on this edition for sunday, january 26th. the maryland mall shooter identified as police search for a motive. in our signature segment, the financial and environmental benefits of solving america's food waste problem. >> i conservatively estimate that we save $40,000 to $50,000 a year in food waste. and business, banking and legalized marijuana. >> you have a lot of legal companies who are forced to resort to the type of shadowy capers you might find in a gangster movie. >> next on "pbs newshour weekend." >> made possible by lewis b. and

louise hi are feld cohen. joyce b. hale. the wallach family. in memory of mere ram and ira dean wallach. bernard and irene schwartz. ross land p. walter. mutual of america. designing customized, individual and group environment products. that's why we're your retirement company. additional support is provided by -- and by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. from the tish wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> good evening. thanks for joining us. new details about that fatal shooting spree in a montana mall yesterday afternoon. authorities have identified the gunman as 19-year-old darion marcus aguilar. they say he arrived by taxi and opened fire within a skate shop inside the mall.

he killed two of the store's employees before shooting himself to death with the same 12-gauge shotgun he purchased last month. investigators discovered and disabled two crude explosive devices in his backpack. in pennsylvania police searching a college freshman's home fare a marijuana-growing operation discovered a homemade bomb and bomb-making materials. a 19-year-old russian national was taken into custody in altoona, pennsylvania, friday. the student told police he bought the materials for the bomb online and assembled the bomb in his room. it was unclear who if anyone he was targeting. a texas hospital complied with a judge's order to end life support for a brain dead woman who was pregnant. under texas law doctors cannot cut off treatment of a preg nant woman. a judge ruled friday munoz was already dead and said the hospital had been misapplying the law. officials at john peter smith hospital in ft. worth said the

hospital's rule was not to make or contest law but to follow it. michael's craft retailer is warning customers their credit cards may have been compromised. the company says federal law enforcement agencies are investigating fraudulent use of some shoppers' cards. no word how many customers may have been affected. this comes in the wake of cyber attacks at two other major retailers, target and neiman marcus. chuck schumer said he will propose legislation to help fund tracking devices for autistic children. the bill will be called avontae's law to honor a 14-year-old who disappeared after wandering off from school. his remains were discovered three months later. schumer said the legislation is similar to a federal program to track seniors with alzheimer's. the crisis in ukraine does not seem to be easing despite political concessions offered by

president yanukovych. today supporters paid tribute to one of their own they say was killed by authorities. britain's channel 4 news reports. >> reporter: today should have been mikhail's 26th birthday. instead, he was given a martyr's funeral. heroes, heroes, they chanted. they carried his body to independence square. >> translator: i think mikhail is a martyr. he accepted an orthodox martyrdom for the future of ukraine. >> reporter: the young man was one of three protesters killed in a week which has changed everything here. among the ranks of those who honored him today, the far-right groups who are gaining support and confidence as the send-off continues. the embattled president, victorian coach vich, made a number of concessions last night including the offer of a top job to

boxer-turned-opposition-leader vitali klitschko. but it wasn't enough to help the government win the fight. >> translator: many of our requirements have been fulfilled by the president. and regarding the rest, we are still firm on those. we are not turning back. and we'll keep discussing and try to find a collection. >> reporter: yatsenyuk was offered the position of prime minister but tweeted this response. no deal,i yanukovich. they're aware if they accept the offers they risk upsetting their supporters. the mood turned ugly as they surrounded a cultural building in the capital. sheltering inside, dozens of police and security officers.

in the end, klitschko had to negotiate safe passage for them. and left behind in a hurry, their supplies. >> for more about the situation in the ukraine we're joined via skype from kiev by david covering the story for the "new york times." last night we said the program had extended an olive branch to the opposition by offering to make one of them prime minister. but that didn't work. >> reporter: they rebuffed this deal offered by viktor yanukovych who is on the defensive. there are protests spreading to the south and eastern parts of ukraine. these are viktor yanukovych's base of support. the parts of the country that are absolutely most sympathetic to his pro-russia policies. what we've seen is indication that unrest will spread. there's a danger of violence getting worse as the opposition leadership holds out for bigger victory in the days ahead. >> just to back up a couple of steps for people, what's this all been about? two months ago there was the

