captioning sponsored by wnet >> thompson: on this edition for saturday, february 13: tensions between western powers and russia increase over a potential cease-fire in syria. in our signature segment, how the city of chicago is fighting food borne illness using data analytics, algorithms, and even tweets. next on pbs newshour weekend. >> 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 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 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, megan thompson. >> thompson: good evening and thanks for joining us. a day after agreeing to reach a cease-fire in syria within a week, world leaders met today to end the five-year civil war that has fueled europe's migrant crisis and may have cost half a million lives. diplomats from the united states, russia, turkey, saudi arabia, and iran are among those attending an annual security conference in munich, germany. secretary of state john kerry criticized russia for bombing raids during the past four months backing syrian president bashar al-assad, who the u.s.

wants removed from power. >> the vast majority, in our opinion, of russia's attacks have been against legitimate opposition groups. and to adhere to the agreement that has been made, we think it is critical that russia's targeting change. >> thompson: russian foreign minister sergey lavrov is skeptical of a cease-fire, saying its odds of succeeding are only 49%, while russian prime minister dmitry medvedev blamed western sanctions on russia after its annexation of crimea, in ukraine, for hurting relations. >> ( translated ): we have fallen into a new cold war. nearly on a daily basis, we are being blamed for the most terrible threat to nato as a whole, to europe, to america, to other countries. >> thompson: rebel-held areas around aleppo, syria, continue to be subject to fierce fighting, as government forces try to retake the city.

and a new report from the independent syrian center for policy research estimates 470,000 syrians have died in the war, almost double previous estimates." new york times" reporter david sanger is covering the syria talks, and he joins me now from munich. david, a day after the cease-fire plan was announced, confidence in it doesn't seem to be very high, correct? >> it certainly doesn't. we heard sergey lavrov, the foreign minister of russia, say today that he thought maybe 49%. and somewhat sarcastically we heard secretary of state keri say later o, oh, he's that optimistic?" i think mr. keri has a higher sense of probable that this will work. but there's an awful lot, megan, that can get in the way of this. there are two part to this. the first part is humanitarian deliveries to the beseemed cities in syria. i think there's a fair bit of

optimism that those will be stark, and the question is how long will they last? the second and much harder part of this is what most people would call a cease-fire and what they are calling for these purposes a cessation of hostilities. even secretary keri has said this may only be a pause. the idea is give enough of a quiet moment to actually get negotiations going. >> thompson: it seems that as talk of this cease-fire have increased, so have tensions between the u.s. and russia. is this just posturing, or is it part of something bigger? >> you know, it really is something bigger. think of the different elements. we have the continued tensions and sanctions over ukraine. we have the increased russian patrols off the of the british coast, off most of europe, more nuclear forces being exercised. and i think here, the americans were taken a little bit by surprise at the speed at which the russians ended up entering

that air war over aleppo, and thus gaining some leverage that the u.s. right now does not have in return. >> thompson: one of the anothers that has caused tension between the two countries is this issue of military coordination in syria. can you talk a little bit about that and if there's been any movement on that front. >> the united states has been very, very cautious about getting into coordination with the russians because they say, look, the russians are deceiving people about who they're striking. they're striking many of the rebel groups aligned with the united states other ands who have been opposing assad, and saying that they're just striking the two terror groups that have been designated by the united nations, the islamic state, and the al-nusra front. but the coordination is going to be unavoidable over the next few weeks because they're supposed to work together in a joint task force headed by mr. kerry and

mr. lavrov, to pick out targeting. they're supposed to work together on the cease-fire, and they're supposed to work together on the humanitarian aid. i don't know how you do that without something that approaches coordination, made all the harder by the fact that the united states, of course, back into the sanctions business against the russians right now. >> thompson: david, you can talk a little bit about the timetable, how this will all work on the ground. >> well, megan, the way it's supposed to work is that the humanitarian relief is supposed to begin within days, and secretary keri said today that the trucks are loaded up and ready to go. but that's a different thing than actually getting them into where they're supposed to be. and the russians are supposed to be airdropping some aid. some of the big questions is where they aired drop it and to which people? if a week from today we still see a lot of fighting going on, then you'll know that this wasn't work the way it was supposed to. >> thompson: all right, david sanger of the "new york times." thank you so much for joining

