PBS NewsHour full episode Sept. 14, 2017

HARI SREENIVASAN: Good evening.
I'm Hari Sreenivasan.
Judy Woodruff is on assignment.
On the "NewsHour" tonight:
DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: We are working on a plan.
We will see how it works out, but we are going to get massive border security as part of
that.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Bringing a bipartisan deal to the table, President Trump and Democratic
leaders negotiate the future of the nation's dreamers.
Also ahead: Mr. Trump travels to Florida to witness Irma's wrath, as crews race to restore
power for the most vulnerable.
Plus: A new Ken Burns documentary 10 years in the making takes on the people and politics
of the Vietnam War, and its lessons for today.
KEN BURNS, Documentary Filmmaker: I think a lot of the divisions that we experience
today had their seeds in the Vietnam conflict, and we haven't really gotten over them.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All that and more on tonight's "PBS NewsHour."
(BREAK)
HARI SREENIVASAN: There's not a full-scale deal yet, but it looks like one's in the works.
The president talked with top Democrats last night on replacing DACA, the Obama initiative
that shielded youthful migrants from deportation.
That, in turn, touched off a long day of verbal maneuvering.
John Yang begins our coverage.
JOHN YANG: Leaving the White House to survey Hurricane Irma damage, President Trump said
he wants to find agreement.
DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: Well, we are working on a plan, subject to
getting massive border control.
We are working on a plan for DACA.
People want to see that happen.
You have 800,000 young people brought here, no fault of their own.
JOHN YANG: Later, when he returned, Mr. Trump said even a though a border wall, a signature
campaign promise, doesn't have to be in the DACA bill, it's still a requirement.
DONALD TRUMP: DACA now and the wall very soon.
But the wall will happen.
JOHN YANG: The president talked about the way forward on DACA over dinner Wednesday
night with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
An open mic on the Senate floor captured Schumer talking about the dinner.
SEN.
CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY), Minority Leader: He likes us.
He likes me anyway.
Here's what I told him.
I said, "Mr. President, you're much better off if you can sometimes step right and sometimes
step right.
If you have to step just in one direction, you're boxed."
He gets that.
JOHN YANG: Then, speaking for public consumption, Schumer was measured in his optimism.
SEN.
CHUCK SCHUMER: There is still much to be done.
We have to put meat on the bones of the agreement.
Details will matter.
JOHN YANG: On Capitol Hill, the challenges to ultimately agreeing on those details were
evident.
Democrats focused on Mr. Trump's commitment to DACA.
SEN.
CHUCK SCHUMER: I think it was a very, very positive step for the president to commit
to DACA protections without insisting on the inclusion of or even a debate about the border
wall.
JOHN YANG: Republicans focused on stemming the tide of undocumented immigrants.
REP.
PAUL RYAN (R-WI), Speaker of the House: If we don't fix problems we have with border
security and enforcement, and we would only fix DACA, we're going to have another DACA
problem a decade for now.
JOHN YANG: Reaching a final deal is also complicated by divisions among Republican lawmakers, especially
in the House.
After initial reports, Representative Steve King of Iowa, an immigration hard-liner, tweeted:
"Trump base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair.
No promise is credible."
But Representative Pete King of New York told the conservative Freedom Caucus: "Trump base
is the American people, not a small faction of obstructionists."
Criticism from conservative commentators was brutal.
Breitbart News, run by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, accused the president of caving.
And Ann Coulter tweeted: "If we're not getting a wall, I would prefer President Pence."
Administration officials say the president's recent alliances with Democrats are strictly
pragmatic, an approach even some staunch opponents of illegal immigration understand.
REP.
LOU BARLETTA (R), Pennsylvania: Does he have much of a choice?
If he can't get things done with the Republican Party, then he has no choice but then to sit
down and talk with the Democrats.
JOHN YANG: Democrats seem eager to respond.
REP.
NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), House Minority Leader: There are plenty of areas to find common ground.
This is one of them.
And maybe on some other issues, we won't find common ground.
JOHN YANG: The contentious issue of immigration will be a big test of how much common ground
is enough.
To talk more about how all this is playing on Capitol Hill, we're joined by Yamiche Alcindor
of The New York Times.
Yamiche, welcome.
Always good to see you and talk to you.
The president flying back on Air Force One from Florida said, "If the Republicans are
unable to stick together, then I'm going to have to get a little help from Democrats."
You have been talking to Republicans all day long.
How did they respond to that?
What does that make them feel?
YAMICHE ALCINDOR, The New York Times: Well, that common ground has really left Republicans
on the Hill both confused and on the defense today.
Republicans that I talked to said that they still support the president and want to see
something that has to do with border security, but even Representative Dave Brat from the
House Freedom Caucus told me that he still is interested in having a wall built.
So, really, the idea that Democrats, who don't control the White House, who don't control
either House of Congress, may actually be the people who are passing this legislation
really has a lot of Republicans on the Hill frustrated.
In interview after interview, people were telling me that they really don't understand
why the president is in some ways going this direction.
But I should say that Leader McConnell might actually want this to happen, because if President
Trump owns the issue of immigration, if he is the one that then becomes the point person
on this issue, he will own it if anything fails, and, of course, the last two presidents,
both President Bush and President Obama, tried to pass immigration legislation and both failed.
JOHN YANG: Yes, I wanted to ask you about the leaders.
Speaker Ryan said he didn't know about this or wasn't briefed on this until after the
president left for Florida.
Leader McConnell's statement rather snippily said, I'm looking forward to seeing the legislative
proposal.
How are they responding to this?
YAMICHE ALCINDOR: Well, they're understandably frustrated.
Both of them are somewhat caught off-guard.
This doesn't look good if Democrats are going to the White House and over Chinese food and
over chocolate pie are talking to the president and making deals without Republicans in the
room.
