PBS News Hour - Full Show - October 12, 2025 – PBS News Weekend full episode

Episode Date: October 12, 2025

Sunday on PBS News Weekend, desperately needed aid begins to flow into Gaza as President Trump heads to Israel in anticipation of the hostage release, farmers in Minnesota struggle to stay afloat as China boycotts U.S. soybeans and a new film about the life and legacy of George Orwell argues his greatest fears could be coming true. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Tonight on PBS News Weekend, desperately needed aid begins to flow into Gaza as President Trump heads to Israel in anticipation of the hostage release. Then, farmers in Minnesota struggling to stay afloat as China boycotts U.S. soybeans. And a new film about the life and legacy of George Orwell that argues his greatest fears could be coming true. It suffice to watch the news every day, you know, to hear elected officials trying to convince you that what you're seeing is not what it is. You have to keep, as always, say, your common sense. Two plus two is always four. President Trump leaves Washington and the government shutdown behind to highlight a diplomatic deal-making accomplishment in the Middle East, the anticipated release of the Israeli hostages held

in Gaza. This afternoon, he left the White House headed to Israel. This is the first time everybody is amazed and they're thrilled, and it's an honor to be involved, and we're going to have an amazing time, and it's going to be something that's never happened before. Tomorrow, Mr. Trump is to meet with hostage families and address the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem. Then he'll fly to the Egyptian Red Sea resort city of Charmel Sheikh for a summit of Arab leaders who backed the agreement. Inside Gaza, the Israeli military

pulled back to a new defensive line as part of the ceasefire. And desperate Palestinians swarmed aid trucks, not even waiting for them to stop before clamoring for supplies. The next steps are unclear, as many details about the future of Gaza have yet to be worked out. Ansel Pfeffer is the Israel correspondent for the economist. He's based in Jerusalem. Ansel, the release of the hostages, as expected tomorrow, is going to close a chapter, a two-year chapter that's been painful on both sides, both in Israel and in Gaza, albeit in different ways. What's the mood in Israel where you are, and is there any way you can tell what Gazans are feeling? Well, the mood in Israel is both expectant, but also there is concern that something can go wrong with the last moon.

And the vigils I went to over the last couple of days were all, hopefully this is the last time we're standing here. And these are people who have no personal relationship or acquaintance with the hostages. This is really so much a representation of Israeli society, which has been gripped by the hostages saga for the last two years. I'm not on the Crown in Gaza. I was there on an embed a week and a half ago, but it's very clear that the situation there,

is the beginning of a very long growth of reconstruction. Entire neighborhoods, at least one Gaza city, have been flattened in this war. So many of those who you've seen in the footage, hundreds of thousands who are streaming back, mainly to Gaza City and to parts of Hanyunis, are not going to discover their home standing and they'll have to camp out for a long time

on the rubble where their homes once stood. And so this is going to be a very long process, which is exacerbated, as we've seen in the last couple of days, by Hamas fighters coming out from various hiding places and trying to reassert themselves. There seems to be a power vacuum in parts of Gaza with the reports over the last few hours of fighting between Hamas and some of the clans who wanted to take control of their areas. So I think that hopefully what will be tomorrow on the agenda in the conference in Egypt, which Donald Trump is going to chair, will be about how to try and maintain control of those areas in Gaza. And does this move us any closer to what Gaza will look like after the war? Who will run it? Will Hamas lay down their arms? What their role would be?

But what we've seen in this very unique type of diplomacy that Trump and his envoy, Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner have been executed in the last few days, is that they're taking it very much stage by stage. Last Wednesday night, they clinched an agreement, but that was an agreement on these very first stages, on the hostage release, of the ceasefire, the Israeli withdrawal to, from all these populated areas in Gaza. So that is now taking place as being implemented over the next 24 hours. the next stage, which is the immediate day after in Gaza, which government will take care of

civilian affairs, it's supposed to be a technocratic, independent government without Hamas involvement, there is, and there's yet unspecified peacekeeping force, which is supposed to be there. We don't even know yet any of the countries which may be contributing soldiers. The United States has made it clear that it will be very much involved in this force, but will not have any boots on the ground. So whose boots? will be on the ground. And that's important because the next most important stage is the disarmament of Hamas. Hamas haven't officially agreed to that yet. And there's all kind of talks behind the scenes. If they'll hand over their weapons, which weapons they'll hand over. And to whom will they hand it over

to international force? Will it be handed over to the Palestinian Authority, which is also, has a role which is yet to be clarified in all of this? So some of these things may be thrashed out. or at least begin to be thrashed out tomorrow afternoon, but that's still not the long-term future of Gaza. That's just the next stage, weeks or months. And on the Israeli side, Israel has set some conditions, and these were recognized in the Trump plan for when it will carry out further withdrawal.