us. >> thank you, mawg an. good to be back with you. >> thompson: an islamic militant group linked to al qaeda is claiming responsibility for a bungled attempt to blow up a passenger jet over somalia earlier this month. al-shabab says the attack was intended as retribution for what it calls crimes committed by the west against the muslims of somalia. a suicide bomber blew a hole in the fuselage of a somali-owned daallo airlines jet, shortly after it took off from mogadishu on february 2. the plane had been en route to the african nation of djibouti with 73 other passengers on board. none of the other passengers were killed, but the bomber was sucked out of the plane to his death. the plane made a successful emergency landing in mogadishu. pope francis is in mexico for a five-day visit, his first as pontiff to the overwhelmingly catholic country. thousands of people lined the pope's route to the national palace, where he met with

mexican president enrique pena nieto today. in his public remarks, francis said mexican leaders have a" duty" to fight corruption and drug trafficking, and work for the "collective good." the pope urged the country's bishops and archbishops to do more to help migrants, and then celebrated mass at mexico city's massive basilica of the virgin of guadalupe, with hundreds of thousands watching on screens set up outside. more than 80% of mexico's 121- million people are roman catholic, making it the second most populous catholic country in the world after brazil. for live coverage of tonight's republican presidential debate in south carolina, go online. visit pbs.org/newshour and follow us on twitter at newshour. >> thompson: chipotle, the mexican grill chain, closed its 2,000 restaurants for four hours on monday for a national staff video conference on food safety.

this after nearly 500 chipotle customers got sick last year after eating food contaminated with e-coli or salmonella. regular inspections help keep restaurants clean and safe, but across the country, that job falls largely to local public health departments, many of which have limited resources. in chicago, food inspectors are improving their efficiency by analyzing data and communicating with the public on social media. last week, i traveled to chicago to see how it's being done. that's tonight's signature segment, and it's part of our series on cities adopting innovative ways to solve problems called "urban ideas." >> reporter: mark chmielewski is the executive chef at latinicity, a hip new eatery in downtown chicago. at this sit-down restaurant, bar, and at 10 food counters, customers can watch their sushi being rolled, burgers flipped, and burritos wrapped. but what they don't see are the

steps behind the scenes that ensure the safety of their food. >> all stations have hand sinks. probably the most biggest thing is washing your hands. all the fish gets iced down. >> reporter: chmielewski oversees systems and procedures to ensure that all the food served here is fresh. >> everything up off the ground. up off the floor. >> reporter: temperature is key. the u.s. department of agriculture recommends hot food is served at at least 140 degrees. cold food must be refrigerated 40 degrees and below. and dirty dishes must be washed in hot water close to boiling. >> it's paramount, to have, you know, great food safety with a place to prevent the public and your staff from becoming sick from foodborne illness. that can be devastating. it can shut you down. fast. >> reporter: according to the centers for disease control and prevention, every year about 48 million people in the u.s. get sick from foodborne illness, from all sources of contaminated food.

128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die. >> i think food safety is one of the core public health issues that we face. >> reporter: julie morita is a doctor and chicago's commissioner of public health. her department is in charge of inspecting all 16,500 establishments that serve food in chicago. close to 7,000 are classified "" high risk"- those where chefs handle raw ingredients and are thus more at risk of foodborne illness outbreaks. >> if we don't address and make sure that our food is safe, we will be constantly be dealing with outbreaks and challenges related to that, and so it's really in our best interest to insure the safety of food so that we can do and focus on other areas that are important to public health as well. >> reporter: i followed one food inspector, annette grimes, as she made an unannounced visit to a restaurant on chicago's south side. >> did you vacuum pack this, and where's the machine? because you're not allowed to vacuum pack. >> reporter: records for all shellfish must be kept. >> how about tags for the oysters?

>> reporter: she even probes for clutter in the basement. the state requires chicago to inspect high-risk venues like this restaurant at least once a year. but chicago has had a difficult time keeping up. a 2012 review by the state found the city to be out of compliance with state inspection requirements. according to morita, they're working to get back on track. >> the city has taken this very seriously, and so we've done some very creative and innovative things recently. >> reporter: the public health department hired more inspectors. today there are 35. but that's still only one inspector for nearly every 200 high-risk restaurants. so the city turned to data analytics. tom schenk leads a team of coders and data scientists who created an algorithm to predict which restaurants are more likely to have the most serious types of violations. >> this is an opportunity for analytics to come in and say, can we do this a little bit better? >> reporter: this is how it works. the program crunches 12 variables based on publicly-