But Paul Ryan said today at his press conference, and his aides are telling The New York Times,
that while the Republican leaders might be upset or even frustrated with what's going
on, they're going to support the president and their members are going to have to support
the president.
And whatever Republicans end up putting on the floor and whatever legislation is presented
will have to be legislation that is supported by the president.
And I should say that when I talked to aides for both of those leaders, they are telling
me on background essentially that Republican leaders are OK again with the president playing
point, if he ends up owning this, because, if it fails, then it's his problem.
So, in some ways, it's a double-edged sword.
Republicans don't want the look as if they're not part of the deal, as if they're not at
the table when all these decisions are being made, but they also now understand that they
are protecting themselves if for some reason this falls through.
JOHN YANG: We have less than a minute left.
Are there any Democrats who have reservations about this?
YAMICHE ALCINDOR: Yes, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional
Hispanic Caucus and the Asian-Pacific American Caucus all met today.
And the members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have a lot of reservation, because
they're fearful that they're going to have to vote for something that might enhance border
security measures, and as a result hurt the parents of dreamers.
I talked to the chairwoman of the caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, today,
and she told me that she would be OK with having two separate bills, one that deals
specifically with the DREAM Act, and another one that deals with border security.
And I'm told by aides that would be the case, because they would want their members to be
able to vote for the DREAM Act, while also not being able to vote for the border security
measure.
JOHN YANG: Yamiche Alcindor of The New York Times, thanks so much.
HARI SREENIVASAN: In the day's other news: Power crews across Florida worked all-out
for another day, trying to turn the lights back on.
By this evening, just under five million people were still in the dark.
Meanwhile, the confirmed death toll for Hurricane Irma rose to 70, and President Trump made
a day trip to see storm damage up close.
We will have a full report after the news summary.
The president is also defending, again, his views on the violence at a white supremacist
rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
He drew fire last month for saying opposing protesters shared the blame.
Today, he said that, since then -- quote -- "A lot of people have actually written, gee,
Trump might have a point.
I said, you got some very bad people on the other side also, which is true."
In Iraq, Islamic State attackers killed at least 60 people and wounded 80 today.
Gunmen and suicide bombers struck near the city of Nasiriyah, attacking a police checkpoint
and a restaurant.
Burned-out cars and debris littered the area after the assault.
The Sunni militants said they targeted Shiite pilgrims.
The Trump administration has again extended sanctions relief for Iran, temporarily, under
the 2015 nuclear deal.
Today's announcement came as President Trump said Tehran continues to violate the spirit
of the deal.
In London, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson explained it's about more than nuclear activities.
He pointed to Syria and other issues.
REX TILLERSON, U.S. Secretary of State: Their actions to prop up the Assad regime, to engage
in malicious activities in the region, including cyber-activity, aggressively developing ballistic
missiles, and all of this is in defiance of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, thereby
threatening, not ensuring, but threatening the security of those in the region, as well
as the United States itself.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The administration is still reviewing whether to withdraw from the nuclear
deal completely.
Russia has begun large-scale military exercises, putting its European neighbors on edge.
Russian state television showed tanks and missile launchers on maneuvers in Belarus
today.
It said 12,000 Russian troops, plus 7,000 Belarusians, are taking part.
NATO said the numbers of Russians could actually be as high as 100,000.
Moscow insisted the war games are purely defensive.
Myanmar came under new international pressure today to stop the violence against Rohingya
Muslims.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the Buddhist nation's leader, faced appeals from both the European Union
and the United States.
Separately, the U.N. pleaded for major increases in aid for Rohingya refugees.
Some 400,000 have fled into Bangladesh since late August.
Back in this country, Motel 6 says it didn't know that employees at two locations around
Phoenix, Arizona, were sharing guest lists with immigration officers.
Agents arrested at least 20 people at the motels between February and August.
The sharing of guest information wasn't illegal, but Motel 6 says it has ordered the practice
stopped.
On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones industrial average gained 45 points to close at 22203.
The Nasdaq fell 31 points, and the S&P 500 slipped two.
And the world's oldest giant panda has died in China.
Caretakers say the female named Basi had liver and kidney problems.
She was 37 years old, nearly twice the age that wild pandas usually reach.
Thirty years ago, Basi visited San Diego on a goodwill tour and drew more than two million
visitors.
Still to come on the "NewsHour": the slow recovery after Hurricane Irma, millions still
without power; the strange story of U.S. diplomats experiencing hearing loss in Cuba gets weirder;
Making Sense of how big tech companies shape the way we think; and much more.
The hurricane headlines out of Florida tonight: new efforts to safeguard some of the state's
most vulnerable and a presidential visit.
William Brangham begins with this report.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: With new urgency, emergency workers moved more elderly residents out of
Florida facilities that lost power, and air conditioning, in the hurricane.
The state health care association estimated at least 60 nursing homes still lacked electricity.
The state's main utility company said it's doing everything it can.
BRYAN GARNER, Florida Power and Light: Getting hospitals and other critical facilities online
is essential to getting a community back on its feet following a disaster like this one.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All of this after eight patients died Wednesday at a sweltering rehabilitation
center in Hollywood, Florida, on the Atlantic Coast.
City officials said a criminal investigation is still under way, and police executed a
search warrant, but there've been no arrests.
RAELIN STOREY, Spokeswoman, City of Hollywood: We're looking into the temperature inside
the facility, the staffing inside the facility, and all of the conditions inside the facility
in the hours leading up to this situation.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: President Trump visited the state's southwestern coast, where Hurricane
Irma came ashore last weekend.
He got a first-hand look at recovery efforts in Fort Myers and Naples.
DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: The job that everybody has done in terms of
first-responder and everybody has been incredible.
