PBS News Hour - Full Show - January 11, 2026 - PBS News Weekend full episode

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Sunday on PBS News Weekend, Iran warns of retaliation if the U.S. uses force to support anti-government protesters. An investigation raises concerns about quality testing for generic drugs. How social media lures migrants around the world into undertaking treacherous, potentially fatal journeys. Plus, scientists use new technology to track individual monarch butterflies on their migrations. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Tonight on PBS News Weekend, Iran warns of retaliation if the United States or Israel uses force to support anti-government protesters. Then how social media lures people around the world seeking to migrate to undertake treacherous potentially fatal journeys. And scientists are using new technology to track individual monarch butterflies on their transcontinental migrations. After all these years of trying to understand the migration of monarch butterflies, now we really know exactly where they're going. And it's just quite fascinating. Good evening. I'm John Yang. As anti-government protests in Iran and the ruling regime's bloody crackdown on them both intensify,

Tehran warned the United States to stay out of it. White House National Security advisors are said to be weighing a broad range of potential responses, including direct military strikes, to present to President Trump, who says he stands ready to help the protesters. Today, the hardline Speaker of Iran's Parliament said U.S. intervention could have dire consequences. And I have a message for the delusional American president. In order to avoid miscalculations, be aware that if you take action to attack Iran, both the occupied territories in all U.S. military centers, bases and ships in the region,

will be considered legitimate targets by us. While numbers are hard to know with any certainty because Iran's internet and phone service have blocked, human rights watchdog group told the Associated Press that more than 500 people have been killed and 10,000 detained. Iran's top prosecutor said rioters would be dealt with without leniency, mercy, or appeasement. Bob Weir, guitarist, songwriter and founding member of the Grateful Dead has died. That's all they're doing I don't care. Weir co-wrote one Grateful Dead classic, Sugar Magnolia, and sang lead vocals on another, Truckin.

His inventive timing on guitar helped define the group's sound, which became the soundtrack of 1960s counterculture. In a statement, Weir's family said he had beaten cancer but died as a result of underlying lung issues. Bob Weir was 78 years old. By some estimates, about 90% of all, All prescriptions in the United States are filled with generic drugs. Insurance companies encourage their use over brand-name medications to reduce health care costs.

The Food and Drug Administration says that all agency-approved generic drugs have the same high-quality, strength, purity, and stability as brand-name drugs. But a pro-public investigation found that the FDA rarely tests the quality of generic drugs, many of them manufactured overseas. National reporter Debbie Zinziper of ProPublica was one of the authors of that investigation. Debbie, the FDA doesn't test these drugs, but you independently tested some of the most widely used generic drugs. What did you find? Yeah, we did because the FDA isn't regularly testing drugs. And what we found in this testing is that there were certain versions of widely prescribed generic drugs that had concerning results because they didn't dissolve properly in the body.

Have patients or other people express concerns about this in the past? Absolutely. And it's one of the reasons we did the testing in the first place, and that is because doctors, pharmacists, consumers, academic researchers, even the Department of Defense has raised concerns about the quality of some of our generic drugs. And despite all of that, the FDA does not have a regular testing program. The agency doesn't regularly test for quality and safety issues. Do they do that with brand name medications?

No, I mean, the FDA publicly reports the names of the drugs that they test, including brand name drugs and over-the-counter drugs. But there's no regular testing program. They say they test based on risk. But what we found is that they're not regularly testing drugs coming in from some of the most troubled factories overseas. What's the FDA's rationale for this? The FDA just didn't think it would work right because they would only be testing a sample, a small sample, a moment in time, and it wouldn't necessarily pick up on trends and wider concerns.

But the Department of Defense is now testing 40 or so drugs because they are concerned about contaminants and other things that can go wrong. not all generics are the same as brand name drugs. And doctors and patients have been saying that for years. Talk about what patients are saying. Have there been specific cases where people have said that the generic doesn't feel the same as the brand name or that they wonder about the effects? Absolutely. And that's really what struck us as reporters is how many people just turn to social media and say something's not right with this drug. one of the drugs we had tested was buproprion. It's an antidepressant. And so many people, for so many years,

have been saying when they switch from the brand, Welbutrin, to a generic or from one version of a generic to another, they get all kinds of funny symptoms or worse. They just feel the drug is ineffective. And doctors might say, well-meaning doctors who are busy, might say something's wrong with, it's just you, it's your body, or it's Mother Nature or it's God or it's bad luck. But it actually might be that that drug, that version doesn't work the same as the brand. And for too long, we haven't really been asking those questions. In addition to testing these generics yourself or the ProPublica doing it, you've also created a tool where people can check what's in their medicine cabinets.