available information. things that seem obvious, like a restaurant's previous violations, the length of time since the last inspection, how long it's been operating, or nearby garbage complaints. and, the not-so-obvious, like the three-day average high temperature, nearby burglaries, and whether the place is licensed to sell tobacco. smoking is not allowed in restaurants. >> what we found is places with tobacco license were less likely to have these sanitation violations, which essentially probably means that they're maintaining those high levels to make sure that they protect these licenses that are also very valuable to them. >> reporter: the number of burglaries in an area, what does that have to do with food safety? >> what we found was areas that have property crime around it, were more likely to have sanitation violations. >> reporter: explain to me how the weather has anything to do with whether or not a restaurant might violate a food safety regulation? >> one of things that matters the most around having food violations is whether or not you're able to maintain the temperature of your food. and so when the temperature goes

up, sometimes it's harder to keep those things chilled or cooled. and what this algorithm essentially does, is it takes this data, these different observations that we have, and essentially weights them in terms of important and how much weight and importance each one of these variables have to predict whether or not there's a critical violation at a restaurant. >> reporter: schenk's team tested their program in 2014 and discovered the rate of finding violations increased by 25%. that meant, inspectors found violations about seven days earlier than before-- a week less of potential exposure for customers based on the algorithm, chicago's director of food protection gerrin cheek butler assigns the inspectors, also called sanitarians, to restaurants they must visit. >> the higher the coefficient the more likely there are to be critical and serious violations found at the inspection. so these are the ones that we would assign for inspection first. it updates continuously, so it's always updating.

so this has definitely helped us prioritize our inspections, put our sanitarians where they need to be. and so what we have found is that in the beginning of the year, we are finding that we have more critical and serious violations in the first quarter. >> reporter: that allows restaurants to correct problems early in the year. >> this is your inspection report. >> reporter: places like the restaurant on the south side, which failed its random inspection. inspector annette grimes found violations with the dishwasher. >> we need to go to the three it fixed.se this until we getse >> reporter: and temperatures of some foods. >> it's only 118. >> reporter: the owners were fined. >> it has to be 140 or above. so all of that has been discarded and you're being issued a critical citation for having those products. >> reporter: the managers have one week to make necessary changes or face the possibility of more fines and inspections. >> we'll make sure everything is taken care of as soon as possible. >> reporter: chicago restaurants are required to post their

inspection report somewhere publicly, but it's not like new york and los angeles, where restaurants get letter grades that are posted right in the front window. chicago does make the inspection results public online, posting them on the web in a database searchable by restaurant name. in addition, the city has launched the app open grid where residents can find public information including restaurant inspection results. chicago is sharing the code behind its algorithm so other municipalities can use it. montgomery county, maryland, was the first to try it out. in a test, it found violations three days earlier than before. besides the algorithm, the department of health also responds to complaints about restaurants. most come through the city's 311 system, or twitter. a program called foodborne chicago mines twitter for messages about food poisoning, and often responds. >> so she's saying, "food poisoning is not my favorite." and then we responded from

foodborne chicago and we say-- "sorry to hear that you were ill. the chicago health department can help." and then we give them the link. >> reporter: the link is to an online form asks users for more information about what happened. if the tweet checks out, the department of health sends an inspector. of the nearly 4,000 tweets reviewed in the last few years, about 600 generated an inspection. at latinicity, which passed its last inspection with only a few minor things to fix like a leaky sink, executive chef mark chmielewski welcomes chicago's use of the new algorithm. but he hopes restaurant goers check the city's inspection reports rather than believing unverified complaints on social media. >> that's a slippery slope. twitter and social media, they wield a very mighty sword. and if someone, they just-- "i had bad sushi at, you know, abc place." is it really from there, or was it from something that they had

for breakfast. they could do a lot of damage to somebody if it's incorrect. >> reporter: as for the restaurant on the south side, during the follow-up inspection this past week, inspector annette grimes found all violations corrected, and the restaurant passed. >> thompson: for the first time in four months, natural gas has stopped leaking from a well in southern california. the leak at porter ranch, in los angeles, began releasing methane and other compounds in october and caused several thousand residents to evacuate their homes. the local utility, southern california gas company, announced on thursday that the leak was capped for now. but there are questions about the health and environmental effects, and the impact on property values downwind from the leak. kelly mcevers, one of the hosts of npr's "all things