possibility of ukraine having closer ties with the eu. then that changed. >> reporter: sure. it began with a broken promise, essentially. president yanukovych had said for a long time he would sign sweeping political free trade agreements with the eu. toward the end of november he backed away from those deals and that set off the first round of protests. but it's become a much deeper, more complicated situation. those protests were inflamed by a violent police crackdown on november 30th on peaceful protesters in kiev. that set off a whole different round of demonstrations. january 16th yanukovych supporters had a package that severely restricted free speech, had penalties and restrictions there. things have turned violent,

evidence of kidnappings and other abuse, either by authorities or their surrogates which has raised pun anger even more. >> what would the opposition be satisfied with? >> many people on the street say nothing short of resignation will do. he's not offered that by any means. there doesn't seem to be any way to impeach him again his party controls parliament at this time. absent that folks are looking for sweeping changes in the government, reversal of these new laws that restrict political dissent. it will be an interesting question in the days ahead how much more he's able and willing to concede. >> how much maneuvering room does he have, given russia's opposition? >> ukraine's been facing severe economic crisis. that was part of what was behind deals with the eu and his resistance, international monetary fund was demanding in exchange for help he make difficult austerity moves.

russia, hoping to continue its influence in ukraine, stepped in. president putin, $15 billion in aid. russia has a lot of money on the line and they're concerned about this unrest, about what this means after russia's investment in ukraine's future. >> all right, david, covering the story for the "new york times" via skype from kiev, thanks so much. the syrian peace talks in gene geneva, women and children will nowing allowed to leave homs where government forces have been attacking rebels. the city was one of the first to rise up against the regime of bashar al assad. 800 families are said to be trapped without regular access to food, medicine and other necessities. the government and the rebels have yet to talk about the most difficult issue facing them, whether assad will remain in power. a chinese activist who campaigned against corruption was sentenced to four years in prison today, convicted of disrupting public order before

being sentenced reportedly said "the last shred of dignity in chinese law was destroyed today." a crackdown of dissidents has been condemned by human rights groups and criticized by the u.s. state department. and now to our signature segment. our original in-depth reports. tonight we look at a problem that is part environmental and part economic. we're talking about food waste. the numbers predictably are imprecise but by every accounting millions of tons of wasted food ends up in landfills every year. now more than ever, efforts are under way to curb food waste and some social entrepreneurs, some businessmen, and some farmers have devised ways to make money doing it. newshour reports from martins burg, west virginia. >> these are food scraps.

rather than putting them in the trash, i'd rather put them in my compost area. >> reporter: barbara hartman is a registered dietician who lives in rural west virginia. she grew up appreciating the value of food. >> i don't like to waste food. it's been ingrained in me since i was a child. my grandfather lived through the depression and he would always bug us about cleaning our plates. my parents would echo that. >> reporter: hartman is part of a growing number of people trying different methods to reduce food waste at home. >> a lot of people throw the greens on the beets away but they're delicious. so i save them, put them in the pan. there's less waste that way. i like to freeze things instead of throwing them out. this is a piece of turkey pot pie from the holiday meal that i stuck in the freezer. otherwise, it would have gone in the compost. >> reporter: hartman's not only trying to reduce waste at home, she's taken her philosophy to work. she's a chief of nutrition and

food service at the veterans affairs medical center in martins burg, west virginia, where she's in charge of serving 1,500 meals a day. what was the food situation like here when you first came to work here? >> when i first became chief of the service we were throwing all the food waste into the trash. which was then going to the landfill. >> reporter: according to the environmental protection agency, more than 36 million tons of food waste goes to landfills every year. and the natural resources defense council, one of the nation's most powerful environmental groups, says that's harmful to the environment. according to the nrdc, food now represents the biggest component of solid municipal waste that makes its way to landfills. food waste converts to methane, a greenhouse gas at least 25 times more powerful in global warming than carbon dioxide. it's environmental concerns like this that encouraged barbara

hartman and her team to take action. is six years ago, they started to implement what they call a green kitchen anyboinitiative. >> our goal is to be as environmentally responsible as we can be. and to also also have great food. >> reporter: barbara turned to technology, investing money in a tracking system called lean pass. it pays for itself in six months. here's how it works. every day, hartman's staff weighs and records the amount of food wasted when preparing meals. they also measure the waste from untouched leftover meals. >> i'm weighing our waste trim that comes from the vegetable prep department. >> reporter: lean pass generates data on what specific food is being wasted. >> this shows the top ten food items that we wasted by category. i can see that cooked vegetables, we went up quite a bit in our waste.

