PBS News Hour - Full Show - July 6, 2025 – PBS News Weekend full episode

Episode Date: July 6, 2025

Sunday on PBS News Weekend, rescuers race again time in a desperate search for the missing after deadly flash floods in Texas. A preview of a high-stakes meeting between Trump and Netanyahu in Washington. We get advice from a doctor on how to stay safe during tick season. Plus, the dangers of rising temperatures and melting glaciers. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Tonight on PBS News Weekend, a preview of a high-stakes meeting in Washington as President Trump is to talk with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the future of the Middle East. Then tick season is upon us, and tick-bord diseases are on the rise. We get insight from a doctor in how to enjoy the outdoors safely. At this moment, the ticks are very active. When we look back over the last couple of decades, we are seeing more and more tick bites happening and more tick-borne infections.

So the problem is, unfortunately, increasing each year. And the dangers of rising temperatures and melting glaciers have we already passed to the point of no return. Good evening. I'm John Yang. Tonight, the desperate search for the missing after deadly flash floods in Texas has become a race against time. The official death toll has climbed to at least 70, and 11 girls from a Christian camp are still unaccounted for. With each passing hour, the chances of finding survivors dwindles. Ali Rogan has our report.

In parts of central Texas, the floodwaters have receded, but grief hangs in the air as the search for the missing girls from Camp Mystic widens. Inside their deserted cabins, muddied cots, and overturned tables lie scattered. Saturday evening, Texas Governor Greg Abbott visited the campsite, vowing to work around the clock to find the girls and bring them home safely. In nearby curvil, downed trees and destroyed homes littered neighborhoods along the Guadalupe River. On Friday, the river surged past 29 feet before the gauge failed, the second highest level ever recorded. Ground crews gathered to sift through debris and search for survivors today,

while rescue teams in helicopters airlifted as many people as they could. For many, their only escape route was to climb onto their rooftops. Meanwhile, locals like Arnaldo Pena are pitching in to help where they can. My dog, he's like a German shepherd, so like I want to see if he can find someone, you know, help out some families. The National Weather Service first detected floods in the region late Thursday night. The RV park right at the end of my granny's road that were completely flooded. But some people in the area said the alerts didn't reach them in time. No warnings at all. They came hours later, which was the most devastating cart.

We got the warnings on our phones hours later, hours later. Curval City officials were pressed today on why early warnings from the Texas Division of Emergency Management didn't reach the area camps and force evacuations. That is a great question, but again, we want to make sure that we continue to focus. We still have 11 missing children that we want to get reunited with our families. This is the flash flood capital of the United States. It's infamous for having many life-threatening and tragic flash floods over the decades. Accuether Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter said it comes down to a matter of local communication. There were several hours of advance notice before the peak of the inundation reached, for example, the Hunt area across Texas as a result of a flash flood warning that was issued by the National Weather Service at 114 in the morning central time.

The question is going to have to be, how did entities receive those warnings, the local officials and also the people that were responsible. for the safety. Prayers for those Texas communities poured in from around the world at the Vatican and in central Texas, where people came together to mourn the lives lost and hope for more survivors.

For PBS News Weekend, I'm Ali Rogan. Flood watches are posted for parts of North Carolina as the remnants of tropical storm Chantel drops as much as four inches of rain. The storm's been downgraded to a tropical depression, but the National Weather Service warns of potentially

dangerous conditions through the early part of this week. The storm made landfall overnight and continues to move inland, bringing with it bands of heavy rain. Life-threatening surf and rip currents are also a danger for beachgoers in neighboring states. Over the next 24 hours, the system is forecast to turn north and then hook to the east. European leaders are bracing for what President Trump may do when his tariff pause ends in the middle of the week. In April, the president imposed a 20% levy on all products made in the European Union, but later reduced it to 10% after pushback from investors and

business leaders. Now, after vowing to make 90 deals in 90 days, Mr. Trump's economic team is underpure to figure out what comes next. President Trump's going to be sending letters to some of our trading partners saying that if you don't move things along, then on August 1st, you will boomerang back to your April 2nd tariff level. So I think we're going to see a lot of deals very quickly. What's going to happen in August? So countries will get a letter saying that if we have not reached an agreement, then you will go back to the April 2nd level.

