PBS News Hour - Full Show - October 11, 2025 – PBS News Weekend full episode

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

Saturday on PBS News Weekend, as the pause in fighting takes hold in Gaza, Israel awaits the release of hostages and thousands of Palestinians return to the ruins of their homes. The latest progress and what’s on the horizon for preventing and treating breast cancer. Plus, best-selling author Mitch Albom discusses his latest book, his writing process and giving back. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Tonight on PBS News Weekend, as the pause and fighting in Gaza takes hold, Israel awaits the return of their hostages and thousands of Palestinians returns to the ruins of their homes. Then the latest progress and what's on the horizon for preventing and treating breast cancer. And in our weekend spotlight, best-selling author Mitch Album talks about his latest book, his writing process and giving back. I wanted to write a book that showed that even if you had the ability, the 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. Good evening. I'm John Yang. It's day 11 of the government shutdown, and there are still no signs of efforts to end the congressional stalemate that's blocking federal funding. President Trump says he's directed the Defense Department to use all available funds to make sure U.S. troops are paid on time on Wednesday. Tomorrow, the Smithsonian Museums and the National Zoo will close as they run out of the unspent prior year funds they've been using to keep the doors open. The president's trying to increased pressure on Democrats, saying he'll pick and choose which furloughed workers get back pay and slash programs Democrats care about. The administration is also moving ahead with plans for mass firings. On Friday, federal workers began receiving notices, telling them that they'll be laid off in 60 days. The administration says that more than 4,100 workers will be fired across seven agencies,

the moves being challenged in court. Authorities say there are no survivors. from a blast level of an explosives plant in Tennessee Friday. They say it's not clear yet how many people died, though. Earlier, they said 18 people were missing. Actress and producer Diane Keaton has died, PBS News has confirmed. Over her long career, she won a claim for roles in films as varied as the Godfather and Annie Hall, for which she won an Academy Award.

Keaton was 79 years old. In the Middle East, there's relief in both Israel and Gaza, as the Pazan fighting appears to be holding. In Tel Aviv, Haggai Angrest, eagerly anticipates the return of his son. Kidnet soldier, Matan, Angrest. We are very exciting, waiting for our son, and for all the 48 hostages. I want to thank to many thanks for President Trump. He did it, and all the American teams.

In Gaza, Palestinians stream north on foot toward Gaza City. Their relief is tempered by the magnitude of the destruction. I'm happy that there is no blood, no killing. People can sleep in calm and are reassured. Now when the war is over, where will we go? I am displaced in a government area building, but we have to move from there. Where will we go? As Israeli forces pull back in Gaza,

organizations prepared to move in with desperately needed aid. Before the ceasefire took hold, Foreign Affairs correspondent Nick Schifrin spoke with Antoine Renard, the World Food Program's Director for the Palestinian Territories. We have seen over the last two years since the October 7 terrorist attack enormous suffering in Gaza. From your perspective, how bad is the suffering today compared in the past? Today in Gaza City, you have 400,000 people that are being cut off from the rest of the Gaza Strip.

We went with our team actually to also ensure what were the condition now there. On the 22nd of August, the famine condition were actually confirmed in the area of Gaza City. And what we've managed to do over the last month is actually to bring more volume of assistance into Gaza and the Gaza Strip. You have on an average, you know, now two meals per day, while it used to be one meal per day just, you know, two months ago. But yet, what was the area that was most at risk? You have 400,000 people that are being trapped, and there's no more assistance that is reaching them. So explain that shift over the last month. How many more trucks are being allowed in?

And are they reaching the people who needed the aid the most? The World Food Programme has been working actually since end of July is to have at least on an average 100 trucks at minimum per day. Out of all the trucks that I've managed to enter into Gaza over the last few weeks, WFP has been doing practically a third of all of those. What we've managed to bring is more than 55,000 metric tons of food over the last two months. To give you a reality of what it is, it's a third of just the staple food that people require in. Gaza, but that is not enough because you need also to have the proper fresh food that is out

you. People are not just relying on canned food and wheat flour. They're required to have proper access to fruits, to vegetables, to meats, to dairy products. So the reality is that we manage to bring a bit more, but at the same time it is not enough. In North Gaza, clearly the conditions, famine conditions are still out there. Since the 12th of September, we did not manage to actually bring the food as we were in the recent weeks. In central and south of Gaza, you actually have more goods that are coming in. The problem that you have is that those that were recently displaced, how are they going to afford it just to go from Gaza City all the way down?

