PBS News Hour - Full Show - October 19, 2025 – PBS News Weekend full episode

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

Sunday on PBS News Weekend, the week-old ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is strained as Israel says it launched strikes inside Gaza in response to Hamas attacks on its troops. How the Education Department is spurring dramatic change in the nation’s public schools. What to know about a painful side effect of breast cancer treatment. Plus, a rare bloom in one of the driest places on Earth. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Tonight on PBS News Weekend, the strains on the weak-old sea spire between Israel and Hamas, as Israel says it launched strikes inside Gaza in response to Hamas attacks on its troops. Then, how the Department of Education is spurring dramatic change in this country's public schools. And a rare fleeting burst of color in one of the unlikeliest places on Earth. The Atacama Desert is the driest in the world, and also one of the territories with the highest solar radiation, and the fact that a plant can grow in these conditions is quite remarkable. Good evening. I'm John Yang. Tonight, there are major strains on the fragile sea spire between Hamas and Israel, which is only been. in place for just a little more than a week. Israel said it carried out a series of strikes across Gaza in response to Hamas attacks on troops near Rafah on the border with Egypt. In

addition, Israel says it's cutting off aid shipments into Gaza until further notice. One of the Israeli targets was a seaside coffee shop in Diyarbala. In all Gaza health officials say dozens of Palestinians were killed. In Israel, it's been a bittersweet day. Celebrations as more freed hostages were returned to their homes and their families, and mourning as Uriel Borough was laid to rest. He was killed in the October 7th attacks and his body kept in Gaza until now. Meanwhile, the remains of two more hostages who died in captivity were returned, so they may be given a proper burial. Special correspondent Leila Malana Allen is in Tel Aviv tonight. Layla, it seems like this ceasefire is running to a lot of problems rather rapidly this weekend.

What's the latest? That's right, John. And then, actually, there were problems right from the very beginning on Monday. Just the 20 living hostages were released, and only four of the 28 deceased hostages bodies were released. That prompted an outcry from the families, and the Israeli government said to Hamas, unless you release it to other bodies immediately, that is a ceasefire violation. They started threatening to close the Rafah crossing and not let the amount of aid in. That is supposed to be coming in.

What then happened was that, of course, Hamas hasn't agreed that they are going to leave the Gaza Strip, or they're going to stop being in charge of it. So they reinforced their presence in the cities and towns as the IDF pulled back. They went around and they started essentially arresting and did some public executions of these gangs that they say Israel has armed to try and fight them, and they want to reestablish their power. Now, there was immediately a comment from President Trump who said, if they're killing people in Gaza, that violates the ceasefire and we will go back and kill them.

He clarified that he did not mean U.S. troops, but he meant Israeli troops. Then the next thing that happened was this weekend we've seen multiple ceasefire violations and both sides are saying that each side is violating. Yesterday, what happened was there was a bus that crossed into Gaza City, a family who were looking to try and find out what had happened to their home, as so many hundreds of thousands of Gazans are returning to their homes. Now, 11 people were killed when the IDF fired a shell at that bus, including seven children. Then in the south, in Rafa, what happened was that the IDF said they had been attacked by Hamas fighters and that two soldiers were killed when Hamas fighters fired anti-tank missile at them.

They responded with a massive wave of air strikes that, as you said, has killed dozens of people thus far. So many violations of both sides. Where it's been left this evening is that Israel Katz, the defense minister, has said that they are going to put down border markers for the yellow line where the IDF's meant to have pulled back to. They're going to reestablish the ceasefire. but anyone crossing that line can be fired upon. Leila, the idea of the ceasefire was going to give them time to negotiate the big questions, what Gaza would look like after the war. Is there a chance this could all fall apart and they never get to those big questions?

There absolutely is, and that was really the problem from the start. Of course, when President Trump was here on Monday addressing the Israeli parliament, he said, this is it. We've ended the war. It's all over. Best thing to happen to the Middle East in decades. That was really premature. The fact that President Trump is a deal guy, they wanted to push this through, they wanted to do the initial stage, which is to stop the killing, they wanted to stop people in Gaza dying, they wanted to get aid in, they wanted to start that. Now, there has been a lot behind the scenes where all the parties involved here, the US, of course, but also mediators in Egypt and Qatar, they're trying to keep this deal on the road, they're focusing on deconfliction, stopping the bombing, stopping the shelling, and getting the aid in. But the reality is that the next stage of this huge Trump 20-point peace plan, We may never get there. Nothing else has been negotiated, and the fruits of that are being born now.