so it does help me to determine that, okay, next week we do need to order less of certain items. >> food is money. it's really critical that we record data about it and we know what we're wasting. >> reporter: andrew shackman is the president and co-founder of lean pass. a graduate of stanford university, he has a background in technology. >> i'm passionate about the food waste problem because i came to it initially as a very rational business thinker, approaching this as an economic problem. there's a financial opportunity where it made no sense to be inefficient. >> reporter: shackman is one of a growing number of social entrepreneurs trying to make money and do the right thing to reduce food waste. >> and i found that i got out of bed every day with a purpose and a mission that was driven by impacting those things. yes, about want to build a great business. but what's exciting to us is about making a change.

>> reporter: so far, he sold his system to more than 150 large institutions. like colleges, hospitals, and hotels around the country. in an effort to attract smaller businesses like restaurants, lean pass now charges about $150 to $1,000 a month, depending on the level of service provided. >> what lean pass does is we help people understand what they're putting in the garbage. so that they can then make changes to production, to purchasing, and to menus so in the future they don't have that waste again. >> reporter: shackman's company is making a profit. and its clients are saving money. >> i conservatively estimate that we save $40,000 to $50,000 a year in food waste. >> reporter: in the last few years, other companies have sprung up to tackle the food waste problem while also trying to make a profit. startups like food cowboy and crop mobster connect food suppliers who have excess fresh produce to organizations that feed people in need.

cutting waste and charging a small commission on the transaction. another company, daily table, wants to make money on the fact that most grocery stores can only sell perfect-looking fruits and vegetables. the company wants to sell bruised and oversized produce at discounted prices. back in west virginia, just 15 miles from the va medical center, a local farmer cam pabb has found a way to make money and reduce the amount of food going into landfills. on his farm he grows crops and raises livestock. but also built a thriving composting business. the va medical center pays him to pick up leftover food scraps every two weeks. he trucks this to his compost heap where it supplements over other nick waste that will decompose over time. >> we're converting waste into a usable product that grows another crop. in other words, what you saw put

in there was some sort of crop. now once processed into compost, then we'll grow other crops. >> reporter: he uses the nutrient-rich compost in place of commercial fertilizer, saving him $50,000 a year. >> it's part of the diversification that we've done which makes us more profitable. >> reporter: thanks to this unique partnership and other efforts the va medical center has made to reduce food waste, hartman and her team received an award from the white house in 2010. >> before we started our waste watchers program, our green kitchen, all our food waste was going into the landfill. now we've reduced it to where there's 5% to 10%. >> reporter: but advocates say there is much work that needs to be done around the country to address what is an enormous problem. >> in the united states there's food wasted at every step of the chain. >> reporter: peter laner is the executive director of the natural resources defense council.

he says the government is starting to pay attention. >> epa, u.s. department of agriculture, have all started programs to try to address food waste, to try to begin to educate people about that. >> reporter: one area his organization would like the government to focus on is regulating food date labeling. those dates stamped on products you buy often provide information for when food is at its best quality, not the date that a product has gone bad and is supposed to be tossed out. >> when people are encouraged to use their nose rather than just look at the date. actually take a taste and see whether it is still good. that can make a big difference. >> reporter: laner says curtailing food waste may be easier than it seems. he says that's because almost half the food in this country goes through six major retailers. walmart, safe way, kroger, costco, target, and super value. >> and so it's a half dozen companies who have a tremendous opportunity, if they change some of their policies, including

pressure they put about expiration dates, how they display food, what they do with food they're throwing out, putting it into composting or feeding it into animals instead of putting it in landfill. it's a relatively small number of actors who could make a big, big difference. so nrdc and others are working with them because they can also save money at it. >> reporter: as for barbara hartman, she has plans to expand her initiative. and hopes to hell oth s ts to t community how they can put these types of programs into place. >> when it's all said and done, when i'm in my senior golden years, i'll be able to feel like i did the best i could. and that my contributions add up. see how one of the most affluent counties in the nation is cutting food waste while also helping hungry kids. visit newshour.pbs.org.

