on this edition for sunday, december 6th, president obama addresses the nation about homeh grown terrorist attacks and mass shootings. liberals and conservatives coming together on a plan to reduce poverty in america. also, the battle over net neutrality next on pbs newshour >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by:>> lewis b. and louise hirschfeld cullman.b. bernard and irene schwartz. judy and josh weston.ar the cheryl and philip milstein family. the citi foundation. supporting innovation and enabling urban progress. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products.

that's why we are yourar retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. from the tisch wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: again and thanks for joining us. president obama tried to reassure americans that the u.s. government is doing everything it can s asu to protect us from potential terrorist attacks like the one last week in san bernardino, california. the president spoke to the american public from the oval office tonight for only they third time in his presidency. he said there is no evidence that california couple who gunned down w 14 people and wounded more in was directed by indemnity overseas organization or part of any broader conspiracy here in the u.s. but he also said the military will hunt down leaders of the

islamic state in iraq and syriai known as isis or isil and traini forces there to fight the group on the ground. the president said he would ask congress to continue the use of military force. >> if congress believes like i do that we are atke war with isl it should go ahead and vote to authorize the continued use of military force against these terrorists. for over a year i have ordered our military to take thousands of air strikes against isil targets. i think it's time for congress to vote to demonstrate that the american people are united and a committed to this fight. >> sreenivasan: citing is an burn dethe shooting since three years ago called on congress tot pass new gun control measures. >> congress should make sure no one on a no fly list is able tot buy a gun. what could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi

automatic weapon. it's a matter of national security n we also need to make harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons like the ones used in san bernardino. >> sreenivasan: the president also cautioned against the u.s. t entering a ground war against the islamic state group. >> that's what groups like isil want. they know they can't defeat us c on the battlefield.tl isil fighters were part of the t insurgency that we faced in iraq but they also know if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops draining our resources and using ouring presence to draw new recruits. >> sreenivasan: and he also addressed muslim communities directly. >> muslim leaders here andre around the globe have to t continue working with us to decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology thaa groups like isil and al-qaedaae

promote. to speak out against not justst acts of violence but also those interpretations of islam that are incompatible of the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect and human dignity. >> sreenivasan: president assad says british air strikes on isis targets in syria has non chance to succeed without ground troops backing them up.. published today assad mocked the strategy of david cameron and cameron's claim that 70,000 moderate rebels are fighting the syrian regime. assad says it's much smaller. bombing isis controlled oil fields three days ago.g assad told the times only russian irstrikes against eye cision targets are working. russia backed the assad regime. british newspapers are an eye witness to last night's attack underground the attacker shouted quote that is for syria. a 29 year old man with a knife injured two people oneop o

seriously in an unprovoked attack. scotland yard says it is treating the attack in the east arteon neighborhood as a, quote, terrorists incident. police officers subdued the attacker with a stun gun before pinning him to the ground. scotland yard has been commented on the -- has not commented on the motive. a report a poverty published onn thursday found a striking lack of economic mobility in america that 43% of americans born into families in the bottom fifth of the economic ladder are stuck there as adults while 40% born in the top fifth stay there. the data was part of opportunity, responsibility and security, a consensus plan for reducing poverty and restoring the american dream.am it was a partnership between two think tanks on different sides of the ideologic spectrum. the brookings institute and the american enterprise institute on

part of our series on poverty, p we sat down with two a authors of the report. >> reporter: i want to talk about one of the issues thatth comes up pretty early in therl report-- which is the decline of marriage. kay, can you talk a little bit-- about that and how it's related to poverty?at >> yeah. well, we've had an increasing number of children living with single mothers and growing upn with single mothers. if we look at it by race, about 72% of black children are born to single mothers, 53% of hispanic children, and about 30% of white children. and we now know, from years of researching this, that those children are at greater risk of all kinds of problems, one of them being poverty. the poverty rates among single mother families is four to five times higher than that of

children growing up with married parents. >> indeed, places we arrived at was that conservatives were able to say, "my gosh.atsh if we could help families plan their pregnancy effectively," a position, historically, taken by progressives, "that would be a great thing."gr and the real surprise is progressives were able to say, "not only are staple, two-parent families the very best environments for children to develop," which we know now from 20 years of very rigorous research, "but in america, anyway-- the highest probability of getting to a stable, two-, parent family is throughre marriage." >> reporter: there's another surprising statistic in the report that the wages of men inn the 50th percentile and lower have basically stayed the same since the '70s. i mean, why is that? >> well, i think there's a lot of disagreement about why that is.em and it's not a question that wet sought to answer. >> and we did not settle that. ( laughs ) >> no. but one of the possibilities

that is that it's based on skill-based technologies that require people to have more skills before they can get a job you could have a guy who dropped out of high school could go directly to a factory, a union job that would provide him with a fairly good life and his family, with a fairly good life. that is no longer the case. >> if african-american men's wages rose at the rate of everybody else's over the last 30 or 40 years, a huge amount of the poverty problem would be reduced. so there is a real problem with the lack of growth of wages among low-educated, young, and especially african-american men. so we share that alarm over that. >> reporter: in the report, you propose raising the minimum wage. i think some people might find that a little surprising that

some conservatives sort of came around to that, given just how controversial-- you know, it is, at least in washington. kay, can you talk about the conservative justification for raising the minimum wage? >> well, that was a very tricky area.l, i would say it was one of the two top trickiest areas. for instance, conservatives are- - the conservative group was more likely to be worried about the loss of jobs that might follow a minimum wage increase, more than the progressives were concerned about that. they were much more concerned about the income of the peoplein who had the jobs. >> this is an example of how the group of tried to practice principled and reasoned discussion to get to decisions. so kay is exactly right.

