray Research, or CMDR, at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu. It specializes in cleaning the oceans of plastics, including discarded fishing gear. Every year, they collect nearly 200 tons of it. And the trash is not just from the waters off Hawaii. comes from all corners of the globe, including a debris field known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located roughly midway between Hawaii and California. It's the largest accumulation of floating ocean plastic in the world. The plastic pollution problem in the ocean is trans boundary.

It's impacting every single ocean. Jennifer Lynch is the co-director of CMDR. She says it's going to take many more efforts like this one in Nebraska to turn this plastic crisis around. Plastic pollution has traveled the entire globe and every single human on the planet is experiencing some exposure to microplastics. That blanket exposure comes after more than 50 years of nationwide recycling efforts, which have failed to keep pace with the surge of plastics. Patrick Leahy acknowledges the business he's building faces hurdles. The lumber itself needs to prove it can meet real-world construction standards, but perhaps the biggest challenge is sustainability.

Do the upsides of recycling plastic in Nebraska justify the costs and carbon footprint of shipping from Hawaii? Lehi believes the answer is to one day bring the solution closer to the problem. The hope being, if we can show that this is successful, we can start a similar kind of plant there in Hawaii where they can just process it on site. Lehi's dream is that the simple The aesthetic boards he's making can one day help rebuild Maui, which was nearly destroyed two years ago in devastating wildfires. It's always about the quality of the products. Even though recycling and sustainability is a great story, if the product is not superior either by quality or price, then people won't want to use it for whatever project they have. He told us his quest for now is to prove his lumber is up to the task and that a state from the Great Plains can play a role in

cleaning up the world's oceans. For PBS News Weekend, I'm Cassidy Arena in Omaha, Nebraska. Still to come on PBS News Weekend, a cutting-edge study to try to better protect Yellowstone's wolves. And in our weekend spotlight, best-selling author, Mitch Album. This is PBS News Weekend from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, home of the PBS News Hour, weeknights on BBS. In movies and literature, a wolf's haunting howl can signify danger or untamed

nature. In real life, researchers in Yellowstone National Park are analyzing those howls with cutting-edge AI technology to better monitor and track wolves. Matt Standell of PBS, Montana, explains. 653, the wolves that across the river are howling.

Here in Yellowstone National Parks, Lamar Valley, wolves from one of the park's nine packs have made a kill. Let's go ahead and feel free to take a look through there. It's the Junction Butte pack. It's the end of August, the peak of bison rutting or mating season and a time when wolves increasingly prey on bison. Many become injured or weakened during the fierce competition for a mate and the wolves take advantage.

Park wolf technician Jeremy Sundaraj is monitoring the pack as they feed and teaching curious tourists about wolves. So what we're trying to do here is just kind of count how many there are, I record their behavior if we can see like what the carcass is. This is almost certainly a kill just based on how they're behaving around it. And if we're quiet, we can actually maybe hear them howling. Their howls have become central to a new cutting-edge conservation project using artificial intelligence to decode sound recordings.

This development in the field of bioacoustics could redefine how wolves like these are monitored in the wild. You got it? Since 1995, when gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone, park biologists have used airplanes to spot them, helicopters to track them, and dart guns to tag them so they can be fitted with radio and GPS callers. And you can see most of the wolf talking is happening in the night. Now, bioacoustics is offering a new, less invasive way to study them using sound and advances in artificial intelligence to one day potentially decode wolf communication by matching their howls with specific behavior.

Not only can we hear them here and record their howling 24-7, 365 days a year, but we We often can link behaviors of wolves by observing them when they are vocalizing. What is the cause and effect of howling? Dan Staler is the senior wildlife biologist for Yellowstone National Park, a job that includes gathering the data from sound recorders like this one, hidden in a tree near Park headquarters. One more, Jeremy? Staylor's team has been recording the barks, yips, and howls of Yellowstone's nine wolf packs, than 100 wolves for the past year.

That's another goal of ours is can we detect unique pack signatures and use that? He says they've collected over 7,000 wolf sounds and have been able to identify the acoustic signatures of several wolf packs in the park. In the future, Staler thinks this bioacoustic work could partially replace the hazardous duty of capturing and collaring wolves. And so what I could envision down the road a decade from now is that we may not have to collar certain packs or put collars out in certain areas of the park. And then with new cutting edge AI tools, we hope, we're not sure yet, but we hope

we can answer really interesting questions about what are wolves actually saying. Or can we count wolves? Can we identify unique individuals? Good morning, everybody. My name is whoo. Linguistics, researcher, and software engineer Dr. Jeff Reed has been experimenting with AI to start study wolves near his home just north of Yellowstone. He's lending his technical expertise to the Yellowstone Wolf Project. This is a wolf chorus howl and we're using AI from Google to see if we can count the number of wolves in a chorus howl. So this is a group of wolves.

