john: tonight on pbs news weekend, as global temperatures rise, amican schools struggle to beat the heat and avoid putting students' learning and health at risk. then, a growing humanitarian crisis in congo, as escalating violence threatens millions in

the central african nation. >> [translated] bombs are still falling in the camp here, and in other camps. several people have died and we live here with fear. john: and, as wildfire season kicks off, what you can do to protect yourself from harmful smoke. >> major funding for pbs news weekend has been provided by -- and with the ongoing support of these individuals and institutions. and friends of the newshour.

this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. john: good evening. i'm john yang. there's jubilation in israel tonight after the military took four hostages safely out of central gaza. the daylight operation washe largest rescue mission of the war so far. israeli army video shows some of them running to an awaiting helicopter. the four had been held since october 7, when they were kidnapped by hamas at a music festival. they were taken to a hospital to be checked over and reunited with their families. >> thank you for bringing my son to me, to us. i'm so excited that i could hug him today.

john: the rescue operation came amid an intense israeli air and ground assault on the nuseirat refugee camp. at least 210 dead palestinians were taken to local hospitals, according to a health official. in france for a state visit, president biden said the united states would work to free all the remaining hostages, including eight americans. russia and ukraine exchanged more drone attacks overnight. moscow-based officials said at least 28 people were killed in the partially russian-occupied regions of kherson and luhansk. people searched through the rubble for belongings and public events were canceled for the rest of the weekend for days of mourning. in normandy, france today, d-day commemorations gave way to a wedding day. world war ii veteran harold terens married his sweetheart jeanne swerlin. the groom is 100 years old, and the bride, only 96. well-wishers witnessed the florida couple's wedding, which

isn't legally binding because they're not french citizens. on d-day, terens was in britain, repairing anes returning from france so they could rejoin the battle. on their wedding night, the couple was invited to the elysee palace state dinner with president biden and french president emmanuel macron. and the man who took one of the most iconic photos of earth has died. former apollo astronaut william anders never landed on the moon, but he was on the first manned flight to orbit it in 1968. that's when he captured the image that became a symbol of the environmental movement. anders died friday when the small plane he was piloting alone crashed into the water northwest of seattle. he was 90 years old. still to come, what's behind the spike of violence in the democratic republic of congo? and how wildfire smoke can affect your health, even hundreds of miles away. >> this is pbs news weekend from w eta studios in washington, home of the pbs newshour, weeknights on pbs.

john: last month, even before summer began, smoke from canadian wildfires triggered air quality alerts in the upper midwest and great plains. at the same time, fires in mexico affected air quality along the gulf coast from texas to florida. it all brought back memories of last year's record setting fires in canada that sent a haze of smoke drifting over the midwest and east coast. smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away is still a health threat. a recent national bureau of economic research analysis says it contributes to nearly 16,000 deaths a year. laura kate bender leads the healthy air campaign for the american lung association. laura kate, what is in wildfire smoke that makes it so hazardous? >> one of the main components is particle pollution. these bits can get deep into your lungs, even your bloodstream, and cause a host of harms. there's a bunch of other harmful

chemicals too, particularly if it's burning houses, cars, other things from built structures. john: is it just as dangerous if the fire is hundreds of miles away or down the street? >> neither is safe. it can change the composition but the fact remains that whether people are close or far away, they should both take precautions. john: what can inhaling wildfire smoke bring on? >> what people might experience during the smoke event is burning eyes, throat, coughing, or wheezing. if you have asthma, copd, or other lung disease, you could have an act -- an exacerbation. you could have heart attacks, strokes, even premature death. john: premature death from illness brought on by the smoke or by the trauma of breathing the smoke at the moment? >> particle pollution itself can cause premature death from both short and long-term exposures, and wildfire smoke can exacerbate existing lung and heart disease and cause health impacts that can send you to the hospital or cause premature death. john: what should people do to