Tell us about that. We really at ProPublica wanted to empower consumers to take control of their own health care. by creating a tool. It's free. It's a look-up tool. It's called RX Inspector, where you can actually take the information on the labels of your pill bottle, stick it in this tool, figure out where your drugs were made, the factory that made it, and whether that factory has ever been in trouble with the FDA for substandard manufacturing practices. And where do people go to get this tool? Right on ProPublica's website, we're free. It's called RX Inspector. And I think it's important to know, that even if you find something, a bad inspection for a factory that makes your drug,

it doesn't necessarily mean that your generic is unsafe and that you should stop taking the drug, right? I mean, you should always talk to your health care provider. But we really felt like this was information that had never been made public before, not by the FDA and not by the drug makers themselves. And so we spent many, many months putting this tool together for consumers. Debbie Sinsipur, pro-Publica. Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. Still to come on PBS News Weekend, how social media can affect people on the move around the globe and new technology that's helping scientists better understand monarch butterflies. This is PBS News Weekend from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, home of the PBS News Hour, weeknights on PBS. Many people use social media to document the things we most enjoy in our lives. lives, vacations, gourmet meals, or even the latest TikTok dance.

But it can also be used to influence people who want to seek better lives, often through dangerous journeys that can have tragic results. This report was produced by the students in the Global Reporting Program at the University of British Columbia and is narrated by Andrea Crosson. These people are celebrating, celebrating making it to Europe, celebrating the end of a long journey and they hope the beginning of new lives. And for many, the first thing they do is reach for their phones to share their life-changing news on apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Yes, yes, like people talk about it on social media like Facebook and all that. People are also

on TikTok because it's what a lot of people use now. 24-year-old Sana de Silva is an amateur soccer player who lives on the Spanish Canary Island of El Jiero. He saw videos like these when he was living in Senegal, hoping to someday make his way to Spain. There are people on the journey who take video and show people that this path is fine and that they're not afraid, that no, it's not very dangerous, that any person can take this route. But what he discovered was very different.

The videos rarely show the reality of the journey on these overloaded, barely seaworthy boats where urine and urine and blood, diesel fuel slosh around passengers' feet, and violence is common. When Sana da Silva made his decision to climb aboard, he had no idea he was embarking on what the UN calls one of the most dangerous and deadliest migration routes in the world. For him, it turned into a week-long nightmare. I was throwing up. Everything I ate, I threw up. In the last three days, I didn't get up from where I sat.

I slept there. I spent the night there because I had a bucket. A bucket that had everything in it. I did not stand up for three days. De Silva's boat was eventually spotted by the Spanish Coast Guard and towed into La Restinga, the main port on the island of El Hiero. The small island is popular with divers, but it's not a beach destination. It's the most southwesternly in the Canary Islands archipelago

and is exposed to the powerful Atlantic waves. In 2025, nearly 18,000 migrants like De Silva arrived on the Canary Islands, mostly from West Africa. Elgaro receives more people every year than the island's entire population. Alexis Ramos is with the Red Cross and says most who arrive here are lucky to have survived the journey. When we see it on TV, it might seem like a moment of calm or even of joy for the immigrants, but that's not the reality, because many people are coming on a single boat. Many of them don't know how to swim.

If at any moment the boat were to capsize, we would be facing a very serious problem. It's estimated that last year alone, around 2,000 people went missing or died in the Atlantic while trying to reach Spain. The seas are rough and boats can run out of fuel or veer off course, says El Jiaro official Elpidio Armas. We're talking about people who have been found on the American. coast mummified. Yes, yes. If they drift off course and don't find El Hiero, they end up in South America. The videos posted on social media focus on the dream of seeking a better life, but they're also used to organize illegal efforts to cross borders en masse. In 2024, a group of migrants used Facebook to organize a mass rush of the border between Morocco and the Spanish

enclave of Ceuta. Then at the set time, thousands of people ran towards the heavily guarded barbed wire topped fence, and many managed to force their way into Europe. But this is a dangerous gamble. Often border rushes end in fatalities, and organizers are apprehended by authorities. Smugglers also use social media to find customers. UC Berkeley Law professor Katerina Linos, an expert on migration, told us smugglers have learned how to leverage these platforms better than many official organizations. What we see is like a mode of transport, the name of key ports written in Arabic script as well as the English script and a dollar sign indicating