It's like you walking into a bar and all the people are talking and you can pick out a particular person in the room. can pick out other wolves that they know in this cacophony of sound. The key to the technology is pattern recognition, according to read. These colorful patterns are what's called a spectrogram of wolf howls, representing their strength and frequency over time. Artificial intelligence, he says, can pick out the patterns and identify individual wolves much faster than any human could.

battery-operated devices use AI. Reed leads a company that makes the high-tech AI-enabled field cameras and audio recorders that Yellowstone is using to monitor its vast space. But these cameras called griz cams don't just listen to wildlife. They can also pick up human conversations and activities from hundreds of yards away. Animal science and human privacy in Yellowstone could soon be on a collision course. 25 of these cameras will be installed in a grid across the park, thanks to a large donation from a company called Colossil Biosciences.

For me, the moonshot with bioacoustics and wolves is, can we reduce the conflict between wolves and humans? Matt James is the chief animal officer at Colossil Biosciences. He says AI recording technology can be used to protect wolves from humans. And can we explain that these are empathetic, emotionally complex animals that aren't mindless hunters, and they deserve the ability to coexist with us? Colossal is funding $175,000 of Yellowstone's bioacoustic study. Plus, the company has hired a team of AI scientists to analyze the data the gris cams are collecting.

We're really hopeful then that they can collect tons and tons of data that our team can then begin to distill and train the AI to move on from just classifying wolf calls to classifying individual calls. As we've mentioned, all that data could include sounds and activities from people in the park. The technology is so new that ethicists are still trying to understand the implications for human privacy in wild places like Yellowstone. This is all data that can be collected. University of Montana philosophy professor Christopher Preston studies the ethics of human interactions with the natural world and how technology can shape those interactions. I mean, if you ask me, would I rather a wolf gets darted from a helicopter

and have a radio collar put on it or a wolf gets listened to by a 24-7 recording device, it's pretty clear to me that I'd rather have the wolf be listened to by the recording device because that's a non-invasive technique, much less likely to cause any sort of harm to the animal involved. But Preston worries the cameras could inadvertently vacuum up human sound and images without people knowing they're being recorded. We do have a different sort of ethic for the human world to the one that we have for the wild world.

You go into landscapes like that to not be part of a system where people are looking at you, where people know what you're doing. And you're certainly not getting away from it all if there is the potential for your movements to go into a database somewhere. As Yellowstone experiments with this controversial new technology, biologist Dan Staler is eager for more gris camps to be installed in the coming months. He believes AI-powered bioacoustics will help his team. better protect these iconic animals as they learn more from every howl that reverberates across this majestic landscape.

We're going to keep this study going. There'll be new emerging questions, but the fundamental question will be, why is Yellowstone's wildlife community important to this landscape, important to Montana, and important to the world? For PBS News Weekend, I'm Matthew Standaw in Yellowstone. Yellowstone National Park. Finally tonight, a weekend spotlight encore. Our visit with Mitch Album, newspaper columnist, author, Benefactor.

He puts love and hope at the center of nearly everything he does. This is the big, that Hudson new Hudson building. Spending the day with Mitch Album in Detroit is not a leave. experienced. We try to keep everything happy. At Detroit Water Ice Factory, the nonprofit dessert store he started to help fund his humanitarian work. He whips up a Motown twist with his namesake, Mr. Mitch's chocolate peanut butter.

Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi. Then a stop at Say Detroit play, a one-time abandoned city rec center that album transformed into a multi-million dollar learning center for hundreds of school students where academics come before play. We're not going to build something that's good enough for a poor neighborhood in Detroit. We're going to build something that's good enough for the best neighborhood in all of Michigan. If you deliver high expectations, you'll get high performances. If you come in with low expectations, well, this is good enough.

That's exactly the performances you're going to get. All I did was kind of, you know, kind of get it going, you know, but they take the ball and wrong with it. And you can see, it's a lot of. joy here. While there, the one-time professional musician shows us his talents on the piano. He's never had a lesson. I have to know your Flintstones. You're going to very beat. In between stops, he takes a call from the orphanage. He's run in Haiti

since after the devastating 2010 earthquake. This is actually my second time around. all of that is before two hours behind a microphone for his long-running daily afternoon radio show on Detroit Station WJR and after the three hours every morning that he devotes to writing. Albaum's books have sold 42 million copies. His latest, a novel entitled twice, was published this year. It's about a boy who can go into the past in order to have a second chance at things except when it comes to love. So you're a protagonist, Alfie Logan, from Philadelphia, you're a Philly boy. He started out as a musician turned to writing. Are there other similarities?

