PBS News Hour - Full Show - November 29, 2025 – PBS News Weekend full episode

Episode Date: November 29, 2025

Saturday on PBS News Weekend, Trump declares Venezuela’s airspace “closed,” escalating what the administration calls its war on drug cartels. The CDC says cases of whooping cough remain elevated this year. Why many Americans have full-time jobs but can’t afford a place to live. Plus, the women lighthouse keepers who kept shoreline beacons illuminated for generations. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Tonight on PBS News Weekend, President Trump declares Venezuelan airspace closed, escalating what the administration calls its war on drug cartels. Then the Americans who have full-time jobs but can't afford a place to live. And we shine a light on a little-known piece of American history, the women lighthouse keep the shoreline beacons illuminated for generations. Women are, you know, remarkable for their strengths, I think. Most of them didn't think what they were doing as remarkable or interesting or strange. They did their jobs.

They did them well. Good evening. I'm John Yang. After weeks of escalating tensions, President Trump increased pressure on Venezuela today by declaring. by declaring that the nation's airspace should be considered closed, even though he doesn't have the legal authority to close it. With a substantial U.S. military buildup in the region, today's announcement fuels speculation about what's next.

Earlier this week, Mr. Trump said his war on drug smuggling would soon enter a new phase. In a recent week, you've been working to deter Venezuela in drug traffickers of which there are many, and we'll be starting to stop him by land also. The land is easier. But that's going to start very soon. We'd warn them, stop sending poison to our country.

Since September, U.S. forces have struck nearly two dozen boats alleged to be carrying drugs in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing an estimated 80 people. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says his country will defend itself against any foreign threat. Overnight in Ukraine, Russia carried out a deadly barrage of drone and missile attacks. At least three people were killed in and around the country's capital. city. Keeb's mayor said dozens of others were injured as debris from intercepted drones fell onto residential buildings. A Ukrainian delegation has arrived in the United States for more discussions about a possible peace deal, and next week, Trump administration officials are to go to Moscow.

On the year's busiest travel weekend, the FAA has ordered airlines to update software in a widely used aircraft by midnight tonight. Airbus issued a software fix for about 6,000 of its A-320 family of jets, after an analysis found that solar radiation bursts may corrupt key data needed for flight controls. They say that's likely why a jet blue flight suddenly lost altitude last month, sending more than a dozen people to hospitals. American, Delta, and United all say they expect the fix to be done quickly and with minimal disruption. The acclaimed British playwright Tom Stoppard has died. His career spanned decades. He won five best play Tony Awards, the first in 1968 for the absurdist twist on Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Gildensterner

dead, his last in 2023 for the drama, Leopoldstad. He also won a screenwriting Oscar for 1998's Shakespeare in Love. Tom Stoppard was 88. As family and friends gather this holiday season, there's a warning for new parents. The CDC says cases of whooping cough or pertussis remain elevated this year. In Kentucky, this week, an unduly. unvaccinated infant died from the illness, the third child to die of whooping cough in the state this year. Other states across the country, including Texas, Florida, California, and Oregon are also experiencing a surge of cases. Allie Rogan spoke with Dr. Lorne Walker, a pediatric infectious disease specialist. Thank you so much for joining us. First of all, can you just tell us what is

whooping cough? What are the characteristic signs of it and what should people look out for? So whooping cough is an infection that used to be very common. It's caused by a bacteria called pertussis. And the old kind of classic name for it is the 100-day cough. And it's famous for causing long-term respiratory illness. And in older kids and adults, the primary symptom is a very severe, prolonged bouts of coughing. And coughing that can be severe enough to cause a collapsed lung or a broken rib. And so obviously, it's something that makes people pretty sick.