we thought we'd spent time talking about whether legal marijuana businesses should have access to the nation's banks. it's a topic that attorney general eric holder raised a few days ago. we're joined from washington tonight by alex altman of "time" magazine. what did the department of justice say? >> well, attorney general eric holder has said that at some point very soon, the department will be issuing guidelines that will hopefully ease some of the questions that banks have in regards to being able to transact legal marijuana companies, both in colorado, which on january 1st became the first state in the world to create a legal recreational market for marijuana, as well as the 20 other states plus district of columbia that permit medical marijuana. >> right now, all these businesses all over the country

are dealing solely in cash, which means that, what, they store it in a warehouse somewhere? >> solely or mostly in cash, which means you have a lot of legal companies who are forced to resort to the type of shadowy capers that you might find in a gangster movie. i've talked to owners in denver dispensaries who leave secret offsite warehouses to store cash, who carry around tens of thousands of dollars on their person every day, who are forced to foot tens of thousands of dollar tax bills in stacks of 20s. it is a situation for them that presents challenges both difficult in terms of cash management and dangerous in terms of personal safety. >> why can't they just take to it a bank? what's the bank going to get in trouble for? >> well, because marijuana is still a so-called schedule 1 drug on par with drugs such as cocaine or ecstasy, banks that transact with legal marijuana businesses are still at risk of running afoul of federal money

laundering statutes. so they could surrender their charter, or even in the event of doj guidelines, they could be at risk of prosecution by some sort of zealous law enforcement. it is not -- a yellow light rather than cart charge to do these transactions. >> what about state banks in a state that legalized it, for example colorado, couldn't a state bank be completely within the law to take that money? >> it's possible. some of these industry out there has been scheming for a solution to this problem. they've discussed everything from state charter banked as you mentioned to the digital currency bit coin. but they have sort of -- they believe that unless this is a situation that is solved at a national level, it is -- because banks are risk averse, it will be problematic for basics to transact. >> alex altman of "time" magazine, thanks so much. >> thank you. this is "pbs newshour

weekend sunday." now some of your thoughts about us. comments we receive from viewers like you after our broadcast last evening. not surprisingly, most of you wrote us about william bragham's look at iran from the inside. a report that included images from inside a hospital. stores selling food and computers. and a political dissident's home. arash, an iranian-american, complained our report was shallow and understated the damage american sanctions have done to the iranian people. he said sanctions have raised the cost of living to the point people have much less protein in their diet and children's nutrition is a concern. but most of you praised the report which offered images of iranian life rarely seen on american television. sharon called our piece informty and well done, a bit different than the picture i had in my mind's eye about commerce in

iran. shelley said on facebook that she would love to see more in-depth stories about regular people and families in iran and how things are on a day-to-day basis. i personally see war and extremists a lot and would like to see the other side. another replied, i'm persian and it's the truth what you see in the media isn't the truth about iran, it's all because of politics. iranians are like other people in the world, friendly people who live in a peaceful way as you do. michael added, they've got a lot more in common with us than most of the countries in the middle east. wonder why that's never reported. on twitter we heard from paul hancock who thought, really fascinating, shows how little you can know about anywhere before you actually get there. send your thoughts through the comment sections below our stories @newshour.pbs.org, on facebook, or tweet us @newshour.

join us on air and online tomorrow on the "newshour." the latest from geneva and the syrian peace talks there. that's it for this edition of "pbs newshour weekend." i'm hari sreenivasan. thanks for watching.

>> "pbs newshour weekend" is made possible by lewis b. and louise hirschfeld komen. judy and josh westin. joyce v. hale. the wallach family in memory of miriam and ira d. wallach. bernard and irene schwartz. roslyn p. walter. corporate funding provided by mutual of america. designing customized, individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. additional support is provided by -- and by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

a storm for the record books. we knew this was going to get pretty big. narrator: drawing power from ocean and air, it becomes a savage monster nearly 300 miles across. winds of 195 miles per hour, gusts up to 240. right now it's as mean as a cyclone can actually get on this planet. this actually went off the scale. it was a monster storm. narrator: on november 8, 2013, it becomes what could be the most powerful typhoon in history to make landfall. this storm peaked right as it was going ashore at the philippines. that's the tragedy. narrator: haiyan brings terrifying winds, torrential rain and a deadly, high-speed flood. man: 20-foot storm surge came almost instantaneously, like a tsunami. the devastation underneath this storm