protect themselves? >> people can take steps before, during, and after a wildfire. before, you shouldet in the habit of checking your air quality. airnow.gov is a great place to do it. it's also on weather reports. people can also prepare now, for example, if they think they're going to get smoke this summer again, they might want to buy an air cleaner, a device that they can use that doesn't add pollution to the air, that just filters it. and then in the event of a fire, people should stay out of the smoke. if you are in your home, you can run that air cleaner in a closed off room to create as much of a clean space as possible. you can make sure your air conditioner, if you have central ac, is recirculating, not pulling air in from the outside. you can readjust your plans if you have exercise outdoors plans that day, for example. that would be a good day to move that indoors. john: even if you live hundreds of miles away from where wildfires are likely to take place, these are precautions you should be taking? >> absolutely, if smoke is in the forecast. you know, i think myself and many others experienced after thinking of wildfires as more of

a west coast problem, in the d.c. area we had days with hazardous levels of air pollution and i, as someone with asthma, absolutely cnged my routine to make sure that i wasn't exercising outdoors on those days. john: you mentioned people with asthma. any other populations we need to be predict early careful? >> wildfire -- wildfire smoke can impact health for anyone, but if you are an older adult, if you are a child, if you're pregnant, if you spend a lot of time outdoors either working or exercising, or if you have an underlying condition like a lung or a heart disease, those are some of the things that can put you at greater risk of health harm. john: it can affect anybody, but is there evidence that any groups are disproportionately affected? >> unfortunately, we know, as with so many air pollution issues, that communities of color and low income communities tend to be at greater risk. john: why is that? >> unfortunately, histories of redlining and other practices that have left people with polluting sources close to their neighborhoods creates a lot of overlapping risk factors. people might be more likely to work outdoors, be less likely to have central air conditioning or a car that th can keep the windows closed and the ac on.

and so there's a lot of factors that could put people at greater risk of not just exposure, but also health harms from those exposures. john: and i know the american lung association has ideas or suggestions about what can be done to mitigate these dangers and the fires themselves. what would the lung association like to see done? >> for individuals, everybody can and should take steps to protect themselves. we have resources at lung/ org/wildfire. folks can also use the website i mentioned earlier, airnow.gov, to look up their air quality. policymakers at every level also have a role to play. number one, we know that climate change is making wildfire risk worse. so continued action on climate change, implementing the policies we have to clean up our cars and our power plants, and doing more will help make this problem less likely to get worse in the future. one more policy recommendation is the use of prescribed fire. it's a tough trade off, but we know that prescribed fire under the right circumstances can help make catastrophic wildfires less likely. john: a controlled fire sort of

burning away the underbrush. >> yes. and there's steps that we can take to make that less risky for lung health. it's an unfortunate trade off, but it can help make lung health better over the long term under the right circumstances. john: laura kate bender of the american lung association, thank you very much. >> thanks for having me. john: in the democratic republic of congo, local officials say suspected islamist rebels killed at least 38 people in an overnight attack on an eastern village. it's the latest in a spike of violent clashes that began in february. since 1996, fighting in the region has led to about 6 million deaths. ali rogin has more. ali: two prominent rebel factions in the region are the march 23 movement, or m23, and the so-called allied democratic forces, or adf. neighboring rwanda has been accused of supporting m23, which the government denies. and the adf is a militia group

affiliated with the islamic state and are blamed for the latest attack. they are just two of the more than 120 groups operating in the region vying for interests including control over the country's rich reserves of civilians have been caught in the middle and the congolese government has often failed to protect them. according to the united nations, the violence has displaced 5.7 million people across the provinces of north kivu, south kivu, and ituri. tjada d'oyen mckenna is the ceo of mercy corps, a nonprofit group providing humanitarian aid on the ground. thank you so much for being here. this is an extremely complex conflict, but what are some root causes behind the violence now? >> you mentioned some of them, this control. this is a mineral rich country, so control of those, illegal mining, interethnic groups, but also lots of proxy wars between other actors, surrounding countries, ethnic groups.