conservatives fear increasing the minimum wage is going to reduce jobs available for low skilled people. the progressives don't want that.nsth progressives fear that a job at such low wages now does not lift the people with low wage jobse out of conservatives don't want that either.er so we're trying, on the basis of evidence as well as values, to find the sweet spot. and that really was what the discussion was about.on now, the sweet spot is highlyt politicized. and so we're trying to bringe' light, not heat, to theset, issues.su >> reporter: i noticed thed report, though, did not mention... >> come with a number. ( laughs ) >> reporter: ....a specific id(nur. >> well, for that-- w >> yes, it should be higher than the current level and lower than $15 an hour. ( laughs ) and we all agree on that. >> yeah.ese that's where we had to leave itv >> reporter: the report suggests that it could be helpful to t increase work requirements forqu certain benefits. >> well, the 1996 welfare reform law, remember, emphasized personal responsibility. it added a work requirement. and that was something new in

poverty policy. what we found is that welfare is no longer a chief driver of benefits for the poor. we have many, many other sources of benefits for the poor. and none of them, or very few of them, have any work requirements attached to them.k so for conservatives, especially because they do believe that the welfare reform bill was basically a success, the belief is that at the very least, we should experiment with work requirements for food stamps or for housing and that kind of thing. if this continues this debate for quite a while -- >> the progressives on this committee did feel very very strongly that if we conditioned food stamps there would be no safety net that certain veryivve vulnerablery families could not fall through.

and that seemed just unviable to us. on the other hand, i think thati there is a belief that, and it's consistent with data, that work requirements in the welfarefa renormal bill did increase single mothers lab le participation in a robustat economy. >> reporter: there's another statistic in the court reportou about how the employment rate r among young african-american mec has basically dropped in the i last few decades.. again, just speaking in terms o solutions, how do we solve thoso problems? >> well, we have a great deal of concern, throughout the report about what we call "disconnected men."at we want to see better skills fos these men. that is a major piece of our contribution i think here was to take the focus away so much from four-year college, which is the and to think more about the kinds of opportunities that are

available in more technical, more blue-collar areas. and-- so that's another thing we would like to see.so >> when young men don't either have the education to get the jobs that exist or the work experience to get it, then we recommended apprenticeships as a form where they can get both, even-- even when they're not quite ready to take that next step into the formal laborfo market. >> the sectors that need to take up the challenge are political sectors, community organizations, the media. >> state governments, too. >> state governments, what cities could do in this. so i think our job was to indicate that it is possible for progressives and conservatives, through principled and

reasoned discussions, that couli come up with a set of ideas that could move us forward.mo >> i think that we are facing a future where we have a lot of disgruntlement with the american dream, with the americanh promise. and rightfully so. we are not providing the conditions that help people to move ahead and to take full advantage of the american possibilities. >> sreenivasan: see more fromee the "chasing the dream" series, including our report on americans living on less than $2 a day.li visit us online at pbs.org/newshour the ability of the u.s. government to regulate broadband internet service is back in court. the washington d.c. federal appeals court heard arguments on friday by the cable and telecom

industry challenging rules the federal communications commission established earlierli this year regarding netre neutrality. for some insight into this i debate, i am joined by arik hesseldahl, a senior editor of the technology news websitegy "re/code." >> so why is it back in courtco and for a bit of background i guess what's the original intent that's being challenged?s >> the original intent is whether or not the fcc has the authority to regulate the internet as a utility. basically what they did is after a series of other challenges in court and legislative rang ling and policy making, they had to regulate the dial tone of the old telephone steal to regulate the internet, the internet is considered a telecommunications service, as an information service provider. and that's just a little bit of legal jujitsu.e but what it comes down to is the service providers want the ability to regulate what data flows on their network an

favorability, to packets they favor and packets they don'tan favor. in an age when people are buying fewer or paying less likely to be paying for cable or satellite tv services, then watching overn the internet if you're hulu or netflix or someone like that, you don't want those, you don't want a cable company that may also have a video on demand service to control whether or c not your customers can watch your content if you're hulu or netflix. >> if i'm watching tv from home they have movies on demand or net dpliks netflix, netflix may be slower. >> what they want to do is cite a fast line. if you're netflix you may have to pay more. that cost is passed on to the customers. it's a long and dye policy