It turns out that the groups that are at the highest risk with whooping cough are people who have compromised immune systems, so folks who have cancer or who are transplant recipients, but especially young babies. And one of the challenges with little babies is that instead of having coughing spells, they often will just stop breathing, which is a reason that those kids will often come into the hospital or even need ICU care with a breathing tube to help them breathe. And so that's why we vaccinate, starting at two months of age, to try and protect that population that's so vulnerable to severe disease with whooping cough. And so why is it that whooping cough might cause worse symptoms in an infant than it would in an older child or an adult? We think that in babies, it's a combination of their immature immune system, as well as the immature sort of breathing responses that they have to infections like this.

So it's very inflammatory and irritating to the lungs. And if you're an older kid or an adult, you cough. But unfortunately, in the little babies, they'll stop breathing and they'll stop breathing kind of unexpectedly. There are these three tragic deaths so far that we know of in Kentucky, which are the first deaths that that state has seen from this disease since 2018. What do we know about the frequency of whooping cough diagnoses right now? Has there been an uptick and is what we are seeing now unusual?

well. 2024 and 25 have both been very difficult years for whooping cough here in the United States. Here in Oregon in 2025, we've had more than 1,300 cases, which is the highest number since 1950. And we've had more than 33,000 cases across the country. And it's not just Oregon where we're seeing a lot of cases, but also in states like Texas and Washington. We've been seeing unusually high numbers of whooping cough cases. So the CDC says that these whooping cough numbers are higher, even than they were before the pandemic. Why do you think that is? Unfortunately, the rates of vaccination against whooping cough have been

falling for years, even going back prior to the COVID pandemic. Currently in Oregon, one out of every five, two-year-olds hasn't completed their full whooping cough series of vaccinations, and one out of every 10 kindergartner that's starting school and being exposed to lots of other kids and people are not up to date on their whipping cough vaccines. And we're pretty confident that the low rates of vaccination are the key risk factor for for having this high number of cases. When we talk about children who aren't getting this vaccine, is it possible to figure out how many haven't completed this five-dose course

of this particular vaccine? And how many are, because they're not getting it at all, because of something like vaccine hesitancy? We know that kids are the most protected when they have the full course of a process of vaccination. We start at two months of age because we know that the young kids and babies are at the highest. risk. Certainly, misinformation and myths about vaccination are one of the drivers of low vaccine

rates. Unfortunately, that's not a new phenomenon. Misinformation and myths about vaccines started 200 years ago when we had our first smallpox vaccine, which obviously worked because we don't have smallpox anymore, but that the misconceptions about vaccination, I think, are a real driver of people being reluctant to vaccinate. And as families travel for the holidays and they might be worried about encountering a disease like this, especially if they have a young child. What should families be mindful of? A lot of the things that we all got used to and learned during the COVID pandemic, like washing our hands, covering our coughs, or maybe staying a little bit further away if you're having symptoms of a respiratory infection, all help

prevent spread of all infections. But for these vaccine preventable illnesses like whooping cough, not only having children vaccinated, but having the folks around them vaccinated will help protect everybody. Dr. Lauren Walker at Dornbecker Children's Hospital. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. Still to come on PBS News Weekend, why so many Americans who are gainfully employed can't afford a home and the women who saved countless lives at sea as lighthouse keepers. This is PBS News Weekend from the day. at M. Rubenstein Studio at WETA in Washington, home of the PBS News Hour.

Weeknights on PBS. The skyrocketing cost of living has left millions of people working at full-time jobs or a number of part-time jobs still unable to afford a place to live. Ali Rogan is back with her conversation with journalist Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place for Us about this growing nationwide crisis. Thank you so much for joining us. In your work, you've come to know many people who work, who may have more than one job, but have come into circumstances where they cannot afford to keep a roof over their heads.