at this point there have been so many splintering's of conflict groups that the numbers ballooned to over 120. ali: you recently visited this region. what is different about this conflict now? has it gotten worse. ali: i was recently in gomo, the largest area in thprovince, and since january over 700 more people have been displaced there. what is happening now is rebel groups have choked off all access to gmo. they are surrounding areas outside the city and they have choked it off, so food prices have gone up, it is hard to go in and out, and the weaponry has gotten so sophisticated that they are able to sendombs and other things into displacement camps where people that they've been displaced. so it's just this this real level of concentrated fear and threat that people are facing. ali: what stuck out to you the

most? >> the thing that stays in my mind as i talk to the people, and even as i talk to my own staff, as i mentioned we've had staff members that are subject to this violence. they have family members that are displaced. it's just the incredible resilience of people. i met a woman who's like sewing little doilies and and table things and trying to sell her wares on the street. people want better for their children. they want to get back to normal and they are talented and want to live productive lives. and just the incredible resilience of the people of the grc really blows me away. ali: and where are most of these people who have been displaced coming from? are they from internally or they from other countries? >> it's almost all internally displaced people. one of my colleagues said at one point he was hosting up to 50 relatives who had been displaced. and so you'll often hear stories of people who started with relatives, moved to a camp, the camp is full, so now they are in an area outside of the camp. so it is people just forced to flee their homes, looking for a

way to survive. ali: i want to play a bit of sound from a mother of six who was displaced by the conflict. >> [translated] bombs are still falling in the camp here and in other camps. several peopleave died and we live here with fear. may god help us so that the war ends and people return to their respective areas. ali: can you tell us a little more about the conditions and the perils that people in these camps face? >> these are very crowded places, very little electricity, really tough access to water. clean hygiene. the poverty, just because people have been forced from their livelihoods, also makes people -- they are hungry, they don't have access to running water. it's not safe. particularly women and children are feeling the brunt of being in these crowded conditions. ali: why is it that women and children are the most vulnerable here? >> i think this happens in situations of chaos. you have a lot of people that

are forced into very crowded situations amongst people that they they may not know women, um -- that they may not know. women having to leave their homes for work and economic opportunities. it's just very easy for them to get taken advantage of in terms of gender and sexual based violence. and it's everyone. it could be someone who is your neighbor in a displacement camp or someone you go into the city to try to get work. or try to get food. unfortunately they seem like easy targets, and they're just being really taken advantage of. ali: do we know at this point, have there been many reports of instances of sexual violence? >> yes, many. and in fact, when you visit these areas, the women and the men are talking about it and also in groups, women that are really children or girls, you will see a lot of pregnant young people, and you know that that's what's happening. but but they are actively

talking about it and feeling just very vulnerable and very taken advantage of in this moment of time. ali: and how about the congolese govement? what has their role been and how effective have they been in addressing the violence? >> the congolese government has not been as effective as it should have been. we desperately need them to come to the peace talks that are being organized through angola and rwanda. we definitely need them to come to some kind of cease fire or truce with these rebel groups. but clearly the people we'd meet in the camps would say that they are not doing enough. you know, as long as people are displaced and as vulnerable as they are, and just feeling like they have nowhere to go, they are going to feel like the government's not doing enough. ali: and there has been some political flux in recent months. has that affected the ability of the congolese government to address this effectively? >> certainly, obviously any instability does not help address the situation at all. and it's another factor that's pulling at them and and

preventing people from really addressing what's going on. ali: what fundamentally needs to change to stop this violence, long-term, and what is the role of the international community and what is the role of humanitarian organizations in achieving that? >> we need a real coming together of a peace process with pressure to bear on neighboring countries, all the parties to this war really need to come together and political and diplomatic pressure has to be put on everyone to do their part to do this. we also need to just help people in the humanitarian situations they are facing. on top of all this violence, we have also seen record rainfall in some areas, droughts in others, all related to climate related disasters. so we need to get basic infrastructures back up and running, help support people. but really this peace process so that people can return to their homes and have a chance of living productive lives. ali: thank you so much for being here. >> thank you for talking about this.