how much they should expect to pay for each stage. So the information that smugglers provide is not necessarily accurate, but it is far more comprehensible than the information international organizations and governments provide. She told us that smugglers are also well-practiced in convincing reluctant passengers to take a chance. And then there's a smuggler who will tell you, look, I've done this journey myself, I'm part of your community, and I decided to help the community. I will help you get a haircut to look Western. I will help you with all of the transition points. You will pay me some amount now and some amount at the end. Take the risk. Alexis Ramos hopes for the day when desperate people are no longer facing the economic and political

challenges that motivate them to take these risks. of a time when the tents or the hospital at the port of La Rastinga no longer exists because that would mean we have a better world and that these people no longer need to come in search of a new life. Sana de Silva knows that pull and the lure of a new life he sees shared on social media. But he urges people to be aware of the dangers they could face. I don't advise anyone to do this, but it's hard to stop someone whose life is so tough. and social media is filled with the faces of the missing.

The many posts we found online from family and friends searching for loved ones that reveal the hidden tragic realities of people who were convinced to embark on dangerous journeys only to disappear in the waters of the Atlantic. For PBS News Weekend and the Global Reporting Program, I'm Andrea Croson. Monarche is to make one of the most extraordinary migrations in the natural world, often traveling thousands of miles across North America. Now, scientists are using new tracking technology to get a greater understanding of those journeys.

Ali Rogan spoke with Dan Fagan. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who teaches science journalism at New York University and is writing a book about monarch butterflies. Thank you so much for joining us. Dan, I have to be honest, I wasn't aware of the complicated and long journeys that these monarch butterflies take when they migrate.

So tell us about their migration patterns. Yeah, it's kind of amazing what they do. They live one way during the warm weather months when those of us in the US are more familiar with them. But when the weather gets cooler, they change. Instead of just living a few weeks, they live the whole winter, at least if they're fortunate enough to survive, they live the whole winter.

And they undertake this. amazing migration. For monarchs in the eastern U.S., they go to Mexico, and for monarchs in the west, west of the Rockies, they go to the California coast. And they go there because they are very weather sensitive. They can't survive if it's too cold or if it's too hot. So they have found these havens where they can safely overwinter, and that's what they do every year. And you've written about these new tiny sensors that scientists have created to be able to track individual butterflies. How does this work?

It's really an amazing development. I mean, people have been using paper tags and sticker tags on monarch butterflies for a very long time, 80 years. You can see where the monarch started and where the monarch ended, but you have no idea where they went in between, which is sort of like... trying to read a book with only reading the first and the last page. But now, thanks to this new technology developed by a startup company called Cellular Tracking Technologies, they create radio tags and they've now figured out how to miniaturize

these radio tags so they're small enough that even a butterfly can handle it. And so now for the very first time after all these years of trying to understand the migration of monarch butterflies, now we really know. exactly where they're going. And it's just quite fascinating. Yeah, to build on your book analogy, now that we know what's happening in the middle of the story, what have we learned? We knew that monarchs are affected by weather, but we didn't really realize until we have these new tracks just how far off course they get blown when the wind is blowing the wrong way or it's a rainstorm. They can be blown hundreds of miles off course. Yet the amazing thing is

their navigational adaptations. They have two different compasses, one that works when the sun is shining and one that works when it's not. And those compasses are so accurate that even after being blown far off course, many of them anyway can recover and head back down in the correct southwesternly direction all the way to Mexico. Another thing that really wasn't well understood is we kind of assumed that almost all these monarchs went to the same small area in Mexico and also some specific areas in California. But now that we have these tags, we can see that they're also going lots of other places too. And it suggests that maybe the monarch is going to be more resilient to climate change and all these other problems that it's facing than we had feared.

Monarch populations have been declining. What are some of the factors that are to that and why should we be concerned about what's happening? Monarchs need to find just the right narrow temperature range to survive in the winter and also in the summer too. And climate change is changing temperatures, it's changing their habitat, making it harder for them to find the nectar plants that they need. The second thing you asked me was why we should care, and that's a really interesting question,

because what monarchs really are is just gorgeous. They're beautiful, and they do fascinating things. And it would be just incredibly sad to lose the migration, which is just such an amazing natural phenomenon that really not duplicated anywhere else in the natural world. And truly, the fact that they're gorgeous is quite enough. Dan Fagan writing a book about this. Thank you so much.