Certainly, each person has a unique story, but are there any common threads in their experiences that you've been able to identify? Yeah, absolutely. I do argue in my book that in cities across America today, in one city after another, a low-wage job really is homelessness waiting to happen. And what they have in common is they all belong to the low-wage workforce. And it's not just that their wages are too low to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of having a place to live. It's also that the jobs themselves have become increasingly volatile and precarious, where they often don't know how many hours they're going to be getting from one week to the next. Their employers give them 29 hours a week

because at 30, they would be eligible for basic benefits like health insurance or sick leave. And, yeah, the cost of housing, rents are just very, very quickly outpacing what their incomes are. So that's kind of the backdrop that defines these people's existence. For a long time, the stereotypical perception of homelessness is that it is something that happens to people on the fringes of society. And that may have never been accurate. But what have you found out in your reporting about the reality of what it's like to be without a home? Yeah, I mean, one really astonishing truth about homelessness in America

is that what we see on the street is really the tip of the iceberg. There's this entire world of homelessness that is out of sight that has been rendered invisible. And within that shadow realm of homelessness, as I refer to it, But it is overwhelmingly populated with people, again, who are part of the low-wage workforce, families with children. And these are people who are working and working and working some more. And it simply is not enough to secure one of life's most basic necessities, a roof overhead.

I mean, to be sure, in the richest nation on the planet, nobody should be without housing. But these pernicious myths and stereotypes that homeless, is just caused by addiction or it's just caused by mental illness, it really is not borne out by the reality on the ground. And indeed, often mental illness and addiction is a consequence of this form of insecurity, not its cause. Can you tell us a little bit about what the lives of the homeless workers are day in and day out? And also, do those lives get harder during the holidays? I think it's really easy for terms like the housing crisis or the homelessness crisis to become kind of abstract and to lose touch with just the acute human toll of this growing catastrophe in

America. You know, what homelessness looks like today isn't just the person sleeping outside the parking lot of a convenience store or a Walmart or a Target. It's often the very cashier or worker stocking the shelves in those stores. And they often have children at the end of the their shifts, they don't know where they're going to be going. They have to tell their children, I don't know where we're staying tonight. Maybe they're sleeping in a car in that very parking lot. And, you know, there's a term that public health experts use to refer to the kind of stress that children and parents are exposed to in these circumstances. And that term is toxic stress. This is stress that is so chronic, so debilitating, that it can fundamentally alter a child's

long-term development, that is the human toll of this insecurity. And it is the consequence. It's the toll of what has happened when millions, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families in this country have been flung into what a case manager in my book refers to as the housing hunger games. You've cited a number of deficiencies across all sorts of categories that are failing people. But what institutions here need to change? Are these, is this a a failure of government, of industry, all of the above. How do you see it? Yeah, I think it is all of the above. What I found in my reporting in the course of kind of immersing myself in the day-to-day lives of five families here in Atlanta where I live over a period of nearly six

years, it's not just the housing system, which, you know, prioritizes profits above all else. It's not just work and jobs and wages that aren't keeping up with the cost of living. It's also other systems like health care, a lack of affordable child care, the education system, food and security, all of these systems sort of collide to make this human disaster, not just possible, but in many ways predictable and inevitable. Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place for Us. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you for having me. And finally, tonight, an encore from this spring.

The little-known stories of women who operated lighthouses across the country for generations. Surfers and seabirds called this stretch of the California coastline home. It can be dramatic and breathtaking. But the rocky, jagged shore and shoals, sometimes shrouded in fog, can also be treacherous for boats and ships that get too close. For generations, the Point Pinos Lighthouse and Pacific Grove has stood sentry, warning mariners to keep their distance. When it was built in the mid-1850s, this was an isolated outpost.

The nearest town, Monterey, was about four miles away, reachable only by a twisty dirt and sand trail. Those on the east coast who wanted to get to the west coast generally traveled by sailing boat, a six-month ordeal that took them around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. This is the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the U.S. Pacific Coast. Two women have been principal lighthouse keepers here, dating back to 1856 when Charlotte Leighton became the first woman to have that job on the West Coast. Charlotte Leighton, who was the first, took over when her husband was killed.