If additional tariffs are imposed on items from the EU, it could lead to higher prices for everything from plastic to leather to European wines. Still to come on PBS News Weekend with tick season in full swing, while this year is worse than usual and what you can do to protect yourself. And polar ice sheets and climate change, where is the planet headed? This is PBS News Weekend from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, home of the PBS News Hour, weeknights on PBS. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has an appointment at the White House Monday to meet with President Trump.

Netanyahu left Israel today for the two leaders' first in-person meeting since last month's joint U.S.-Israeli assault on Iranian nuclear facilities. We have never had such a great friend in the White House, and our joint mobilization has brought a great victory over our common enemy, Iran. There's also great opportunity, and their opportunity is to expand the circle of peace far beyond what we could have imagined. before. There will be plenty to talk about. High on the agenda is likely to be Mr. Trump's push for a 60-day ceasefire in Gaza. Even as Israeli and Hamas negotiators are set to talk in Qatar, the Israeli military said it struck more than 100 Hamas targets in Gaza, and hospital officials said 38 Palestinians were killed.

Kenneth Pollock is Vice President for Policy at the Middle East Institute. Ken, when these two leaders sit down tomorrow, what does each... hope or want to come out of it. Well, look, I think that it's a lot more complicated for Prime Minister Netanyahu than it is for President Trump. For President Trump, as you pointed out, he is looking to get a ceasefire in Gaza. But more than that, I think he's just being opportunistic. What we've seen from him was six months back in office is he's just looking for wins. If you can get a win, he runs with it. If he doesn't, even if he tosses out an idea, if it goes nowhere, he's perfectly glad to discard it

or wait on it. So right now, I think what he's waiting to hear from Prime Minister Netanyahu is, what are you willing to do that's going to be good for me, good for Donald Trump? The problem is, Prime Minister Netanyahu, although he's riding high at the moment in Israel, he still has a range of challenges out there.

First, he's almost certainly mulling whether to hold snap elections in Israel take advantage of his current popularity. He's still facing a war with Gaza. There seems to be no sign that he's actually interested in a meaningful ceasefire or a permanent ceasefire. It's unclear whether Iran is out. They're certainly down, but whether their nuclear program is gone for good is an open question. The United States has started talks with the Iranians. Prime Minister Netanyahu is very concerned about what the U.S.

is ready to give to the Iranians in return for whatever he's going to get from them. And then there are tantalizing prospects for peace with Lebanon, with Syria, with Saudi Arabia. All of these things are going to be things where Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to be looking for firm commitments from President Trump, where, as it said, President Trump is probably just looking for wins from Prime Minister Netanyahu. This is going to be Mr. Netanyahu's third visit to the White House since President Trump went back in office. In Gaza, what happened in Iran, does that change the calculus or the thinking on either side, on either or the Israeli side or the Hamas side? It's hard to see it changing Hamas's calculations at all. They are where they are. They are, of course, in a no-win situation, just as the Israelis are. They won't give up the hostages without a permanent ceasefire. And the Israelis seem to have little inclination to give them a permanent ceasefire. I think for the Israelis, the real question is whether the bolstering of Prime Minister Netanyahu's popularity as a result of the 12-dayous, war with Iran, has made it possible for him to imagine doing some things with Gaza that he wouldn't have done beforehand, agreeing first to a 60-day ceasefire, agreeing possibly even to a

permanent ceasefire. These are the kind of things which would be very hard for Prime Minister Netanyahu to do under any circumstances because of the very right-wing nature of his cabinet, the fact that he's got some real hard-line right-wingers who want no truce with Hamas whatsoever. But if there were ever a moment when he might be able to do so, now, after he's gotten this big boost from the war with Iran, that's a moment when he might. Talk a little bit about the relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu. It was clear that Nanyahu wanted Trump back in the White House during the campaign. But since he has gotten back, the president has alternately praised him and chastised him. Talk a little bit about that.