Getting the IDF to leave that area will also involve various milestones of stabilizing Gaza and this army in Hamas. So these are all very, very important issues, which have yet to be dealt with in any kind of detail or any kind of agreement to be achieved regarding these issues. And Shelfafer, the economist in Jerusalem tonight. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

And today's other headlines, on day 12 of the government shutdown, there's still no end in sight. Democrats say they won't vote to fund the government unless Republicans agree to extend tax credits that help low and middle income earners pay for health insurance under the afford. Affordable Care Act. Republicans say they're open to talking about that, but only after Democrats

agree to a short-term funding bill. On CBS's Face the Nation, Vice President J.D. Vance said the tax credits need to be reformed. Well, the tax credits go to some people deservedly, and we think the tax credits actually go to a lot of waste and fraud within the insurance industry. So we want to make sure that the tax credits go to the people who need them. House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffrey said the credits need to be extended by November 1st. which is the start of the annual Obamacare insurance enrollment period. Russia attacked Ukraine's power grid overnight as part of its ongoing campaign to cripple the energy infrastructure before winter.

Russia targeted multiple regions from Dynetsk to Odessa, two employees at Ukraine's largest private energy company were wounded. The Kremlin reiterated its long-standing concern about the United States supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine and said the war has reached a dramatic moment of escalation. Ukrainian President Volota Mer Zelensky said he would use the Tomahawk missiles to further military goals and would not target Russian civilians. Four people are dead and at least 20 injured after a mass shooting at a crowded bar in an island off South Carolina. Four of the injured are in critical condition.

The sheriff's office says it happened early Sunday morning at Willie's Bar and Grill on St. Helena Island. Authority said that when the shooting started, people ran from the bar to seek shelter in nearby business. and properties. An investigation is ongoing. A strong nor'easter is churning its way up the East Coast, bringing damaging wind and heavy rain from North Carolina to New England. There have been flight delays and cancellations at airports from Washington, D.C. to Boston. New Jersey declared a state of emergency in anticipation of potentially major coastal flooding and wind gusts of up to 55 miles an hour. The weather service also warned of potential for scattered power outages. Still to come on PBS News Weekend, how China's boycott of American soybeans is affecting

farmers. And a new documentary showcases the life and work of visionary author George Orwell. This is PBS News Weekend from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, home of the PBS News Our weeknights on BVS. Farm bankruptcies were already on the rise when President Trump's trade war added to the financial pressures on America's soybean farmers. To hear what's on their minds this harvest season, special correspondent Megan Thompson visited two farmers in Minnesota. Mother Nature has been kind this year to Ryan Mockentoon, who farms about 2,200 acres of corn

and soybeans near Broughton. Brownton, Minnesota. Great weather has met better than average yields, and the sun was shining during his soybean harvest in early October. When you can get a run of a week straight of, you know, 80s weather with nice wind, I mean, you can combine a lot of beans. The weather's just been fantastic. What's not fantastic? Just as Muckintoon brings his crops off the field, the world's largest soybean consumer, China, has stopped buying American beans. It's really nerve-wracking. The looming tariffs over us have made it just difficult to predict anything. Ed Usett is a grain market economist at the University of Minnesota.

This is harvest time, and traditionally our biggest sales are from September to the end of the calendar year. And Usett says the biggest chunk of those sales usually goes to China. Over the last decade, we've routinely sent a billion bushels to a billion two just to China every year. That represents 25% of a total soybean demand in the United States. But since May, China has bought zero American soybeans after the Chinese government slapped tariffs on them, a retaliatory move in the Trump administration's ongoing trade war. I'll finish this little strip, turn around. And as demand plummets, so does the price.