And, by the way, that includes the people that live here because you see the people
immediately getting back to work to fix up their homes.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Mr. Trump also spoke of his well-known fondness for Florida.
He has an estate in Palm Beach.
DONALD TRUMP: We are there for you 100 percent.
I will be back here numerous times.
I mean, this is a state that I know very well, as you understand.
And these are special, special people and we love them.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The president was joined by first lady Melania Trump and Vice President
Mike Pence.
Together, they helped hand out food and water to storm victims in a mobile home park.
To the south, parts of the Florida Keys remained inaccessible, but more reports emerged of
extensive property damage.
MAN: We were in a big house on the ocean which we thought was going to be safe because it
was three stories.
And the house basically caved in.
I mean, we barely made it.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Meanwhile, the U.S. Virgin Islands are also in desperate need after being
blasted by Irma, when the storm was at full strength.
People on St. John and St. Thomas have been living off military food rations distributed
by U.S. Marines and the National Guard.
WILLIAM MILLS, Hurricane Victim: It's not enough, but it's better than nothing at all.
You know, it's something that you can eat for the day.
You know, it keeps you sustained for the day if you don't have much.
Much of the stores aren't still open.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: A Royal Caribbean cruise ship brought more than 500 evacuees into Puerto
Rico today.
It's loading up supplies to take to French St. Martin tonight.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm William Brangham.
HARI SREENIVASAN: As we heard, the Florida Keys are still reeling from a devastating
hit.
They're largely inaccessible and conditions remain very difficult.
To get a sense of what communities are dealing with, I spoke by phone this afternoon with
the vice mayor of Marathon, Florida, Michelle Coldiron, and asked her how her city was doing.
MICHELLE COLDIRON, Vice Mayor of Marathon, Florida: We received a lot of damage.
We currently do not have our electric on.
We do not have water services.
We do not have cell services.
We don't have Internet connections.
So it is pretty sketchy right now.
However, we do have a very collaborative, structured team on the ground.
They're working in collaboration with Monroe County.
We have a well-trained recovery effort in progress as we speak.
HARI SREENIVASAN: What are your greatest needs right now?
MICHELLE COLDIRON: Right now, our greatest needs are food, fuel, and water.
Our Marathon Airport has been cleared so that official planes can arrive.
They are coming in.
We have C-130s that are arriving with the needs our city is requiring to rebuild.
We have the Florida Department of Transportation is working tirelessly.
The electric company is working, first-responders.
So we really are doing our best to get our city back open again.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Are residents being allowed back in?
MICHELLE COLDIRON: No, sir, they are not yet.
It is still too unsafe for them to come back in.
Currently, we have, as you know, the Florida Keys, we have one road in and one road out.
We had to do a cut-and-clear to get all of US-1 Highway open.
Then the Florida Department of Transportation had to check the integrity of all of those
bridges.
They're all cleared and are passable.
Now our crews on the ground, our city staff, Marathon city staff and the utility department
are going street by street to do the search-and-rescue and to continue with the cut-and-clears.
So until that is finished and until we get our electric and until we get our water running,
i.e., toilets to flush, it will not be safe for our residents to return.
HARI SREENIVASAN: We have heard some are angry trying to get back in.
What would you tell people who are probably anxious, homeowners, business owners?
MICHELLE COLDIRON: And I understand that anxiety level, as I too am off-site.
And it is very frustrating, and it's heart-wrenching.
However, we need to let the 2,000 volunteers that are professional volunteers, the lines
men, the first-responders, we need them there so that they can get our city safe to open
up again.
We currently -- our hospital is not open right now.
So if all of our residents came back in and somebody got hurt, there would be no way for
them to get medical services.
Even though we have set up a walk-in clinic behind Marathon City Hall, it is still too
soon.
It's four days.
We need to put it in perspective.
We're four days out of a catastrophe, and we're doing a remarkable job.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The folks who decided to ride out the storm, when you say there's no
food, fuel or power, what's the condition of people in the shelters on the ground?
MICHELLE COLDIRON: They're doing all right.
We have had some food delivery.
We had -- FEMA is on the ground now.
Red Cross is on the ground now.
We have a shelter set up.
And we're doing distribution of food and water at the Marathon High School is one of the
stations.
We do have a base camp set up in Marathon.
So there is some fuel and water.
It's just that is what is in high demand for all of the professional staff and folks that
are there working on the ground.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Michelle Coldiron, thanks for joining us.
MICHELLE COLDIRON: Thank you so much.
Appreciate the call.
HARI SREENIVASAN: As we heard, there are still millions of people without power in Florida
and Georgia, close to six million as of this evening.
The pace of restoring power has undoubtedly been picking up speed.
But it's a difficult situation, given the magnitude of the outages.
To help us understand the scope of the challenges, we're joined by Scott Aaronson of the Edison
Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities.
I have covered a few hurricanes, and never seen a rollout this big with, this many different
agencies, this many volunteers.
How's it going?
SCOTT AARONSON, Edison Electric Institute: That's exactly right.
It is a huge rollout.
It was an historic storm, as you're seeing from all of the footage.
It's historic impact, and it's requiring a historic response.
So, I want to update the number.
You said close to six million outages.
We're actually right now, as of just about an hour ago, 2.1 million outages still in
Florida.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Now, are those customers or people?
SCOTT AARONSON: So, those are customers.
HARI SREENIVASAN: OK.
SCOTT AARONSON: And so a little bit more on the people side, but, to say the least, we
started with 7.8 million outages just three days ago.
We're at 2.1 million now.
You see the pace of progress is really picking up.
HARI SREENIVASAN: I often realize that the last 5 percent, 10 percent are the hardest
ones to get to.
Are there dates, are there goals that you have on when everybody in this region is going
to have their power back on?