If we forever stay in this stage where it's all about stopping and starting, many people are concerned that this will turn into a Lebanon situation. It's been nearly a year since a ceasefire was agreed with the Lebanon War. There have been hundreds of violations documented by the Lebanese Armed Forces, where Israel has struck both with airstrikes and shelling Lebanon. They say there has been complete impunity for that, and they're worried that the same situation will repeat its own. here, where Israel continues to strike when they say there's been some sort of violation, when they say that Hamas has done something, which means we'll never progress to the next stage. Reconstruction. Will they ever be able to get the materials in? Where will all those gardens live while that's happening? Will Israel allow building materials in unless Hamas is out of power

which they have not agreed to? And beyond that, a Palestinian state, there are references to that in this peace plan, but can that ever happen? This technocratic committee, is this just going to be For Gaza, is there going to be something that unites all the different Palestinian territories? What's the future here? This is a huge and ambitious plan, and we are languishing in that first stage, which may not even be able to survive. Leila, Malana, Allen, and Tel Aviv. Thank you very much. Thank you, John. In tonight's other headlines, there was a brazen daytime robbery at the Louvre Museum today,

carried out while the museum was open to visitors. The caper that sounds straight out of a movie, officials say the third. The thieves used a basket lift, forced open a window, smashed display cases of pric Napoleonic jewels, took eight of them, made good their escape, all in less than ten minutes. Museum officials see the thieves entered through an area where construction is underway. Visitors were steered out of the museum, but weren't told why. We were just ready to go and to see the Mona Lisa when they swept us out of the gallery, swept us down the stairs by the wing victory.

Then we were headed out the exit. We didn't realize the whole museum was being evacuated. And then we asked a guard, and the guard said, we're having technical difficulties. One piece was recovered inside the museum and will be evaluated for damage. In June, Louv's staff staged a walkout saying the museum was understaffed and that security was insufficient. President Trump called Colombian President Gustavo Petro an illegal drug leader and said he's cutting U.S. aid to the country. In a true social post today, Mr. Trump said that if Petro doesn't shut down drug production that he said is killing Americans, the U.S. will close them up for him.

This comes hours after Petro accused the U.S. government of assassination and demanded answers for a Thursday U.S. strike on a Colombian boat in Caribbean waters. Shortly after Mr. Trump's post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegsef said U.S. forces on Friday carried out a strike on another vessel alleged to be smuggling drugs, killing three. It was the seventh note attack since last month. London police say they are investigating allegations that Prince Andrew asked a former bodyguard to dig up damaging information about the woman

who accused him of sexual assault. Media reports say that in 2011, the prince gave Virginia Joufrey's birth date and social security number to a London police officer. Joufrey, who took her own life earlier this year, said the prince assaulted her when she was, 17 years old. On Friday, Prince Andrew gave up the royal title, Duke of York, following years of controversy over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Still to come on PBS

News Weekend, how the Trump administration is reshaping education in America, and a burst of blooms in one of the driest places on earth. This is PBS News Weekend from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington. Home of the PBS NewsHour, weeknights on PBS. In March, President Trump signed an executive order to begin shutting down the Department of Education, though it would take an act of Congress to actually close it. In the meantime, the department is taking dramatic steps

to work fulfilling a conservative vision of a reshaped system of primary and secondary education. Jennifer Smith Richards is the co-author of a pro-public investigation, looking into all of this. Jennifer, what is the Department of Education doing? What steps are they taking? Yeah. So they've been very, very clear since Trump took office that the idea was to shut down the department. Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, has called it her final mission. And Donald Trump, of course, has called the department a big con job. So that part has been clear,

this desire to phase out many of the functions of the department and close it down. What's been less clear is why Linda McMahon has brought in a number of political strategists and, you know, ultra-conservative activists into the office, even as it's supposed to be shutting down and winding down. Those people have been quiet, frankly, about what they are doing behind the scenes at the department. Is there a common thread running between, through these appointments, and are they all have similar goals or similar things? as they've talked about in the past about education? They have.