Caught in the middle are farmers like Ryan McIntune, whose great-great-grandfather started this farm in 1887. When we visited, he was just finishing up combining his first field of the day. Most every year, he puts his soybeans into big storage bins on his farm and sells them throughout the year, trying to eke out a bigger profit when and if the price rises. But this year, he's reversed course completely and is selling his haul right away at the local grain elevator. So on that load, I had 371 bushels of soybeans. Got paid $9.13 a bushel.

It's a dollar below what I got for most of my beans last year. My fear is that the price is even going to get worse and worse as we go along if we don't have that demand for the soybeans. Mokentoon is fearful because he's seen that happen before. In 2018, a similar trade war pushed prices down to around $8 a bushel. But it means he's selling his soybeans for less than what it costs to produce them. With the prices of fertilizer and farm equipment ever increasing, he figures he's, he's losing about $100 per acre, or about $90,000 on his soybeans.

It's overwhelming on how to manage all these costs when we plant on good faith that the market will be there to support all our costs. Yeah, it's emotionally demanding to try to balance all of it. Just a few miles away, Bob Lindeman is also veering off his usual harvest plan. With the beans we normally would sell right off the field, we're putting them into these bins. Unlike Mockentoon, Lindemann's holding on to most of his beans, crossing his fingers the market will improve. Oh, it's for sure a risk. You know, putting them in, the market could go down. I'm hoping that we can get some of these tariffs taken care of. But Lindemann doesn't have a place on his own farm to store the soybeans, so he's

renting space from his neighbor, which will increase his costs. Right now, we're using one, two, three, four, possibly five bins on his farm site. Not selling now means he may need to take out a federal loan for the first time in more than a decade to help pay his bills. And when he does sell, it'll take a lot of time and labor. I'll be hauling a load every second to third day from now until next fall just to get it all emptied out. I really don't want to be doing that, but we need to try and make every cent extra we can this year. Ed Usett, who advises farmers on these types of complicated decisions says they're used to factoring in risk, but this level of uncertainty

is making those decisions exponentially harder. There's a difference between uncertainty and risk. Risk is something you can measure. Uncertainty is this trade war going to be resolved in the next month, six months, one year. Your guess is as good as mine. In September, on a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Trump discussed TikTok, not soybeans, and he's threatened to cancel an in-person meeting with Xi later this month. In the meantime, his administration is said to be putting together a multi-billion dollar bailout package to help make up farmers' losses. And we're going to take some of that tariff money that we made. We're going to give it to our farmers. Ryan McIntoon appreciates the help, but...

Nobody likes a bailout. It's a short-term band-aid. We need long-term fixes. And he's worried about long-term damage to the export markets because China has now found other trading partners in Argentina and Brazil. Ed Usett's also concerned. China's learning something. They have an incredible appetite for soybeans, and they can feed all their needs from South America. That's what they're learning right now.

Farmers want to sell more of their products here in the U.S. and are hopeful about a Trump administration plan to boost biodiesel, made from American soybeans. Renewable diesel, it is expanding quickly in the United States, but it's not covering that gap anytime soon. And so, as farmers in Minnesota move on to harvest their corn crop, they want their leaders in Washington to understand what's at stake. Well, I'd say let's not worry quite as much about TikTok and this and that.

Let's worry about this egg sector. You keep agriculture healthy, it keeps a lot more jobs and a lot more people financially. set throughout this United States. When farmers are profitable, we spend their money on new equipment, which turns around and helps our economy. To do that, though, we need profitability, we need certainty. We need a vision of a future where farming will be someday. For PBS News Weekend, I'm Megan Thompson in Broughton, Minnesota.

George Orwell's writings, warning of the dangers of totalitarian and authoritarian states, gave the English language the term Orwellian. A new documentary argues that Orwell's greatest fears are coming true. William Brangham talked with the director about his new film, which is in theaters nationwide. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of this world. I'm going to set down what I dare not say aloud to anyone. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs. In his new film, Orwell, 2 plus 2 equals 5, director Raul Peck offers what is in part a biography

of the visionary novelist, essayist, and social critic George Orwell, best known for 1984 and Animal Farm. But Peck's film also serves as a jarring reminder of Orwell's clearest warnings about inequality, the pernicious nature of the surveillance state, and the lengths to which leaders will distort the truth to retain power. Raul Peck joins us now. Welcome back to the program. Thank you.