Some people actually have to borrow sometime up to $1,000.000. You might have more food on the market. You might have more capacity for people to get the food there, but it can't afford it. And that is the biggest challenge that we have. Can you give us a little bit more detail on the people of Gaza City? Obviously, we have been seeing images of people who are struggling with malnutrition. Children who health authorities say have died from famine, from hunger. How does it compare today to what you've seen in the past?

I mean, I was in Gaza at the end of July and beginning of August. I went again to Gaza City. Meeting the same families, they see the children which actually don't want to be waked up because they actually don't even know if they're going to have a proper meal on a daily basis. That's what they're telling me. And they feel such a deja vu of these things that have happened again and again. That's why more than ever in Gaza City, we require the assistance to reach the the population and at scale.

The people who have gone down to Deribala, gone down to the south, how great are the needs of the recently displaced to have left Gaza City? And how much are you able to get to them? Well, one of the challenge that you have every time that you are being displaced is that you lose asset. You need potentially to, again, find a tent if there is any tent on the market. Many of them are actually worth more than $1,200 U.S. dollars just to find a simple shelter where to go. You need again to see where is the queue for any of the hot meals that are out there.

Where is the access to the water? Where is the medical area? So all of these people, again, are struggling just to find the basics. And on the flip side, are you ready to serve humanitarian assistance? The reality is that we have all the food, being in Egypt, being in Israel, being in Georgian, and we have all the teams that are on the ground. As we speak, we have more than 100 staff that are actively reinstating bread in many areas, reinstating nutrition, because people deserve to actually have the bare minimum.

We have food out there for the next three months. We are ready, and we will make it happen. And Juan Wernard, thank you very much. Thanks to you. Still to come on PBS News Weekend, the latest progress in the fight against. against breast cancer, and our weekend spotlight on author and humanitarian Mitch Album. This is PBS News Weekend from the David M. Rubinstein studio at WETA in Washington, home of the PBS News Hour. Weeknights on PBS.

Every October for the past 40 years, pink ribbons have sprouted as the symbol of breast cancer awareness month. It's a good time to take stock of the latest in breast cancer research and the experience of patients. Ali Rogan spoke with Dr. Arif Kamal, the American Cancer Society's chief patient officer and a Duke University Medical School professor. And Kristen Dalgren, a former NBC news correspondent who's a breast cancer survivor and the founder of the Cancer Vaccine Coalition. Thank you both so much for joining me. Arif, I'd like to start with you. We have as a country been commemorating breast cancer awareness month for 40 years now. What are some of the major milestones you see that we've achieved over that time?

Yeah, 40 years is pretty remarkable as we think about it. It started in 1985. I would really center around the number 40, actually, for a lot of the great accomplishments. Breast cancer mortality has reduced by over 40 percent over that period of time. In addition, we've now reduced the age of which we recommend starting mammograms now down to the age of 40. In addition, we're starting to see other areas of disparities and gaps closing as well. Mammogram rates, for example, are at all-time highs across multiple communities. Now, we've still got some room to grow, but a lot has happened over, you know, a couple decades of time.

And to that point, Are we sticking with you? Where do some of the main challenges still remain? You know, again, I'll stick to the number 40 here for a minute. So black women, for example, are 40% more likely to die of breast cancer when matched stage-per-stage with white women. In addition, we're starting to see, you know, some areas. and pockets of mammogram low rates across the country. In addition, we're starting to see some of the experience be varying across different populations.

For example, some data from the American Cancer Society looked at loneliness and social isolation. And we found that breast cancer survivors only reported about 40% of them having adequate social support during the course of their cancer treatment. So we've got some work to go. Kristen, you come at this from so many interesting places. Yourself, you were diagnosed with stage two breast cancer in 2019. and following that, you've committed your work to pursuing a vaccine for breast cancer. What inspired you to make this more than just your own personal breast cancer journey?

