on this he had days, a rare alliance with drug companies. and the pension peril of financially strapped cities struggles to fulfill its obligations to retired public employees. >> we could go bankrupt again. >> i worked almost 30 years. i was promised something when i retired. >> and unemployment. looking behind the latest numbers next on pbs news hour weekend.

good evening. thanks for joinings. attorney general eric holder moved today to extend the same rights to married same-sex couples at heterosexual couples. same sex spouses of police and firefighters killed in the line

of duty will be eligible for federal benefits. they will not be offered to offer testimony that could incriminal natuin krim n incriminal criminal nature their spouses and bureau of prisons will offer the same rights. it came in remarks and will go in toeffect monday. northern california is finally getting relief from the extreme drought. meteorologists say as much as 3 inches of rain could fall in the san francisco wbay area monday. even more rain is expected north and east of the city. but meteorologists say it will take several more major storms to put a department in the drought which threatens water supplies to both agricultural and urban areas. last year was the driest ever recorded since california became a state in 1850. governor brown declared a drought emergency three years ago b

ago. >> toyota is close to an agreement with the federal government in connection with sudden acceleration. the issue first came to light in 2009 after an off duty california highway patrolman and his family were killed when the lexus they were driving careened off the highway at around 120 miles per hour. the driver had called 911 saying he could not slow down the car. the company is facing more than 700 lawsuits over acceleration issues. under the reported settlement, the company which has never admitted wrongdoing, would face no criminal charges. an american missionary being held in north korea has been sent back to a labor camp. kenneth bay he had been hospitalized and the state department calls on north korea to grant amnesty. he was sentenced to 15 years hard labor for religious activities. south korea has scored a victory over japan in virginia. lawmakers there voted this wheek to require school textbooks to refer to the waters dividing the

two countries as the east sea. as well as the sea of japan. the vote followed intense lobbying by both countries. virginia has some 80,000 korean americans which is four times as manies a japanese manies. but the state does much more business with japan than with south korea. there was a dramatic increase in the number of children killed and wounded in war related incidents in afghanistan last year. a new united nations report puts the number of casualties at more than 1700 including 561 deaths. according to the report, the withdrawal of foreign troops and increased taliban attacks are to blame for the spike in deaths and wounded. turning now to syria despite what was to have been a three day cease fire, an aid convoy came under fire. it's the first humanitarian mission there in 18 months. aid workers had to valscramble

cover. many were evacuated showing signs of malnutrition. earlier this week, ten big drug companies that rarely share their secrets agreed to work together with the national institutes of health. their goal, finding cures for a number of major diseases, including diabetes and alzheimer's. the project will last five years, cost $230 million, and at the end, all the findings will be free for anyone to use. here to help will us understand it all is monica langdon from the wall street journal. has anything like this ever been tried before on this scale? >> no, nothing has been tried on this scale with this many diseases. and with this much collaboration. and the biggest revelation of all is they're going to put all

their discoveries out to the public. so the big pharmaceutical companies or the littlest start up up will have access and can compete. >> almost following straight out of the play book of the software model of open source. >> and this is what is unusual. there started to an few more collaborations in the last few years, but nothing of this scale. and this actually took two years to get it done. and it was very difficult. there were a lot of sharp elbows and a lot of hurt feelings along the way. and not all the drug companies that participated ultimately signed up. but ten big ones did and they hope to come up with some blockbuster drugs. >> so what are the specific diseases and how do they narrow down the list of what to tackle? >> okay. that's a good question. at first, the head of the nih is francis collins, and he is the one who sequenced -- or who led the human genome experiment. and he wanted to like map all

diseases. that was his grand idea. and the drug companies were like are you crazy? we can't think of some big theoretical experiment like that. we want something that will go into our pipeline and help us make honmoney. so they looked at diseases what patients really needed and they came up with alzheimer's, diabetes, and they also came up with two autoimmune disorders, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. so they focused on those four for this initial five year project. >> so let's talk about this $230 million. put that in perspective about how much these companies would spend if they weren't part of this trial. >> this is peanuts to be honest with you for the pharmaceutical companies. but -- because they spend like over 200 something billion a year worldwide. but what they're doing here is

something money can't buy. they're -- they have agreed to give their best scientists a lot of their tissue and blood samples and all their data for the past and krptd clinical trials on these four diseases within the research plan. and by wutputting all this together, they think they can come up with ways to map does his diseases that they have been able r unable to do of alone. >> how much of this is just funding drying up? >> these truat's true. the scientific component is there is so much more scientific information now, they don't know which molecular pathways to follow. the second is the business reason. these guys, the farm assupharma executives told me it takes ten years and $1 billion to get one drug from discovery to market. and so they are just, you know,

their pipelines are drying up, generics are coming out, so they need help finding right drugs. >> monica, thanks so much. >> my pleasure. we continue our coverage of the pension peril, the shortfall in funding for retirement benefits. vallejo, california went bust during the great recession after a series of budget cuts emerged from bankruptcy three years later. but now some fear have a lay