SCOTT AARONSON: So, the estimated times of restoration, yes, in the less hard-hit areas,
we're looking for most people by the end of this weekend at the latest.
By the really hard-hit areas, you're talking about places that had flooding, catastrophic
flooding, places that hard tornadoes, maybe toward the end of next week.
But, again, 60,000 workers from all over North America are descending on the affected area
to respond to this historic storm.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Give us an idea of the complexity here.
We saw in some pictures that it's not just about getting the person there, that there
is sort of a tangled web of things that have to happen in order for the light to come back
on.
SCOTT AARONSON: That's exactly right.
It's an interconnected system.
There's a lot of things that have to happen, sort of gating items, if you will.
First, we have to make sure that generation is on, up and running.
Fortunately, with this storm, that wasn't an issue.
But then we go for the biggest swathe that we can possibly get.
And that's going to be the transmission system, the interstate highway system of the electric
grid, if you will.
And then from there, you get into the neighborhoods.
And that's where sort of the onesies, twosies that are going to take a little bit more time
to get to.
But because of the way that companies practice this and because of just the absolutely monumental
effort from all across North America to come support the companies in Florida and Georgia,
by the way, we're seeing that pace quicken.
HARI SREENIVASAN: What are the areas that are going to be hardest to get to?
Is it the edge of the Keys, where this vice mayor was talking to us from?
SCOTT AARONSON: I think that's right.
I think you're going to see some of those barrier islands, some of the Keys, some of
those places that were hit by tornadoes, some of those places that were hit by catastrophic
flooding.
There is going to be an instance where a customer simply can't take power because their homes
have been damaged too much.
And so we're seeing that in the restoration from Hurricane Harvey over in Houston as well,
so much flooding, we're going to have the wait until those homes can actually accept
electricity.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And it doesn't also just seem like it's just about the power poles.
It seems like a lot of these trucks, the debris needs to be cleared before they can even get
there safely.
SCOTT AARONSON: In this particular case with Florida, Mother Nature had not done a house-cleaning
in Florida in about a decade.
And we are seeing a lot of vegetation on the ground.
In the business, it's known as vegetation management.
And so what we're doing actually was one of the impressive things about this particular
restoration.
There was a need for more veg management folks, as they're known in the business.
And we were able to bring them into the affected area, get more of them, so we can start clearing
that debris and then ultimately restore the power.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Scott Aaronson of the Edison Electric Institute, thanks for
joining us.
SCOTT AARONSON: Thanks so much for having me.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Now the latest from the Northeast Caribbean, where Irma hardest.
Thousands of people are still desperate for help on St. Martin and Anguilla.
We get more from Alex Thomson of Independent Television News.
ALEX THOMSON: The jetty's broken on this Anguilla beach.
Most pumps are wrecked.
So you fill up by hand.
But, as we do, people arrive desperate to help their families over in St. Martin.
MAN: It's not good news, what we're hearing about St. Martin, so it's about getting my
family over here right now.
ALEX THOMSON: The British Anguillans keep saying that French St. Martin, up ahead, was
far worse hit, but the French government responded quicker.
We want to find out.
Approaching St. Martin, the waterside concrete buildings gutted, as if some passing army
has done its worst and moved on.
The entire green forest slopes burned brown by blown seawater, every leaf stripped by
Irma's passing.
And, as ever, the poorest get hit hardest.
ALEX THOMSON: What is the biggest problem?
MAN: I was living there.
ALEX THOMSON: You live in there?
MAN: I was.
ALEX THOMSON: What are you going to do?
MAN: What can I do?
Nothing.
ALEX THOMSON: Are you getting help?
MAN: How?
ALEX THOMSON: The government?
MAN: We don't know.
I cannot tell you nothing.
I don't know nothing yet.
ALEX THOMSON: For now, Francisco's sleeps at a friend's, his shock, bewilderment a week
on mirrored everywhere here.
But here in the poorer, low-lying suburbs of St. Martin, the damage is worse because
of two factors.
First, the eye of the hurricane pushed over this whole area, which means they were hit
by extreme winds from one direction, then a pause, a calm, then extreme winds from the
opposite direction, but not only that.
This low-lying area close to the sea was also demolished by a sea surge, at least a meter
deep.
The brutal calling card of the surge and tsunami everywhere here, cars cast about randomly
by the water, then garlanded with debris.
At the town's tennis court, Thomas Urigsa's vehicles, taken without consent by the joyriding
Caribbean, then dumped.
Tell me, what's the most -- your biggest problem right now?
THOMAS URIGSA, Hurricane Victim: My biggest problem is now that's my van to work.
No have a van, I no can work.
ALEX THOMSON: Right, no van, no business.
THOMAS URIGSA: No business, everything done.
All my materials inside my van, all the things damaged.
ALEX THOMSON: Some might laugh at the playthings of the rich smashed by Hurricane Irma, smirk
at the even bigger playthings of the even richer also dispatched, except, like the wrecked
hotels, these reporter jobs lost for local people who are not wealthy and depend on tourism.
Not quite so amusing., but rightly not part of the clear-up priority.
The damage on St. Martin is way worse than Anguilla, but the scale of the French response
is, frankly, startling.
French warships patrol against piracy and secure their marine frontiers.
You don't see British warships doing that.
The French energy giant EDF everywhere, trenching cables.
We saw no major British power company on Anguilla.
Roads long since reopened, even bridge railings patched up, and already a vast operation to
dump the continents of a shredded town and the plan to do it.
Nothing on this scale in Anguilla.
And, yes, people have noticed it.
THOMAS URIGSA: For now, it's OK.
Now they start to clean the place.
After they clean the place, maybe today, they open the gas station.
JOHN FRANCIS, Hurricane Victim: It just start coming in, like the water, but no food yet,
but I think it will come.
ALEX THOMSON: The evidence of a difference in approach is all around you.