I was a network correspondent and I was 47 when I was diagnosed. I went through my treatment, but it wasn't easy. And as soon as I learned as part of my reporting that there were breast and other cancer vaccines in development, I was blown away and I didn't believe it at first. Once I learned that these are not just pie in the sky down the road treatments, they actually are in clinical trials and seeing incredible results. I had to do something about it. So I decided to put together a coalition of top doctors from around the country.

We're bringing them together for some collaborations. These research trials take a lot of funding. So we're raising money to help accelerate the process. process and then we're out there talking about it so that people know what's available. We don't have to do these treatments, you know, that are, we're developed in the 1800s and in the mid-century and, you know, there really is this future down the road and it could be closer if we get behind this idea that our immune systems really can fight off cancer. And speaking of that research, Kristen, sticking with you, how has that research, if at all,

been affected by some of the cuts we're seeing from H.H. especially when it comes to things like MRNA platforms for vaccines. Right. So, you know, the head of NIH went on TV and said our concerns and what we're doing in the MRNA space cutting research does not apply to cancer vaccines. Those are really promising we need to pursue that research. Cancer is nonpartisan. It doesn't care which way you vote. It impacts all of us. And so while there have been funding cuts, I think if the government gets behind this type of forward thinking and modern medicine, we really could change things. And so it's something that I'm really passionate about encouraging our government to do more and more research

in this space because it could be world changing for so many of us. And you both are thinking a lot and doing a lot to address the patient experience. So what would your message be to somebody who has breast cancer on the mind right now, either because they're going through a diagnosis or they are facing a screening. A reef, let's start with you. The reality is today many people, even with advanced disease, don't require or need chemotherapy that makes them lose their hair or stay in bed for long periods of time. Oftentimes now the average person with cancer is someone who may be next to you on a train

or may be with you at work. As cancer becomes an experience for many people that last now over months and potentially even years. It means we have to continue to reform the oncology delivery community to think about these journeys now being measured over marathons instead of sprints. Kristen? Yeah, I like that because this is, you know, a lot of people do have these long lives ahead after a cancer diagnosis. I know for me, I'm aware of cancer every day. And I think we need to look at it year round as something that we're aware of. For me, as a patient, I worry about recurrence, and it's why, you know, getting additional treatments, more interventions that could prevent recurrence is so important. I also found my own

breast cancer. I had had a mammogram in May of 2019, and just four months later, I saw a dent in my breast, and I insisted on more screening. It turned out I had dense breasts. I didn't understand what that meant, and that I could have gotten more screening after that initial mammogram, because that. If we can do earlier detection and better screening, and then we can have more interventions and things that make a better outcome, as far as treatments, we really could get this disease even more under control than we have over the past 40 years. Such important messages, Dr. Arif Kamal and Kristen Dalgrin, thank you so much. You bet.

Thank you. Finally tonight, a sports writer turned author turned benefactor who puts love and hope at the center of nearly everything he does. In our weekend spotlight, Mitch Album. This is the big, that Hudson, new Hudson building. Spending the day with Mitch Album in Detroit is not a leisurely experience. 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, 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. 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, say, 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 run with it. And it's, you can see, it's a lot of joy here. professional musician shows us his talents on the piano. He's never had a lesson. I have to know your Flintstones. You're really out 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 in life. All of that is before, two hours behind a microphone his long-running daily afternoon radio show on Detroit Station, WJR, and after the three hours every morning that he devotes to writing. Album's books have sold 42 million copies. His latest, a novel entitled Twice, was published this week. 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 your protagonist, Alfie Logan, from Philadelphia, you're a Philly boy. He started out as a musician.

turn 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's 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 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 world world-wide 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, for example, the five people you meet in heaven, people have always thought,

oh, you want to write about heaven after Mori. 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, the 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 albums' 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 much, so many troubles, is it hard to keep that hope and optimism? No, I actually find it's more necessary and it's somewhat easier because it's almost a counter to what's going on. I think that everybody wants hope and everybody wants inspiration. 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 Porta Prince Haiti.

He in an army of volunteers rebuilt 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. Give me, we don't have children. We get married late.

Doesn't happen for us. 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 Chica 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 waited. 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 we have to save her life she's our little girl and and and we have the second chance with another

beautiful little child full of life what do what did I do to deserve all these second chances. You know, who's watching over me, you know, 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. Thanks for joining us. See you tomorrow.