sh vallejo could face a second bankruptcy unless they reduce what they pay the retirees. here is our report. >> reporter: bob lee has been through major changes over the past few years. on moved out to the country a p p went into a new line of work. he became the pastor of a church with a small congregation in a rural part of napa county, california. about 50 miles north of san francisco. he'd only been a believer for a few years when he decided to go into the ministry. but he was certain that it was his calling and the chance to serve his community. >> i've had a good life. and if i can help someone else have a better life, that's what life is about. when we leave here, we don't take anything with us. i don't take my retirement benefits, my medical, up in of those things. >> reporter: lee could have a

new career because he retire from his old one with benefits. for nearly 30 year, he was a police officer in the bay area. he was able to retire at 50 with a pension and family health insurance benefits worth a total of a little over $108,000 a year. >> i knew that i wasn't going to have to count on a church salary to carry me through my retirement, i was going to defend on my law enforcement retirement to do that. >> it sounds like you had a pretty good sense that when you retired, vallejo would continue to take care of you. >> i knew they were going to if a care of me. that's what they said they would do. >> reporter: but that is taking a toll on the city's finances. reirement benefits will cost the city $21 million in the current fiscal year. nearly $4 million more than the year before. two years ago, they accounted for 19% of the budget. this year their share is nearly 26%. five years from now, the city

projects it will be almost 30%. that is bad news for a city with a $5 million budget deficit. stephanie gomes feels like she's watching history repeat. >> we could go bankrupt again. the first one is hard enough. i can't even begin to imagine a second one. >> reporter: gomes had a front row seat on the city docouncil 2008. the city never recovered from the blow it took in 1996 when the ship yard closed and thousands of residents lost jobs. the additional burden of the recession was too much for the municipal budget. for gomes, the worst part of the crisis was just before the city filed for bankruptcy. >> because before is when you're scrambling trying to figure out how not to go into bankruptcy. so we had to cut fixing our road, trimming our trees, hours at the library, you know,

anything and everything. >> reporter: there was one thing the city couldn't cut. pensions. under california law, vallejo was prohibited from cutting them. pensions cost the city so much because it pays it workers so much. the fifth highest wages for municipal employees in the state. and the highest wamgs in the city are paid to police. >> in vallejo, we paid $150,000, $175,000, $121 $200,000, $300,0o you have people retiring with 90% of that. >> reporter: bob lee argues firefighter s and police office earn it. he lost two friends in the line of duty. when he was growing up, few cities had a problem with crime. but when crack cocaine came to up to, the city's crime prison got worse. >> people were crying out for something to be done about the crime. so the city started paying more for police officers, they

started providing better benefits to attract good officers and we built a very good police department, one that was looked up to by many agencies in the state. >> reporter: last year when the city had to cut spending again to deal with its $5 million deficit, the council turned to the police budget. last december, the council chambers filled up with residents, police in uniform and retired cops as the council took up a proposal to cut health care benefits for retired police by $2 million a year. stephanie gomes and the rest of the council listened as bob lee told them that the proposal was unfair. >> those of you sitting out here, you picture yourself retiring 15, 20 years from now with what you thought you were going to get having been taken away. >> reporter: gomes can empathize with the police. their department was the last one her husband work this had before he retired. but she wanted her kurt to the r last major accomplishment.

the council voted 6-0 to make the cut. bob lee lost their insurance. now they paid a total of $769 a month for themselves. >> i am disappointed and frustrated that the city has done this. to me and for other retirees, they have let us down. and in some ways it seems like they have taken the easy route to fill a monetary gap by cutting retiree benefits. i was promised something when i retired. i worked almost 30 years to receive that and i based my life upon it. >> was there anything else the city of vallejo could have done at that point? where could they have cut? >> where i think they should have started to make changes is with the current employees. those people still have an opportunity to plan for these

things in the future. >> i get that they put their life on the line. my husband was a police captain. retired after 36 years. i get it. but you choose that job. because you believe in it. you choose it because of service. and you believe in serving the public. and the public is hurting. >> yhow far is it fair to go in cutting that, though? >> i would cut the least amount that we could because i agree people retire and they kind of make plans on that. but what about the promises to the taxpayers? people paying these pensions. it's promises to a many and promises to a few. and if would he all took a little bit of cuts and if we all shared in that pain, then it wouldn't have to be so great. >> reporter: the confrontation in vallejo was part of a breerd con fligflict over the cost of g care of retire years and it may be coming to a lot more.