Sure. So, you know, all relationships with President Trump seem to be fraught. They seem to be difficult. He's a rather mercurial character. He says he likes to be unpredictable. He thinks it's an advantage of his. He doesn't really believe in staff work or planning. He goes with his gut.

All of this makes him tough to deal with. And before President Trump came back into office, I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu thought, well, he's been very pro-Israel in the past. to let us do whatever we wanted to do. But that's only been partly true. What we've seen is that President Trump has been perfectly glad to put a halt to Prime Minister Netanyahu's cherished positions. Famously telling him he was going to go ahead with talks with Iran, when it was clear

the Israelis did not want him to do so, famously telling the Israelis not to attack Iran because he wanted to do the talks with Iran instead. Although, of course, it's worth noting that President Trump seems to be. very forgiving of the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu went ahead and attacked Iran anyway on the eve of new U.S. Iran talks. But since President Trump seems to feel like he got a big win from having contributed to the war, having bombed three of the main Iranian nuclear sites, he seems willing to forgive Prime Minister Netanyahu. But this is the big issue for the Israelis, is Prime Minister Netanyahu feels like he's got a friend in President Trump, but it's not always

clear that he actually does. And again, I think he's going to be very much on his toes, but he doesn't know what he's going to get from President Trump this time around. Ken Pollock of the Middle East Institute. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for having me on, John. They're tiny, but they can pack a mean punch every year in the United States, nearly 31 million people are bitten by a tick, and tick-related illnesses like Lyme disease are on the rise. A trend experts attribute to climate change, human expansion into forested areas, and overpopulations of deer. Ali Rogan is back this time. She's talking with Dr. Andrew Handel about how to best avoid these tiny insects.

He's a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Stony Brook Children's Hospital in New York. Dr. Handel, thank you so much for joining us. Different states. have exposure to different types of ticks. What are some of the most common ticks that bite and illnesses that they might bring with them? Absolutely. So I live here in the Northeast where we see a lot of lone star ticks and deer ticks. And like you mentioned, depending on the type of tick that's bit new, you're at risk of getting different tick-borne infections or other medical problems. So by far the most common tick-borne infection you can get in the United States is Lyme disease. But then those same ticks that transmit Lyme disease can also give you other

infections like bobeziosis or anaplasmosis. In the southeastern United States, there's higher risk of something called Rocky Mountain spotted fever. And all these infections can give you very different signs and symptoms and kind of give you different degrees of severity of your illness. And what do we know about the rate of infections right now and the number of ticks that are out there around the country? So at this moment, the ticks are very active. There's lots of tick bites that are happening. I've seen lots of children in my own office. and in the emergency room. You know, this is typical for this time of year. It's always a little bit hard to say if there are more tick bites or less than tick bites than have happened in past years.

Though the CDC, if you check their data online, you can see there actually are a higher number of people going to the emergency department for tick bites than in past years. And so, you know, when we look back over the last couple decades, we are seeing more and more tick bites happening and more tick-borne infections. So the problem is unfortunately increasing each year. What are some things that people can do to help protect themselves against tick bites? So the first thing you want to think about is what you can do to avoid ticks altogether. So ticks tend to live on tall grasses or in that leafy underbrush in forested areas. So if you go out for a hike, you want to stay in the middle of the path and avoid brushing against the sides where the ticks are hanging out on the tall grasses waiting to grasp onto you.