One of your last films about James Baldwin was incredibly timely in its moment. This film, even more so, as I think audiences are now seeing, when did you realize that Orwell that this film was the moment for now? Well, as a filmmaker, you know, it takes us three, four, five years to make a film. We never know when it will end. But what we do is to make sure that our film will survive any time and that the coincidence that it comes out right now shows us how not all well predicting the future, but how clear he was through his own experience in arbitrary moments or authoritarian regimes.

he deconstruct the whole machine, the whole toolbox of those appearances. And unfortunately, it rings so truthful today. I know as I was watching the film, the words in this film, one might call them narration, although they're not really that. Freedom is slavery. As you're listening to him speak, overlaid with images of modern days, several times watching the film, I had to remind myself,

these were words written almost half a century ago. Absolutely, and that was the scarier part. We had that editing the film, you know, and even dealing with the text, because I started with the text, and going through all, that was the extraordinary occasion that I had access to everything, Oh, well, everything he had written. And going through those texts, you could see, oh, my God, he's describing something I saw yesterday.

And that's an out-of-body experience. But that shows how deep his analysis was, how he was able to deconstruct the whole pattern of deviance and authoritarian behavior. And he said, you know, it doesn't have to be an authoritarian country for this to happen. It can happen within democracies as well. And it's a slow burn where you don't even realize what is happening. There's not an announcement that trumpets come and say, here comes the totalitarianism.

No. It's step by step. And each time the civil society accept that facts are not truthful anymore, that there are alternative realities, that words don't mean the same thing anymore, or that words are forbidden, that book are banned, those are part of the toolbox. every authoritarian regime. When there is a dictatorship or a push somewhere, the first thing they do is to burn books or attack the media or, you know, capture the divit stations. So it's weird to be living this in the United States. And always says something very, very truthful

when he said the degradation of language is the condition for the degradation of democracy. And now we are in a world where even words are being, you know, put aside, certain words we are not allowed to use in the administration anymore, as if the function of that word would disappear. You know, it's basically in closing your eyes. So it's a very weird place for democracy right now. I mean, you are clearly arguing both in this film

that we are in one of those moments that Orwell warned us about, where governments will insist that 2 plus 2 equals 5. Do you really believe that? Do you think we are in one of those moments? Well, it suffice to watch the news every day, you know, to hear elected officials trying to convince you that what you are seeing is not what it is, or that you should use that word to describe something

that obviously is an abuse of rights. When you attack academia, when you attack the justice system, when you attack the journalists or the networks, those are known tools to degrade democracy. So at one point you have to accept this is what's going on. You can't continue to tell yourself, well, he's saying two plus two equal five, maybe they might be right. No, you have to keep, as always, say, your common sense.

Two plus two is always four. And that arithmetic formula is arithmetic. It's not a matter of opinion. You know, it's a fact. Given that, and your belief that we are in one of those moments, how do you explain the relative lack of outrage from people? First of all, contrary to what is declared, every day, it's not a landslide victory.

You know, there is one percent difference between the electoral votes. And second, people are stunned. A lot of people are stunned when suddenly all the limit that you knew, all the rules that you knew, when even the language that you knew doesn't mean the same thing,

it's hard to react. And I understand that. When you lived for so long in a republic that was more or less peaceful, where there was a balance of power. You know, Congress had his job, the executive branch has his job, the justice had their job,

caught it for them, and you start to see a dysfunctionment. People whose presence is to make sure that everything is running correctly or not doing their job. Parliamentary or are afraid to tell what they actually believe. They would take the floor when they know they are not going to for re-election. All those little signs, you know, when you have to think twice before saying something in front of a microphone.

Those are signs, you know, I come from Haiti, I grew up in a dictatorship, and I remember my parents, I remember my parents whispering in the living room. And now I'm seeing friends that they don't have certain discussion openly anymore. Because they don't want to lose their jobs or for some reason they don't want to be catalogued in one camp or the other. Those are very scary signs. And when you come from the third world, you have some instinct to decipher those signs very early on.

The film is Orwell, 2 plus 2 equals 5. Raul Peck, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for inviting me. of the 2020 election interference. All that and more is on the NewsHour Instagram account. And that is PBS Newsweekend for this Sunday. I'm John Yank. For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

Have a good week.