My colleague and I at ProPublica went through, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours of speeches and podcast interviews and read essays that were from these appointees that really lay out of vision for the future of American education. And the through line really is that they want to break up what they view as a monopoly that public schools have. and they envision in the future that far, far fewer students will be attending a public school. I've heard people talk about this, and it's all in the view of the idea of returning power to the parents,

letting them sort of figure out what schools are doing well and let them send the money there. What other critics say about this? Well, critics say you need a strong public school system for many reasons. One is that public schools are required to serve students with disabilities, whereas private schools typically are not. You know, the American school system is a democratic idea. It was designed to serve any and all students who come through their doors. And private school choice means that private schools also get to choose which students they're going to accept. On the one hand, the administration and conservatives say that most decisions about what happens in schools should be done at the state and local level.

But are they talking about getting involved at the federal level about some curriculum decisions? The federal government historically has not been involved in dictating what is being taught in the classrooms. They've not been in the curriculum business. But what we're seeing under this administration is a desire to promote certain types of curriculum. For example, what they refer to as a pro-America or patriotic curriculum that would be in public schools across America. We've also seen a number of, you know, sort of edicts and mandates come out of the department. that have to do with teaching racism and gender and diversity issues. And those are steps into the classroom that we haven't seen very frequently in the last few years.

We really are seeing the federal government start to really reach into classrooms in a way that we are not familiar with. There have been some states have tried to do this, haven't there? There have been. Some of the states that tend to have majority Republican legislatures have advanced several bills that you might have heard of as anti-DEI bills or anti-CRT bills. A number of states have passed, you know, anti-transgender bathroom bills. So some of these, you know, reforms have been tested in individual states and have been upheld by courts so far in many of the states.

So, yes, there is certainly, you know, a red state testing ground for many of these ideas that we're seeing play out now at the federal level. And how have been the results been? These testing grounds, what have been the results? I can't say for sure in every state, but there have been states where the testing grounds have really held up. So the states have been able to adopt laws that restrict pretty severely teaching about racism and teaching about gender. They have been successful in passing bathroom bills that prevent transgender students from using the bathroom or locker room at school that matches their gender identity. have been in place. And a number of states have been pretty successful in limiting just the type of

material that can be at a school or in a school library or on a teacher's bookshelf in her classroom. And so we're seeing kind of a copying of that at the federal level now, where we're hearing for the first time, at least in many years from the federal government, that they want to push certain types of curriculum and certain types of teaching into classrooms. Jennifer Smith Richards of ProPublica. Thank you very much. Thank you. The end of breast cancer treatment is caused for celebration.

But for many patients, it can bring new challenges. They can include lymphedema, a painful swelling of tissue due to excess fluid retention. Some studies show up to 65% of women who undergo breast cancer surgery develop lymphedema. Ali Rogan spoke with two members of the nonprofit lymphadema education and research network, Dr. Stanley Robson of Stanford Medicine and retired Army Colonel Susan Fondi, who's also a physician. Thank you both so much for being here. Dr. Roxton, let's start with you. Why is lymphedema so common among breast cancer patients? lymphedema occurs because the lymphatic system has been damaged and systematically we have to do that

both to determine the appropriate treatment for breast cancer and to curtail the cancer so lymph nodes are removed but that creates damage 80 85% of the time that damage can be accommodated by the body but 15% of the time it results in malfunction and that's what we call lymphedema and because breast cancer is so common among women in the United States, the numbers of people affected, even if it's only 15% will be relatively large. Colonel Fondi, you were diagnosed with stage three breast cancer and developed lymphedema following your treatment. But as a physician yourself, when you were going in for consultation, you asked questions about your risk. What did doctors at the time tell you? When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer, the surgeon saw me and he

talked to me about the possible treatment options as far as surgery went, but he never mentioned lymphedema. And then he reached for the doorknob, and he turned back and asked me if I had any questions. And I said, what about lymphedema? And he said, what about it? And I was kind of surprised. I just sort of stammered, I don't want to get it. And he said, you won't, you're small. And he was mistaken and misinformed. The only risk factor that I did not have for lymphedema was obesity. But I had all of the other risk factors, and he was just not educated in that, and he didn't

know what to do about it, so he didn't want to talk about it. When I was first diagnosed, I was given a lymphidema compression sleeve, very Very quickly, my hand swelled up, and then I was given a glove as well. I have worn compression sleeves and gloves day and night for more than 10 years. I pursued a surgical option in 2016, and it didn't help. I pursued another surgical option about a year ago, and that I've seen some big improvement from. Dr. Roxton, how common is it for doctors who treat breast cancer to not have a tremendous

awareness of the potential for and treatment options for lymphedema. It's unfortunately very common. The situation is improving, but not rapidly enough. I did a study back in 2004 to determine what amount of time is spent in a medical school education on the lymphatic system in total and learned that on average, it's 15 to 30 minutes out of a four-year education. So there's not really enough time to properly educate clinicians on the diagnosis and treatment of even a common disorder of the lymphatic system if it's not studied.