john: from rising seas to more intense storms and droughts, climate change has brought about sweeping changes. now add education to that list. studies show that in more places in the country, there are more days in the school year hotter than 80 degrees than there were in 1970. and schools that can't afford air conditioning are left to struggle with overheated classrooms, which, researchers say, pose both academic and health risks. anna phillips was one of the reporters who looked in to this for the washington post, where she covers climate change. anna, just to be clear, we are not just talking about summer term, are we? >> definitely not. we're talking about a problem that starts in the late spring, when kids are taking state exams, for example. and becomes even more of a problem when they come back in the fall when you start to see some really high temperatures setting in that would not have happened or would not typically have happened, but are now

becoming very common. you're getting heat waves in september and october in parts the country that never experienced them before or maybe very unusually for those parts of the country. and they have really no means of dealing with them because their schools were built without air conditioning. john: and in the story, you talk about the schools in the northern particular that didn't have to worry about this. what are some of the examples of what you found? >> so you can pretty much draw a straight line across the country from new york and philadelphia, all the way out to the west coast. and you're looking at a part of the country where most schools were built without air conditioning. many of these schools are very old. some of them are on the historic register. they don't have the electrical capacity or the kind of infrastructure to put air conditioning in easily. and so you're seeing places like philadelphia, baltimore, detroit, these are places that have had to close schools early and send kids home, because the buildings have gotten so hot that it's not safe to keep kids in there, and they're not learning. what teachers are telling us is that it's just unbearable in

some of these schools, that the temperatures are reaching into the high 80s, low 90s, that kids are throwing up, that their asthma attacks are being worsened by the heat, that they're spending all day in the nurse's station. and that it's an incredibly difficult environment. john: what about in the south, where i would imagine that air conditioning was more usual? especially in the deep south. >> yeah, so we don't typically think of the south as having this problem because most schools do have air conditioning. but what's happening is a confluence of things where many of the air conditioners that are in place are very old. i talked to one superintendent in arizona who's dealing with air conditioners that were put in in 1997. and the climate has become much more extreme. you're seeing these longer lasting and more frequent heat waves. and the air conditioners they have just can't keep pace. john: i mentioned in the introduction talking about 80 degree days. that's outside. what about inside the assroom? >> when it's 80 degrees outside

and you are in an old brick school building, for instance, like you would see all over the northeast, what you're going to find is that the temperature inside can reach into the low 90s or the mid 90s. and we know that because in many instances, teachers actually have thermometers in their classrooms, and they have taken pictures and they have posted them on twitter and they have, you know, alerted their unions to this. and parents for sure are paying attention and are very unhappy about this. so we know that that these temperatures are not simply uncomfortable, it's not like kids are little bit sweaty, these are not temperatures we would ever expect kids to learn in. john: and is there evidence that any groups of students are being disproportionately affected by this? yes, the research shows that black and latino students in particular suffer more learning loss when they experience hotter days in schools that are not air conditioned. this is especially true in the u.s. and the same researchers who have looked at this question havelso found that there is

something that makes this trend go away and that is installing air conditioning. john: and how easy is that for schools? >> it's really not as simple as it sounds. when you have these old school buildings, it's not like you can just put a window air conditioner in the classroom and walk away. many of these schools weren't built with enough electrical capacity to handle air conditioners. if you install air conditioners throughout the building and try and operate them, they just won't function. there's not enough power to serve them. so that's one big problem. the other problem is the money, which is incredibly hard to come by in many of these school districts. we're talking about multi-million dollar, if not billion dollar, facilities campaigns. there are plenty of parts of the country where residents don't have much money and can't do that, or they're in a part of the country where the tax base, maybe the city's population is declining or it's getting older and voters are not inclined to support paying more for that. you also have kind of a perception problem, which is

that people don't always recognize exactly how much hotter it's gotten. and they often think of their own childhoods and they think, well, you know, i was in school. it was a little uncomfortable during the spring and the fall, but we got by. there's just not quite a recognition of how much worse it's gotten. john: anna phillips of the washington post. thank you very much. >> thank you. ♪ john: and that is pbs news weekend for this saturday. i am john yang. for all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us. see you tomorrow. >> major funding for pbs news weekend has been provided by -- >> consumer cellular, this is sam, how may i help you? this is a pocket. well, thought i would let you know that with consumer cellular you get nationwide coverage with

no contract. that's our thing. have a nice day. >> and with the ongoing support of these individuals and institutions. this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. [captioning performed by the national captiong institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy.]

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