This isn't scientific, but on St. Martin, we couldn't find anybody who felt the French
government had done too little too late.
On British Anguilla, with half the damage, it's hard to find anybody who doesn't feel
that.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Headaches, nausea, ringing in the ears, even brain swelling, all symptoms
of unexplained illnesses that have afflicted more than 20 American diplomats in Cuba since
late 2016.
Some have been left with speech, memory and hearing impairment.
Were they victims of some spy games gone awry?
No one seems to know, but the FBI is on the case.
Cuba's government is reportedly cooperating, and denies any involvement.
For more on this Cuban mystery, I'm joined by Associated Press diplomatic correspondent
Josh Lederman.
Thanks for joining us.
I mean, are those descriptions pretty accurate of the people that you have been speaking
with?
JOSH LEDERMAN, Associated Press: Those descriptions of symptoms that have been experienced by
diplomats in Cuba are accurate.
But what we have to emphasize is, they're not consistent.
That isn't the set of symptoms that all of these people have had.
And that's why this is such a difficult puzzle for investigators to crack.
There's inconsistencies.
Some people heard things.
Some people felt vibrations.
Some people felt and heard nothing at all.
Some people heard -- had symptoms like mild traumatic brain injury, permanent hearing
loss, nausea.
But without a clear pattern where you can say, OK, in this circumstance, this happened,
investigators are really at a loss to be able to reverse-engineer what might have caused
this and try to stop it.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Was there any consistency on where it happened?
Did it happen in their office?
Did it happen in their home, a hotel?
JOSH LEDERMAN: Well, we know that many of these diplomats had these incidents take place
in their homes in Havana where they live with their spouses and families.
But new details that we're reporting at the AP today show that also there was at least
one incident in a Havana hotel, the Hotel Capri, which is a Spanish-run hotel in downtown
Havana.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And did this also happen to Canadian diplomats?
So it's not just the U.S. that were targeted?
JOSH LEDERMAN: We know there were several Canadian diplomats that were confirmed to
have some type of incidents.
Some of them went back the Canada for treatment.
Others were treated in Havana.
It doesn't appear that the Canadian incidents were as severe as some of the American incidents.
But the fact that Canadians were hit, despite the close ties that Canada has long had with
Cuba, has really made it more difficult for investigators to try to figure out, what was
the motive for this attack?
HARI SREENIVASAN: We have heard about technologies like sound cannons before that militaries
have used, but when you talk to scientists, what could cause something like this?
JOSH LEDERMAN: That's really the mystery here.
Nothing they have been able to point to could cause most of this or really all of it.
There are sound cannons.
There is something called an LRAD, which beams sound at long distances, high-powered, in
narrow directions.
But it creates really irritating noises to try to disperse people.
It doesn't cause traumatic brain injury.
Actually damaging brain tissue is something that researchers say isn't really you can
do with sound waves.
And that's why the initial explanation of a sonic weapon has become so much less fathomable
now that we know that there were people that experienced mild traumatic brain injury or
concussion.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And this wasn't over a large area at the same time?
One of the things that you describe in the report is that people almost felt like they
can walk into and out of it?
JOSH LEDERMAN: This is the part that really feels like it's ripped from a sci-fi novel.
We had investigators telling us that patients would say, I would wake up in bed.
I would hear this grounding, excruciating noise.
I would jump out of bed.
Two feet to the left, I wouldn't hear anything.
It would disappear.
I would move back, and then, bam, there it is again, as if there was some type of invisible
wall that was separating part of the room from another part of the room.
So, that really casts doubt on the typical speaker that you would think of in a room,
where the sound would go everywhere.
HARI SREENIVASAN: This also was only made public months after the incidents took place.
What's the administration doing about it now?
JOSH LEDERMAN: The administration is not doing anything different than they were doing before.
The U.S. knew about this at least since late last year.
They first raised it with the Cubans in February.
They have been trying to get to the bottom of it.
They have offered that if American diplomats don't feel comfortable serving in Havana while
this is unsolved, they can have a different job elsewhere.
But, meanwhile, they're continuing to staff the embassy.
They're continuing to have a full mission there.
And people are going about their business while investigators continue to search every
avenue to try to get to the bottom of it.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Josh Lederman from the Associated Press, thanks so much.
JOSH LEDERMAN: Thanks.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Stay with us.
Coming up on the "NewsHour": 10 years in the making, Ken Burns' new documentary series,
"The Vietnam War": and "Fresh Air" host Terry Gross explains why she prefers to work on
the radio and not television side of things.
But first: Tech giants are increasingly under scrutiny from politicians, regulators and
experts on the left and the right.
Some are concerned about their growing power, even calling them monopolies.
And the tension keeps building, whether over privacy, politics or the displacement of workers
by automation.
Yet their role in contemporary life certainly isn't shrinking.
We, too, at the "NewsHour" have worked and collaborated with Facebook, Google and many
other new media businesses.
A new book zeros in on some of these criticisms.
Economics correspondent Paul Solman has a conversation for his weekly series, Making
Sense.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, what's the problem?
FRANKLIN FOER, Author, "World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech": Google,
Facebook, Amazon, Apple are among the most powerful monopolies in the history of humanity.
PAUL SOLMAN: Journalist Franklin Foer, former editor of "The New Republic" magazine, author
of the new book "World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech."
FRANKLIN FOER: So, the problem is, is that they have tremendous ability to shape the
way that we think, the way that we filter the world, the way that we absorb culture.
And if they were just companies, maybe we shouldn't be so concerned about them, but
they play an incredibly vital role in the health of our democracy.
PAUL SOLMAN: The most powerful gatekeepers ever, Foer calls them, the first, second,
fourth and fifth most valuable companies on the U.S. stock market.
Microsoft is third.