Yes, most of Alfie's screw-ups with girls were based on personal experience. And Alfie has the power to go back in time. We do things. So there's a scene in the book where he goes up to this cute blonde girl who he kind of has a crush on and he starts talking with his hands and hits a glass of milk and knocks it into her lap and she looks up with that, oh my God, and he just says, look at that and walks away and that is exactly what happened to me. If you want to write about a teenager with embarrassing moments in his romantic life and you already have them in your own life, why not use them? Why make up something else if they work? Tell us how he discovers he's got there. Yeah, they're living in Africa

and he is supposed to sit with his mother who's sick, and she's in one of those mosquito netting beds, and he goes and sees that she's sleeping, and his father's out, and he says, well, she's sleeping. I'll just go out and play, and he realizes his mother died while he was out. And he's so upset by this

that when he wakes up the next morning, it's the day before. And his father says, go sit with your mother, and he goes, what do you mean? He says, go sit with your mother, and he walks in, and she's there again, and it's replaying all over. But it was a very poignant scene for me because my mother had a stroke and then a series of strokes

that robbed her of the ability to speak for the last several years of her life. And so I never had that last conversation with her because I didn't know the stroke was coming. And then I had gone out to see her and I flew back home and when I landed, I got a phone call that she had died while I was in the air. And there's a line in the book that says Alfie, who was running around with a cape, a Superman cape on, just jumping up and down, and he says, my mother died while I was trying to fly.

And I don't think most people know, well, maybe I'm telling you, but my mother died while I was flying. And so, yeah, that scene kind of choked me up a little bit. choked me up a little bit. It set the stage for the book, though. It was as a Detroit Free Press Sports columnist in the 1980s that album first gained prominence. His 1997 worldwide bestseller, Tuesdays with Mori, brought broader recognition. An account of his weekly visits with a beloved former professor who was dying, it's one of the best-selling memoirs of all time. I just start with what I want to write about, and then I create a story around it. So,

So, for example, the five people you meet in heaven, people have always thought, oh, you want to write about heaven after Maury. And that wasn't really true. I wanted to write a story about people who think they don't matter. So I kind of picked the themes before I start, and the theme for this one was the grass is always greener. And I wanted to write a book that showed that even if you had the ability, a magical ability, to go back in time and change it, you might find a whole new set of problems. And you might find that you miss what you learned from, what you thought. was a mistake. While not all love stories, many of Album's books have lessons about love, hope, and optimism.

So many of my friends I told I was coming to do this said what they love about your books is the sense of hope and optimism that runs through all of them. In America today, with so much division, so many troubles, is it hard to keep that hope and optimism? No, I actually find it's more necessary and it's somewhat easy. because it's almost a counter to what's going on. I think that everybody wants hope and everybody wants inspiration. When people take out their wallets,

they pull out a picture of their grandson or their child or whatever. They don't pull out a picture of their woe or their misery or how awful life is. Here, let me show you how awful, how dark life is, whatever. They aspire to hope. Since 2010, Album has been giving hope to hundreds of impoverished orphans in Port-au-Prince Haiti. He in an army of volunteers rebuild an orphanage heavily damaged by the earthquake. He spends a week there every month. I did not know what I was doing.

I'll admit that at the beginning. I didn't have children of my own. I didn't even know diaper changing or a lot of that stuff, but I learned it. And the kids are the absolute joys of our lives and the purpose for myself and my wife, I'm sure that we were put on this earth for. Album and his wife of 30 years, Janine, became parents to two children from Haiti. Just one instance when he says he's been given a second chance. So there's more to this than just a love story and a novel.

I have come to realize that my life has been the embodiment of second chances. If you look at it from 30,000 feet, you know, I was, a musician, and I thought that's all I want to do, and I failed at it. And I kind of took up writing because there was nothing else to do. But look at what writing has given me. We don't have children.

We get married late. Doesn't happen for us. Figure out we're not going to be a couple that doesn't have children. And then this little, then an orphanage comes into our lives. And then this little girl named Chika needs our help, because she has a brain tumor, and she becomes our daughter for two years.

And then we lose her. And we figure, oh, my goodness, that was our chance. That was our child. And then a few years ago, a little girl is brought to us who weighs six pounds at six months and has had nothing to eat but sugar water. And I hold her in my hand, and she fits in one hand, and her eyes are closed, and she can't speak,

and she can barely move. We don't think we just say, well, we have to save her life. She's our little girl. And we have the second chance with another beautiful little child, full of life. What did I do to deserve all these second chances? Who's watching over me that's saying, you're on this way, but we're going to take you this way?

So this is a kind of a celebration of what life can be like if you understand what went wrong with the first time. And you try to make it right the second time. And I am a walking example of that. And that is PBS News Weekend for this Saturday. I'm John Yang for all of my colleagues. Thanks for joining us.

See you tomorrow.