debate ny hali -- >> so has there been any chain since the kind of rule in summer until now? is there a reaction the industri is fighting or are they tryingyi to prevent something? >> >> i think they're essentially'r arguing that the service providers don't really provide a lot of intelligence into thee network itself. they're literally being asked to pass on packets and data, essentially on a best-effort basis an to treat every packet essentially the same. so the example i've always used is if you are setting up a toll road you can charge more for trucks versus regular cars. in this case they're being asked to essentially charge the same rate for every vehicle that passes through toll booth essentially whether or not it is a truck or a car. that's the basis of the argument that they're running up against here. and the industry is basically arguing that it's interfering

with their intent to invest in their infrastructure which is kind of silly when you think about it, because they spent tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars to buildf out this network. the demand is not going to gond away.. i fail to see a kay that -- a case that sceerm demand is goind to go away. >> consumer demand is going to go away. >> arik hesseldahl, thanks so much.k >> sreenivasan: one of the most prominent and prolificnt american artists of the past 50 years is alex katz who is bestt known for his bright billboard size paintings.n nearing 90, katz still paints and divides the time between new york and maine. we have this profile that we first brought you this summer. >> even at 88 years old alex

katz paints almost every day. >> i like doing it. i don't know what's going to happen. i love people --ve >> starting out katz thought he could never be a full time painter without a part time job. when i sat down with him this summer in lincolnville, main. >> he told me his first gallery shows didn't sell much. now you're in museum over the world. >> i'm at the top of the pyramid at this point. >> this summer's retrospective in atlanta time museum featured classic katz, group portraits, bright p colors, clean lines ans his main subject of recent years, landscapes. his inspiration comes from observation. he's like a wall flower painting family and friends and other people he needs. >> i've asked waitresses to

pose. someone goes no, no, he's really good. >> his favorite subject acrossje the decades has been his wife aida painting her more than 250 days. >> she's like -- i imagine her like miss america. one of the first times she had on a bathing suit, she's used to that. >> the college museum of art in maine houses the largest katz collection anywhere, 850 works. through last month they stagedta brand new and terrific focusing on katz early works from the 1950's. diana tweet was the curator. >> i think that what alex seemed to know coming out of art schooa is that he didn't want to be doing what anyone else was doing. >> initially katz did some

photographs. figures in a field or these four children. then while taking art classes in maine katz says, he found his eyes. >> i like the light.ig the further north you get, the less light you have and the more color. i thought the color around here is just really marvelous. that was big. w >> he's come back to coastal maine for the past 61 summers. he built a studio overlooking a pond and often files subject matter right outside the window. when cats has an idea, he first draws and sketch and then paintn a small study. when he returns to manhattan in september, katz transform the studies into large canvas. so this becomes this. katz works fast applying different colors and layers of y wet payment on top of each other. i watched him complete this 15 foot by 11 foot painting of trees in just 90 minutes. >> he has really transcended any

art movement and continues tonu really be influential for young parentpainters today. >> what's happening now is like an explosion. different people saw my workrk more like than ten years ago. >> why do you think that is. >>yo i think longevity is it and the big change to the open area is the right fit. i think in a sense the world caught up with me. >> most people your age slow down. >> ha ha ha ha. >> sreenivasan: recapping our top story in an oval office speech tonight, president obamaa said there is no evidence showing that any overseas group directed the shooters who killed so many people in california four days ago. the president urged congress to authorize the use of military d

force against the islamic state or isil said the u.s. would not be drawn into a ground car in syria or iraq. he also called for a new ban ono assault weapons and for tougher screenings tied to the femaleal attacker in california.er that's all for this edition of pbs newshour weekend. i'm hari m sreenivasan. thanks for watching. have a good night. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: lewis b. and louise hirschfeld cullman. bernard and irene schwartz. judy and josh weston. the cheryl and philip milstein family. the citi foundation. supporting innovation and rn enabling urban progress. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we are your retirement company. additional support has beenee provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by

contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

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steves: riding this gondola, you soar, landing in the sleepy, unpromoted village of gimmelwald. in 30 years of researching guidebooks, i've found hidden gems like this in every country. gimmelwald would have been developed to the hilt, like neighboring towns, but the village had its real estate declared an avalanche zone, so no one could get new building permits. the result? a real mountain community -- families, farms, and traditional ways. choosing places like gimmelwald and then meeting the people, you become part of the party rather than just part of the economy. this is a realistic goal for any good traveler. eins, zwei, drei. man: [ chuckles ] steves: take a moment to appreciate the alpine cheese. so, older is better? man: oh, yes. -woman: i don't know. -man: oh, yes. woman: for me, it's the younger one. steves: once you're off the tourist track,

make a point to connect with the living culture. pitch in, even if that means getting dirty. here, farmer peter is making hay while the sun shines.

david eagleman: the most complex thing we've discovered in the universe is the human brain. for the past 20 years, i've been trying to understand how what happens in 3 pounds of jell-o-like material somehow becomes us. what we feel, what matters to us, our beliefs, and our hopes-- everything we are happens in here... and, for me, there's one mystery that's absolutely fundamental-- what is reality? what if i told you that this world around us, this richly textured world, were all just an illusion