Add them together, and they account for some 10 percent of the stock price of the S&P 500.
FRANKLIN FOER: And it's not just the size of these companies that we should be worried
about.
Their ambitions are to essentially control the entirety of human existence.
And I know that sounds outrageous, but it's true.
They're trying to stay with us from the moment that we wake up in the morning until the moment
that we go to bed at night.
They want to become our personal assistants.
They want to become the vehicles to deliver us news, entertainment, to track our health.
They want to obey our every beck and call through Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
They're...
PAUL SOLMAN: And Siri.
FRANKLIN FOER: And Siri.
PAUL SOLMAN: But corporate titans have always wanted to control everything.
John D. Rockefeller, oil, but the trains that bring you the oil.
FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.
You're right.
We have always had ambitious corporations, but we have never had everything stores and
everything companies in quite this sort of way.
And I think the crucial difference is that John D. Rockefeller never really set out to
control the way that you think or to shape the way that you think.
PAUL SOLMAN: Worse still, Foer claims, we don't realize what's happening to us as a
result.
FRANKLIN FOER: Fifty years ago, the way that we consumed food was revolutionized.
We began eating processed foods, and it seemed amazing.
And then we woke up many, many decades later, and we realized that food was engineered to
make us fat.
And I think that these companies are doing the same thing with the stuff that we ingest
through our brains.
They're attempting to addict us, and they're addicting us on the basis of data.
So, right now, Facebook wants to make money off of video.
And so, even though I prefer words to video, it's giving me video constantly when I look
at my Facebook feed.
And even though I'm somebody who likes to read conservatives, likes to read people on
the far left, it's essentially only giving me screeds against Donald Trump, because that's
what, based on my data, it thinks that I want.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, it's actually even funneling you.
I mean, it's narrowing your vision in terms...
FRANKLIN FOER: It's funneling my vision.
It's leading me to a view of the world.
And it may not be Facebook's view of the world, but it's the view of the world that will make
Facebook the most money.
PAUL SOLMAN: You use the word pander several times in the book, pander to our taste.
But what could be better, says economics, than that we get exactly what we want.
FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.
PAUL SOLMAN: That's consumer preference.
That's the whole point.
FRANKLIN FOER: Sure.
Well, that's fine when it comes to picking out socks and diapers, but it's different
when it comes to the information that we use to understand and process democracy.
We exist right now in two separate political tribes.
And those tribes are delivered information that confirms their biases, and that does
pander to their instincts.
It tells them what they want to hear.
PAUL SOLMAN: Well, wait a second.
I have got The New York Times here.
I subscribe.
The New York Times is a gatekeeper kind of pandering to my interests, isn't it?
FRANKLIN FOER: Well, The New York Times and PBS are gatekeepers of a sort.
And they perform that role of gatekeeping with a set of rules and aspirations about
where they want to lead their viewers and their readers.
They value objective facts, and they attempt to transmit a comprehensive view of the world.
And they do have values.
And they do lead their viewers and their readers to certain conclusions.
But it's different than these companies which are dissecting information into these bits
and pieces, which they're then transmitting to people.
And it's about -- really, it's about clicks.
PAUL SOLMAN: A vivid example, Cecil the lion.
FRANKLIN FOER: So, Cecil the lion was killed by a hunter from Minnesota who posted a picture
on the Internet, and this picture went viral.
It became -- it generated 3.2 million articles, according to The New York Times.
PAUL SOLMAN: Articles.
This is not hits?
FRANKLIN FOER: Articles.
Articles.
And so every publication saw that this was a topic that was trending on Facebook, and
they tried to glom onto it.
And so everybody wanted their piece of this traffic rush.
And so even publications that we couldn't respect more, like "The New Yorker" or "The
Atlantic," ended up writing pieces about Cecil the lion.
And the reason that this is important is, it shows the way in which something that's
kind of relatively trivial can go viral, and it also shows the way in which we have a certain
amount of conformism in our culture.
And my argument is that Donald Trump started off as a curiosity and a joke, but the media
glommed onto Donald Trump and covered him, perhaps even when he didn't deserve coverage,
because he brought clicks.
PAUL SOLMAN: In your book, you say this all began with hippies, basically, a hippy, Stewart
Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog.
FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.
So, one of the fantastic things about Silicon Valley is that it's both the birthplace of
technology and it was one of the birthplaces of the counterculture.
The Internet and the personal computer were going to be like the communes, where we would
all be networked together, and we would be able to achieve this state of global consciousness.
PAUL SOLMAN: And it was utterly benign.
It was a benign vision, right?
FRANKLIN FOER: It was a beautiful vision.
And so, the idea of this network in one context could be this hippy dream, but in another
context could be the basis for the biggest monopolies in human history.
PAUL SOLMAN: And that's what we have got?
FRANKLIN FOER: That's what we have got.
PAUL SOLMAN: Shortly after we talked, Foer's fears appeared to be supported.
The liberal Washington-based think tank New America, recipient of millions in funding
from Google, announced it'd fired scholar Barry Lynn, just after he criticized Google's
monopoly power.
New America denied that Google forced the firing.
But Foer, once a New America fellow himself, wrote to say it's a prime example of the abuse
of power he's worried about.
Finally, how do the tech companies respond to Foer and his concerns?
We solicited their thoughts on Foer's book.
Amazon declined to comment on the record.
Google, Facebook, and Apple didn't respond.
For the "PBS NewsHour," economics correspondent Paul Solman, reporting from Washington, D.C.
HARI SREENIVASAN: This Sunday night, PBS will air the first of 10 episodes of the new Ken
Burns and Lynn Novick documentary "The Vietnam War."
It's been 10 years in the making.
And Judy Woodruff met with the co-directors at the Vietnam Memorial recently to talk about
why this topic and its resonance now.