She sort of knew what to do and she was widowed and the people around the local community wanted her to have a job so she wouldn't be destitute. Nancy McDowell is the docent coordinator at Point Pino's. How did her husband die? He was with the group that went out to the house where this bandit was and he went to the back door and and that's where the bandit came out and shot the three of them that were back there. And that's how she lost her husband but also became the head keeper. Yes. These are sort of unheralded, a pining pioneers doing this. Right. We think it's wonderful and especially that she got the same pay as her

her husband had. It was one of the first non-clerical government jobs open to women. Over the years, there were scores of women lighthouse keepers from coast to coast. One of my grandfathers worked at a lighthouse here in Nova Scotia. So I've always been fascinated. Shauna McDonald of Cape Breton University in Canada works to shine a light on the women who ran lighthouses. There were hundreds of women from the 18th, but really 19th and 20th centuries who kept lighthouses in the United States. Most of them, however, would not have been official keepers. So the official number is somewhere around 200. 200 is more than I had imagined. Did that never surprise you? Absolutely. I mean, I'm someone who's always been interested in women's history and women's lives.

And I just, I sort of felt ashamed that it hadn't ever occurred to me, you know, even though I had been researching lighthouses when I realized how many women had done this work or had been involved in some way. So from here, you can see the original lens up there. At Point Pinos, the second woman to be principal lighthouse keeper was Emily Fish. She had the job from 1893 to 1914. She hopefully had a time to sit, maybe resting during the day after being up all night with the lamp. The widow of a physician, she was known as the socialite keeper. She entertained guests at the lighthouse in her fashionable sitting room. Maybe you'd like to go up and see where she went from her room to take care of the light.

And so it's narrow steps, but it goes up to a ladder. and we can even go up the ladder. Just like the keepers would have had to do. We're going up the ladder to the lantern room. So we see this vista, and this light is going out 17 miles in this entire direction? Yes. However many degrees, this is all the way around. It's not 360.

Because this little part's gone, and I'm not sure how many that is. But it goes everywhere except in the fog. And I don't know how far it does go. It depends on how thick the fog is, I suspect. By 1990, all U.S. lighthouses had been automated, eliminating the need for keepers. Lighthouse keeping was not a terribly posh job, despite the exception of someone like Emily Fish. mostly working class people. These were not easy jobs. And while we might look at lighthouses today as places of beauty, where we go to learn about history, or we love to paint or take

pictures of, at the time, they were just another necessary technology that everyone, you know, relied upon. North of Point Pinos across Monterey Bay is Santa Cruz, once home to another important lighthouse run by a woman. Laura Hecox was the principal lighthouse keeper there from 18 She was also a naturalist, amassing an impressive collection of specimens from the area. Ida Lewis was arguably the best-known U.S. woman lighthouse keeper. She made it on to the cover of Harper's Weekly in 1869. She ran the Lime Rock Lighthouse in Rhode Island's Newport Harbor. She did a lot of rescuing.

So that's how she came to be known by rowing out in her rowboat and rescuing people. who had gotten into some kind of trouble on the water. She began at the age of 15 because her father had fallen ill. And so he just sort of supervised and she did the work until she was an elderly woman. By all accounts, she was a tiny woman, but she was able to do these wonderful things. So she was famous in her time. But then I also love women who haven't gotten as much attention. Laura Hedges, she kept a lighthouse in New Jersey for a while when her husband had fallen ill.

And then I was able to visit the National Archives and find the logs where I can see Laura Hedges having been the Keeper in 1925 and 1926. And the day that her husband passed, she simply had written in the log, Keeper died and the time. And the rest of the log is weather and sailing reports. Her husband dies. She makes a note of it, but she keeps on working. She keeps on her job. She keeps on working. These women are, you know, remarkable for their strengths, I think, both physical and mental, as well as obviously emotional to be able to keep doing this work. Most of them didn't think of what they were doing as remarkable or interesting or strange.

They did their jobs. They did them well. They cared for people. These logs were written by Emily Fish. And usually it had to do with the weather and what was happening around. Hazy, fog, fog, clear showers. 89 years old, Nancy McDowell is determined to keep a spotlight on the stories of these women keepers, just as they and those like them around the country kept their shoreline beacons illuminated. 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.