In terms of when you are outside enjoying the outdoors, we always recommend that people wear long sleeve light colored pants and shirts. And you can actually even tuck your pants into your socks to prevent the ticks from biting onto your skin. You also want to use insects repellent. So we typically recommend Diet 20 to 30% insect repellent, which is really good for keeping the ticks away. And for people who really spend a lot of time outside, so landscapers or gardeners, you may even want to have a pair of clothing or two that you spray with a solution called Promethrin, which goes right onto the clothes. It stays on them for, you know, a good number of washes and then kills the ticks and other mosquitoes and other insects on contact. And then the last part you want to think about is once you're done with your outdoor activities, we want to take your clothes in. in your shoes, and you can actually just throw them right into the dryer on high heat for 10 minutes.

That's going to kill any ticks that are attached. You can also use a lint brush if you don't have access to a dryer. And then probably the most important part of all, this is once you're back inside to perform a really thorough tick. So you want to make sure to check in any areas where there's hair, in the belt line, behind the ears, and skin folds. Look really closely for those tiny black dots, which might indicate that you've been bitten by a tick. The CDC also says that 470,000 people contract Lyme disease each year. And we know sometimes that the symptoms don't show up right away. So what should people be looking out for that might indicate they've contracted Lyme disease?

Yeah. So the symptoms really depends on how long it's been since the tick bite occurred. They actually change over time. So if you had a tick bite within the last couple weeks or so, you're going to want to watch that area for what we call a target rash or the bullseye rash, which that classic circular rash that gets bigger over the course of a few days. That's often the first sign of Lyme disease infection. That often tends to come along with flu-like illnesses,

so things like muscle aches, fevers, chills. Some people actually never even have the bull's-eye rash. That symptom just never develops or is an area that they didn't notice. And so later on, some people can develop, especially children, we'll see you have Lyme meningitis, which presents them having really severe headaches that worsen over a week or two. Adults are prone to having Lyme charditis, meaning that it's an inflammation of the heart,

and that can cause them to have shortness of breath, fainting episodes, things like that, because actually can affect the electrical rhythms within their heart. And then in children, we tend to see quite a bit of Lyme arthritis, where months after the tick bite occurred, they have a swollen, red, painful joint. And that can often be the first sign that they've had Lyme disease at all. Some people rely on remedies and information that they find online, which may be a varying reliability. How would you determine what's a best practice and what's not? There are tick removal kits that you can find online or in other sources that often have all the tools you need.

We recommend using tweezers to remove the tick instead of other remedies that are often used. So I've had patients who have tried to burn the tick off with a match or who've tried to suffocate it with oils or creams. None of those things are helpful and can actually cause harm to your skin so we don't recommend it. So what you're going to do is you're going to take your tweezers, grab right where the tick is biting onto your skin, and then firmly pull it straight upward. Don't twist it. Don't try and pull on the stomach or anything like that. Just pull it straight upward. And then you're going to have your magnifying glass and a tick identification card, which if you don't have one handy at home, you can always look online and use those to try and

figure out what type of a tick it is. So you'll take the tick from the tweezers, put it into a sealed container. And then when you can look at the tick and try and figure out what kinds it is, which tells you which infections or other medical problems you may be at risk of. If someone is infected, what are some best practices that they should follow? So, of course, if you have any concern at all that you've been, been my tick and you may have Lyme disease, you want to speak with your medical provider. We do have some antibiotics that work very, very well for it. And I say particularly among children, the vast majority of patients we have who have Lyme

disease get their antibiotics and get better pretty quickly. Some people can have some lingering symptoms. And so if you're not feeling back to yourself by the time with you're done with your antibiotics, you do want to speak with your medical provider again and see if there's anything else that needs to be done. Also, you want to make sure that the Lyme disease was the correct diagnosis. the first time because Lyme disease can look like a lot of other medical problems. And so if you're not responding to the antibiotics, we always want to take a step back and say, are we sure this is Lyme disease?