LYNN NOVICK, Documentary Filmmaker: Thinking about every single name here as a story.
JUDY WOODRUFF: That's the tall older of the latest Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary,
"Vietnam."
LYNN NOVICK: We just tell a few of them.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The team culled hundreds of hours of footage into 18.
It's a flash point in history that's been examined countless times, but they say it's
still not fully understood.
KEN BURNS, Documentary Filmmaker: There's one way to think about it, is there's really
only one name on the wall here, which is your name, your story, your brother, your uncle,
your father.
That's the important thing.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Vincent Okamoto is the most highly decorated surviving Japanese American
veteran of the Vietnam War.
VINCENT OKAMOTO, Vietnam War Veteran: The real heroes are the men that died, 19-, 20-year-old
high school dropouts.
They didn't have escape routes that the elite and the wealthy and the privileged had.
And that was unfair.
They weren't going to be rewarded for their service in Vietnam.
And yet, their infinite patience, their loyalty to each other, their courage under fire was
just phenomenal.
And you would ask yourself, how does America produce young men like this?
JUDY WOODRUFF: After tackling the Civil War and World War II, Novick and Burns vowed:
KEN BURNS: We're not going to do any more wars.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But as they realized hundreds of Vietnam War veterans were dying each day,
they decided to take on what they call the most important event in the second half of
the 20th century for Americans.
KEN BURNS: There's an interesting thing, having done these three wars, that the Civil War
and the Second World War are really encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality.
And that's not a problem with Vietnam.
And so, in a way, we get it raw.
Nobody's going to sentimentalize Vietnam.
It defined who we were.
It was this horrible loss.
And I think a lot of the divisions that we experience today had their seeds in the Vietnam
conflict, and we haven't really gotten over them.
LYNN NOVICK: It's still with us in this very present way.
I think we came across a quote after we finished the film that all wars are fought twice, on
the battlefield and in our memory.
I think we're still fighting the Vietnam War in many, many ways.
The great gift for this project was that so many of the people who lived through it are
in their 60s and 70s, and they're here today, and they remember it very, very well.
And they told their stories to us in the most generous and brave way.
People took tremendous risks to kind of open themselves up and just tell us what it was
really like.
MAN: You adapt to the atrocities of war.
You adapt to killing and dying.
After a while, it doesn't bother you.
Let's just say it doesn't bother you as much.
I was made to realize that this is war and is what we do.
And that stuck in my head.
This is war.
This is what we do.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The documentary comes at the war from all sides, the divisions among Americans
and the divisions among Vietnamese.
Burns and Novick say they wanted to include all voices, but avoid passing judgment themselves.
KEN BURNS: In addition to a whole cast of American characters, every possible stripe,
we have also got North Vietnamese soldiers, and Vietcong guerrillas, and North Vietnamese
civilians, and South Vietnamese civilians, and South Vietnamese soldiers, and South Vietnamese
diplomats.
But we're not putting the thumb on the scale of any kind of political agenda.
We are just interested in sharing the stories of a remarkable set of people.
NARRATOR: As many as 230,000 teenagers, many of them volunteers, worked to keep the roads
open and the traffic moving.
More than half of them were women.
Le Minh Khue, who had left her home in the North with a novel by Ernest Hemingway in
her backpack, observed her 17th birthday on the trail.
LE MINH KHUE, Lived Through Vietnam War (through translator): We all had to endure.
The jungle was humid and wet.
Bombs fell day and night.
We women had to find a way to survive.
We thought it was terrible.
MAN (through translator): My brother, the seventh child in our family, joined the local
resistance.
The Americans came through on a sweep and killed him.
Another brother was ambushed while he slept, shot through the heart.
MAN: I never considered the Vietnamese our enemy.
They had never done anything to threaten the security of the United States.
They were off 10,000 miles away, minding their own business.
And we went there to their country, told them what kind of government we wanted them to
have.
JUDY WOODRUFF: There have obviously been hundreds, if not thousands of books...
LYNN NOVICK: Indeed.
JUDY WOODRUFF: ... written on this here and, I'm sure, in Vietnam.
Do you think you now understand this war, Ken?
KEN BURNS: No, I think there's something -- just like you can be married for years and years
and years, and that other person remains kind of inscrutable to the end, this is the arrogance
of history and biography, that we think that we can know, go into the past, and do it.
Every day was a daily humiliation of what we didn't know.
We always had not just scholars, but veterans present.
And their B.S. meters are so fine.
And they would go, you know what, I'm not so sure about that.
And they'd say, in my experience, it was like this.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The documentary team shot about 40 times the footage they eventually used,
and spoke with more than 1,000 witnesses in the U.S. and Vietnam, one-third of them Vietnamese
or Vietnamese-American.
Research took them to almost 20 countries.
Facts were checked and rechecked.
In addition to sorting through 5,000 hours of historical footage and photos -- one took
a year to locate -- they wove 120 pieces of music from the period in with original music,
led by composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who did the soundtrack for hit movies
like "The Social Network" and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," as well as from Yo-Yo
Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.
The filmmakers say they hope that, by airing this documentary, what happened will become
clearer, even if the why continues to provoke debate.
The documentary comes out at a moment in American history when we're thinking a lot about America's
role in the world and how important Americans are and America compared to the rest of the
world.
And judgments are being made.
So there's a timeliness here, isn't there?
LYNN NOVICK: Yes, people ask us how -- what does it feel like to have the film coming
out in this moment?
And it's just the sense that we live in this extraordinarily polarized and divisive moment,
and we don't seem to be able to talk.
We don't seem to be able to listen.
We don't seem to be able to agree about basic facts.
And yet so much of that really started escalating during the Vietnam War.