It's a pleasure to be with you. Finally tonight, some news about us. As you may know, this is the last broadcast of PBS News Weekend, at least for the foreseeable future. PBS canceled the show due to the loss of federal funding for public media. We're grateful that you've chosen us over the years as the place to get news on Saturdays and Sundays. Tonight on PBS News weekend, we've brought you breaking news. Months of escalating tensions between Israelis and Palestinians have erupted into a firestorm. It began as a routine scene.

Look at what happened. President Biden says he's dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to be his party's nominee. On the scene reports from around the world. This series of strikes really was a new front in this war. Here in the capital, Damascus, Syrians are certainly happy that Bashal Assad is gone. The broadcast began in 2013 as PBS News Hour weekend. Good evening and thanks for joining us. It was anchored by Hari Sweenevason and produced in New York.

Good evening. I'm Jeff Bennett, and this is PBS News Weekend. In 2022, a new name, PBS News Weekend, a new anchor, Jeff Bennett, from a new city, Washington, D.C. About an hour outside of Salt Lake City, Ali Rogan was weekend correspondent. And three years ago, I moved behind the anchor desk. We were reported from the West Coast. This light is going out 17 miles in this entire direction. Yes. To the East Coast and places in between.

This vacant lot is all that's left of the Winston Weaver fertilizer plant. Residents of this neighborhood worry what hazardous chemicals may have been left behind. The Maha movement has largely been driven by moms. Yeah. I've been on a Maha journey for about the last 15 years. We went to the U.S. Mint to learn about quarters featuring late 19th and early 20th century investigative journalist Ida B. Wells. It was part of our series highlighting often overlooked figures from America's past. New technology allowed us to speak with three Scottish brothers while

they were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Ewan McLean, Jamie McLean, and Lachlan back there doing all the work. John, thank you so much for having us on. Really appreciate it. Our reach was further extended by stories from our PBS partner stations. For ranchers like the Nolans, Grassland conservation is about survival. If we're not taking good care of the land, we're not going to be here anymore. At Rhode Island School for the Deaf, parents are learning American Sign Language or ASL.

Who? Here, here, here. We shined our weekend spotlight on familiar faces. It's easy to travel when you know where your home is. PBS travel guru Rick Steves. It's a very, very old farmhouse of 1728. 1828. Children's book author, Sandra Boynton.

There were well-known musicians. I don't think of songs as, I'm going to write a hit. Occasionally I'll think, well, this could be a hit. Sinatra sang on the vowels. But I can tell. And a popular trio that can be hard to describe. People still ask me, like, hey, so, oh, you're in a man, what genre do you play?

I don't know. There were also new fresh faces like 14-year-old Haman Bekelly who came up with a soap that fights skin cancer. My main goal here was not only to fight against skin cancer, but to find a more affordable and accessible approach to it. Nine-year-old Molly Samson, who found a prehistoric fossil that was the envy of experts. It would have been a 50-foot shark. He said it was a fun-ful lifetime. We covered the quirky. It's called a shrimp raid.

Everything old is new again. Any news about typewriters is good news about typewriters. We dealt with serious issues like family estrangement. A little heart achy that I don't have a mom for some of these big events and holidays and whatnot. But it's not like I want her there. It's like I want who I wanted as a mom there. With our series unequal treatment, we devoted time to women's health issues. We know that 70 to 80 percent of women.

all women will be diagnosed with uterine fibroids by the age that they're 50. And our series, Saving Species, brought attention to some of the world's most vulnerable creatures. This is Stink Pot, and she has seven babies. It's all been the product of a lot of hard work by our small but mighty team of dedicated professionals, producers in the newsroom and in the field, and the technical wizards in the control room and the studio, all striving to give you the best, most interesting, programs we possibly can. Starting next week, new programs will be in this time slot.

Horizons from PBS News, hosted by William Brangham in focusing on science, health, and technology, and compass points from PBS News, hosted by Nick Schifrin with a focus on foreign affairs. But for now, I wanted to meet all the folks who have worked so hard, weekend and week out, to bring you PBS News weekend. They're usually behind the scenes, and also, I hope you can stick around to see all their names on the on-screen credits. And it has been a privilege

to work with each and every one of you. And on behalf of all of them, thanks for joining us over the years and good night.