Is there something else that we should think about here? And what would you say to parents who might be worried about tick season? So the first thing I always tell anyone is, especially for those of us who live in areas where there are many ticks, eventually you're probably going to find a tick on your child or yourself. I have kids and do find ticks on them throughout the season. Again, it's just part of life. So when that happens, it just reminds everyone, don't panic. The vast majority of tick bites do not result in tick-borne infections or other medical problems. So just because you've been bitten by a tick does not mean that you're going to get sick for it. But of course, you want to be careful about it.

Dr. Andrew Handel with Stony Brook Children's Hospital. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for having me. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change set the goal of limiting global warming by the end of the century to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above what it was before the industrial age. That was thought to be the threshold for averting severe climate change impacts. But now new research published in the journal Communications, Earth and Environment, says that even that level is too high to prevent the catastrophic consequences

of sea level rise due to melting glaciers. Chris Stokes is one of the authors of that study. He's a professor at England's Durham University where he studies glaciers. Chris Stokes, we're currently at 1.2, as I understand it, above pre-industrial levels. If we were just to maintain that level, not get any worse, what would be the effects on glaciers and sea level? So that was actually one of the questions that we tried to answer in our research. And the answer to that question is the ice sheets, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, they're losing almost 400 billion tons of ice per year.

And this is a trend that started in the kind of early 1990s. And it's something that we're really worried about because some of the changes we're seeing now in terms of the mass of ice being lost is really quite dramatic. And what would that mean for sea levels? Yeah. So at the moment, the global average sea level all around the world is rising at about four and a half millimeters.

per year. So if you take that four and a half millimeters per year that we're currently experiencing at the moment, and you just carry on at that same rate of acceleration, before the end of this century, we'll hit that kind of, you know, one centimeter per year. So that means, you know, our young children who will be living into their 80s and 90s will be living with sea level rising at a centimeter per year. And that means that their children will then have to cope with one meter of sea level rise over a hundred years. So this is really quite alarming. As I say, the changes that we're seeing and measuring at the moment are perhaps what we're seeing is the worst case scenario playing out before our eyes. What would be the optimal level warming over

pre-industrial? We probably need to go back to about one degree above pre-industrial. That's kind of conditions at the late 1980s. And that's what we think will slow down, possibly even stop sea level rise from ice sheets at that kind of warming level. But, you know, that doesn't mean that all ice will stop melting because we'll still have mounting glaciers around the world, and those smaller glaciers will still continue to melt. So it's unlikely to stop sea level rise in total, but it will stop sea level rise from the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, we would hope. And what's the effect? Talk about the coastal regions, not only in the United States,

England, around the world. Just as an example, there are 230 million. people who live within one meter of sea level. And there's about a billion people live within 10 metres of sea level. And so for those people, you know, think of all a lot of our largest coastal cities, London, New York, Singapore as well, Bangladesh, whole countries who have their land territory within just a few meters of sea level. Well, this represents an existential threat.

You know, this threatens the existence of entire countries. And we're talking about widespread displacement of, you know, you know, millions and millions of people at that level. Do you see the lesson of your study that we need to curb greenhouse gases more or that we need to prepare for the worst? You know, I wish I wasn't here talking to you today about this. But I think we have to just faithfully report what the observations are showing us, what the science shows.

You know, people can debate whether to carry on burning fossil fuels. The ice doesn't care, right? The ice will just melt as it gets warmer. but part of the message here is that every fraction of a degree really matters. So if we end up at 1.6 or 1.7 degrees of warming, that will be far better than if we end up at 2 or 3 degrees. Part of the message here is like if countries want to continue burning fossil fuels, and let me be clear, I don't think they should, but if they do, they need to start preparing to invest trillions of dollars in coastal defences because this problem will not go away.

Decisions taken in the next few years and decades by world leaders at the climate conferences will actually have impacts for several generations. And some of those impacts will be irreversible as well. We won't be able to turn back on them. Chris Stokes with a very sobering message. Thank you very much. Thank you. And that is PBS News Weekend for this Sunday.

I'm John Yang for all of my colleagues. Thanks for joining us. Have a good week.