The resonances of where we are in the world and who we are in the world, especially -- we
have been in several wars that are not unlike the Vietnam War for the last 15 years.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, inevitably, there are the questions of lessons from this war, so
many lessons that may or may not have been learned.
What do you think they are?
KEN BURNS: Well, they're legion, but the one that we could agree on is that we're not going
to blame the warriors anymore.
History is the set of questions we in the present ask of the past.
If we can't talk about the current toxicity, let's go back and look at the other one, and
maybe, with the kind of courageous conversations you can have, permitting people to have and
hold views opposite of your own, you could really begin to have something, and not just
the talking at or the shouting over that we do today.
MAN: For years, nobody talked about Vietnam.
It was so divisive.
And it's like living in a family with an alcoholic father.
Shh, we don't talk about that.
Our country did that with Vietnam.
And it's only been very recently that I think that the baby boomers are finally starting
to say, what happened?
What happened?
JUDY WOODRUFF: You can see more of my conversation with the filmmakers in our next piece.
The documentary will air for the next two weeks.
HARI SREENIVASAN: "The Vietnam War" premieres Sunday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern on most PBS stations.
You will find more online information right now, including an excerpt about a Navy pilot
who spent more than eight years in captivity, making him the second longest held American
prisoner of war.
That's at PBS.org/NewsHour.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Now to another in our Brief But Spectacular series, where we ask people
to describe their passions.
Tonight, we hear from veteran public radio host Terry Gross.
She's celebrating her 30th season of "Fresh Air" this year, which is produced by WHYY
in Philadelphia and distributed by NPR.
TERRY GROSS, NPR: The only woman I ever heard on the radio when I was growing up was Alison
Steele, The Nightbird, who was an FM disc jockey in New York on WNEW, the progressive
rock station.
And she had this kind of late-night, like, sexy voice.
And I never listened to that and thought like, yes, someday, that's going to be me.
I fell in love with radio the moment I started doing it.
It had everything I wanted.
I was probably like 23 when I started.
I felt very young and inexperienced.
And the earliest tape I have of myself is from 1974.
I kind of sound like this.
I find it both like surprising and in a way deeply upsetting...
(LAUGHTER)
TERRY GROSS: ... when I listen to old tapes, because I think, like, they let me on the
air?
How did that happen?
And the answer is because it was mostly an all-volunteer operation.
When I'm preparing for an interview, I do as much research as I can in the limited time
that I have.
I like the questions to have a narrative arc, so, at the end of the interview, you feel
like, I have heard the story of somebody's life or the story of their work and how they
came about doing it.
It's pretty nonstop, but, you know, on the weekends, I try to take time out, in addition
to doing the food shopping and stuff like that, to go to the movies or to a concert.
And, of course, what I'm thinking is, who might I want to interview from this movie?
(LAUGHTER)
TERRY GROSS: But that's a good thing, because it makes the movie even more interesting to
think about the possibility of talking to somebody about it.
One of the many reasons why I'm on radio and not TV is that, when I'm listening, my face
goes just slack, like this.
When I was a kid and I would walk around lost in thought -- and I was usually lost in one
thought or another -- strangers would come up to me and say, oh, dear, what's wrong?
Are you lost?
And I would go, damn, no, I'm thinking.
Like, what's your problem?
My kind of interview, the kind I do, is about the person I'm talking to.
Now, I have listened to a lot of interviewers, like Marc Maron, who talk a lot about himself
in the interview.
And that's part of the reason why I listen, because I love hearing Marc Maron talk about
himself.
But if I were to talk about myself a lot in my interviews, you would be hearing me, like,
talk on and on about why I love Charles Laughton in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and why
I love Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd," and what it's like to be married to my husband,
Francis.
And as great as that stuff is, it would get a little old.
MAN: I bet there's an audience for that, though.
(LAUGHTER)
TERRY GROSS: There are several advantages to doing a long-distance interview.
One is, if you're a little bit of a coward, which I confess I am, and you want to ask
some challenging questions, it's easier to do when you're not looking the person in the
eye.
Another nice thing about long-distance interviews is that you're not judging each other by your
clothing.
Like, I'm wearing my favorite leather jacket today.
Usually, I'm just wearing a schmatta, because it just doesn't matter what I look like, and
I like it that way.
I'm Terry Gross, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on interviewing.
HARI SREENIVASAN: You can watch additional Brief But Spectacular episodes on our Web
site, PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.
A news update before we go.
There's word that North Korea has launched yet another missile.
The South Korean Defense Ministry said it came from Pyongyang and flew towards the east.
Japan's government says the ballistic missile flew over their country and crashed into the
Pacific Ocean.
They warned their residents to take shelter.
It's the second North Korean missile launched over Japan in recent weeks.
On the "NewsHour" online right now: A song that ruthlessly satirizes the sexism of Bollywood
has racked up more than 3.5 million views on YouTube in just the last few days.
You can watch it with our English captions on our Web site, PBS.org/NewsHour.
And that's the "NewsHour" for tonight.
On Friday, Judy Woodruff sits down with Hillary Clinton to discuss her new book.
I'm Hari Sreenivasan.
Join us online and again here tomorrow evening with Mark Shields and David Brooks.
For all of us at the "PBS NewsHour," thank you.
See you soon.
PBS NewsHour full episode, September 14, 2017 Smashed by Irma, St. Martin draws startling response from France Are big tech companies trying to control our lives? Why America is still raw over the Vietnam War WATCH: President Trump discusses Irma relief in Fort Myers, FL After Irma, restoring power for millions won’t be easy. Here’s why Trump and Democrats seek common ground on DACA, frustrating Republicans Ailments that plagued diplomats in Cuba puzzle investigators The Terry Gross you don't see on the radio PBS NOVA 2017 AMERICAN ECLIPSE DOCUMENTARY

PBS NewsHour full episode Sept. 14, 2017

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