>> it's a systemic problem, like a virus making its way through california municipal governments. and everyone will get hit with it eventually. >> reporter: joe nation is a professor of public policy at stanford. he sees california's municipal budget cries is as a preview of worse things to come in other states. >> if you look at the pnks status of california of the pension systems here versus the rest of the country, we're not in the worst shape. we're probably about the middle of the pact. >> reporter: he believes that as long as the cost of pensions keeps rising, cities all over the country will have to either raise taxes or cut other parts of the budget. >> and that is the path people are on right now. the numbers are staggering. >> reporter: in california, the cost of pensions is rising faster than that of police and fire departments you can sanitation, education, or anything else in municipal budgets. stephanie gomes sees no way for cities to rein in that cost because they would have to cut pensions to do it. and since that's prohibited

under california law, they're likely to go bankruptcy. she's been campaigning to change that law, to give cities the right to negotiate for pension cuts. she and other supporters hope to get the initiative on to the ballot in the statewide sleeks that california voters can decide. >> i'm going to pay -- >> reporter: she's also running an anti-graffiti campaign she and her husband started. she sees a lot of other residents getting together to do things the city used to do which could be a good sign for vallejo's future. and on that point, bob lee agrees with her. there is a story like that in the bible. >> in the book of acts after christ went back to heaven, he left the people with a mandate. he said love god, love your neighbors. and that is what the people did. they set their differences aside, they came together to make a better future for everyone. and i think that you can do that. but it takes a lot of hard work

for people to be willing to set aside things that they oftentimes hold dearly. >> sfind out which cities in the united states have declared bankruptcy. see our map at news hour.pbs.org. we wanted to follow up tonight on yesterday's monthly unemployment report. our focus this evening, a persist pepent problem, how it impacts young people and people of color. we have a senior economist with us from bloomberg. when you you look under the hood, it's worse depending on where you look. let's look at race. white americans have an unemployment rate of about 5.7%. african americans are more than twice that figure at 12.1%. any primary causes? >> well, you see that doubling of the unemployment rate between blacks and whites at every

educational level and it's particularly dramatic when you look at the youth population. there are several reasons. one, the fact that blacks graduate at lower levels than whites do. so we know college education is a huge factor in determining the level of unemployment. so that employment disparity is a big driver. secondly, youth and african-american youth tend to be employed in sectors that are very business cycle sensitive. so when the general economy is doing bad, that sector gets worse and it's worse for this particular population. >> so when we look at unemployment numbers by age, it's even worse as you're pointing out. from 16 to 19, the number is 20.7%. by race, whites 17.5%, and young african-americans are more double that number at 38%. that is an astounding number.

>> that's nearly 40% for young black teenagers. look, one in every four black youth ages 16 to 25 is unemployed right now. and so it's a huge problem. but it's not only a problem for the present. it's a problem for the future. how you start out as a young worker, how you enter the labor market determines your future earnings potential. if you're blocked out opportunities now, you may be blocked out for a lifetime. it's a dramatic situation that definitely needs attention. >> and it costs the government sort of in both ways. taxes that we don't get from workers that are contributing to the economy and also social services that we're providing to the unemployed. >> that's true. but the good news here is that this is a problem that is fixable. we know that if you get a college agree, yodegree, your c finding a job increase today

ma dramatically. so one fix is to make college aid more available. but for black youth, you still see double the unemployment rate. so we need perhaps paid internships to make sure they have the same employment opportunities going forward. >> and what about manufacturing jobs, how does this address the equation? >> you know, there is a huge segment of the economy that is actually taking off. and the one thing that young people have in their favor is that they're much more mobile than older workers. they can move to where the jobs are and they can acquire skills that are needed for the economy of the future. so any program that we can get to get people attached to the labor market by growing skills and skill development can only help their future employment picture going forward. >> all right. thanks so much for joining us. >> thank you.

finally tonight, a preview of next tuesday's front line, a rare ground level view of the fighting in syria. as rival rebel factions take aim at the assad regime and one another. you hear a rebel speaking to a journalist. >> a young fighter who was a lieutenant in assad's army before defecting has signed up his rebel battalion to the new syrian front. it shows mohammed what they are up against. >> translator: we're driving along those farm roads to avoid being attacked.

jihadists are more ruthless. they attacka villages are artillery and shells. in thatville annu village, they killed 15, including women and children. they use car bombs as if we are our main enemy. but they are the enemy of the revolution and for syria as a whole. >> the most radical of the jihadist factions to turn against the other rebels is the islamic state of the rock in syria. s the group wants to establish an islamic state, fighting against the regime and more moderate rebels. the group wantn islamic state, fighting against the regime and more moderate rebels.the group wants to estab islamic state, fighting against the regime and more moderate rebels. it claims an alliance with al qaeda, but even al qaeda has severed ties with them. ♪

>> join us tomorrow on air and online. we'll take you to bangalore, india, a hot tech spoke tech entrepreneurs. >> we'd be making much higher salary in the u.s.. it's still worth it. skills and opportunity here is a once in a lifetime opportunity. >> that's it for this edition of pbs news hour weekend. i'm har hari sreenivasan. thanks for watching.

avalanche up top. avalanche up on the mountain. it's buried over. we're going to have to go out the side window to get out. over. support for this program was made possible by the north american railway foundation a non-profit foundation that was formed and funded by the brotherhoods relief and compensations fund to support organized rail labor and other non-profit projects related to the railroad ndustry in the united states and canada. and by the dobbas company specializing in emergency response services, heavy equipment contracting, railroad salvage services, snow removal and full service trucking. proud partner with the railroad industry since 1964. and by the proud railroad professionals of the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and trainmen,