And Dr. Roxon, walk us through the spectrum of efforts and options to both prevent getting lymphedema and then also mitigating it once it's been detected. The most important preventive strategy, of course, is minimizing the number of lymph nodes that need to be surgically excised, and there has been a movement over the last 20 years progressively to accommodate that need. Radiation protocols have also been curtailed in such a way as to minimize lymphatic damage. Then we need surveillance, and in well-informed centers, this occurs on a quarterly basis over the next 24 months at a minimum, and if we undertake aggressive of treatment at that point, we can actually prevent lymphedema in about 50% of cases.

Once the lymphedema occurs, then there is a very standard protocol for physical interventions to minimize the amount of edema that has developed during that period of time, and then a maintenance regimen that includes compression garments and devices and other approaches to try to maintain that benefit over time. Colonel Fondi, I'd like to ask you about what it's like living with this condition. You recently retired as an Army flight surgeon, but how did it affect both your military career and your everyday life? It's something that causes you to not be able to ever be done with cancer. I have this thing that I look at or I have to manage every minute of every day. And in the military, it was particularly bothersome, both because I wasn't

able to do some of the things I needed to be able to do, but also because every time I shook hands with somebody or saluted, my lymphodema was front and center. So I couldn't step beyond it. And Colonel Fondy, you have been advocating on Capitol Hill in support of federal funding for lymphedema research. What is the state of those efforts? In 2023, lymphedema and lymphatic diseases were added to a list of diseases that receive federal funding for basic research. This past year, lymphedema and lymphatic diseases were dropped entirely from the list. And nobody knows why. So we've been advocating on Capitol Hill to get lymphatic diseases added back to that list of diseases that can compete for that funding. This is critically important because our lymphatic researchers,

they have not been able to do the amount of research that is needed. What we need on Capitol Hill is we need one of the senators to be a hero. We need them to step up and add lymphatic diseases back to that list of diseases so our researchers can continue doing research for this very prevalent disease. Dr. Stanley Roxon, Colonel and Dr. Susan Fondy, thank you both so much for joining me. Thank you. Thank you.

We leave you tonight with a beautiful site in an unexpected place. William Brangham tells us about it. These wildflowers. gently blowing in the breeze are delicate and rare because they live in one of the driest places on earth, a place usually hostile to any kind of flowering plant. This is the Atacama Desert, a sprawling stretch of land squeezed between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, mostly in Chile. It normally gets just two millimeters of rain every year.

But this July and August, some parts of the desert got 60 millimeters of rain. But rain isn't the only condition needed for this landscape to be transformed, says Victor Ardiles, the head of botany at Chile's Museum of Natural History. We understand that there is a threshold that must exceed 15 millimeters of rainfall for the seas to begin to activate. But in addition to water or precipitation, we need temperature, we need a certain number of hours of daylight, and we also need humidity. This year, those proverbial stars aligned and the blooms are bursting.

Ariel Oriana studies plant biotechnology at the Andres-Beyo University. The Atacama desert is the driest in the world, and also one of the territories with the highest solar radiation and ultraviolet radiation on the planet. This means there are very adverse conditions for the growth of any living being, and the fact that a plant can grow in these conditions is quite right. remarkable. We wanted to investigate it and to understand the mechanisms it uses to survive in such a hostile environment. This floral display has drawn tourists and scientists for the opportunity to understand just how these plants do it. Coordination and joint work with academics and researchers studying the physiology of this plant is very important. How can it produce enough food and performance?

photosynthesis to withstand extreme conditions. Oriana says understanding these individual plants is key in the age of climate change. This plant has the ability to tolerate drought very well, which is a serious and growing issue in global agriculture. Therefore, by understanding the genome, the genetic information of this plant, and at the same time identifying which genes are expressed when it is exposed to drought, We could potentially use that knowledge to develop crops with greater drought tolerance. Most of these flowers will disappear by November, as South America edges closer to its summer season.

For PBS News Weekend, I'm William Brangham. And that is PBS News Weekend for this Sunday. I'm John Yangham. all of my colleagues. Thanks for joining us. Have a good week.