considered," has been covering the story, and she joins me now from los angeles. so, kelly, socaldeira gas says they have temporarily stopped the leak. what's the state of the fix and what happens next with it? >> well, the company that operates this gas storage facility says that the leak has been temporarily capped. what has to happen now is that state regulators have to go inspect that and make sure that it is a solid cap, and the leak will be sealed permanently. >> thompson: so how hesitant or concern read families about moving back in? >> right, so more than 5,000 families left this area near where this gas storage facility is. we talked to many of them. some people are fine with going back. some people are ready to go back. they're tired of living in hotels at the expense of the gas company, of course. but some people are hesitant to go back. we talked to one family whose

little girl got very sick, and it wasn't from the methane that's being released. that's not what makes people sick, say public health officials. it's the other compounds that are inside a gas storage facility like that can make people sick. but it can do things like rashes, cause respiratory diseases and other explikses. so there are some families that just don't necessarily trust that this leak is capped and that the health effects from it are completely gone. >> thompson: i understand that once it is permanently capped, the assistance that some of these families have been receiving will get cut off in about a week's time. is that really enough time to make sure that everything's okay? >> right. i mean, that's eight days that they're given once everything, you know, again once regulators say this cap is done, it's finished, and it's no longer leaking any gas, they'll get eight days of assistance from the company. it's hard to say. here's what publicca health officials and the gas company

say. they say there are no long-term health effects from all of this gas that was leaking over the course of these months. so when people go back, that gas won'ting leaking anymore, but i think the question that remains is what are the effects of the gas that was leaking during that time? and although public health officials and the gas company say there are no long-term health effects, there are other researchers that say we actually don't know. in addition to the methane, there was benzene leaking, and something called mercaptain, that's what gives us that smell that you know gas is leaking. that is what made people sick in the short term. lut the effects of benzene over the long-term, len screen is a cacarcinogen, so researchers say we don't have enough information about this leak over this amount of time. >> thompson: what do we know about the environmental impact of the leak. >> we spoke to a researcher, and

he said the amount of the methane being released is the size of a small country in europe. and a state like california that is spending so much money to reluc of duce its greenhouse gas emissions, and when that you are talk about something like methane, which is one of the worst greenhouse gas, this is a real setback. >> thompson: any sense of the economic impact in porter ranch and surrounding areas? >> well, there are a lot of lawyers now working with families who live in the area who are concerned about that very fact. people are very worried about their property values. there are some families, like i mentioned, who don't want to go back, but if they don't go back they've got to think about what to do with their home. once the gas company is no longer paying the rent, where do they live? there are a lot of families questioning how are they going to recuperate value of their home in an area where people probably don't want to live, don't want to buy a new house in porter ranch. and so it's a real concern. >> thompson: all right, mark zandi thank you so much for being here.

>> you're welcome. >> this is pbs newshour weekend, saturday. >> thompson: jimi hendrix is considered one of the greatest guitarists in rock ¡n roll history. he was from seattle, but before hendrix became famous in the u.s. in the late 1960's, he had a following in london. now, that city has turned his last residence there into a museum. the newshour's phil hirschkorn has more. >> before releasing his third and final studio album, jimi hendrix was living in london, playing venues like royal albert hall. in the summer of 1968, hendrix represented a top-floor apartment in this building. his girlfriend moved with him. >> well, it's quite strange, as you can imagine, 45 years on to be sitting in the same room you were sitting in when you were 22 years old. >> reporter: the apartment is

now restored as it looked then-- colorful cushions, persian rugs, a victorian shawl hanging over the bed. there's hendrix's turntable and vinyl record collection. he wrote songs on an acoustic guitar. his girlfriend said hendrix told her this was his first real home of his open. the building, in london's mayfair neighborhood, had good musical karma. classical composer george friedrich handle lived next door in the 1700s. magazine photographer barry wents of wentzell visited hendrix in this apartment. >> he said i got the. i wonder what it would be like to jam with him. >> hendrix moved back to new york in in 1969. he died in london at 1970 at age 27. the handle house trust spent $3.5 million ren vaight the apartment and is making handel and hendrix in london open to

the public permanently. >> thompson: and finally tonight, oklahoma experienced the 30 strongest earthquake in state history today. the u.s. geological survey says the 5.1 trembler could be felt throughout the northwest part of oklahoma and seven other states. oklahoma had more than 900 quakes that could be felt last year. and the national weather service has issued a wind chill warning tonight for nine states where temperatures will feel below zero. officials in baltimore, buffalo, philadelphia, and new york city have declared a code blue, alerting emergency officials to prepare and help get the hoimless indoors. and that's all for this edition of pbs newshour weekend. i'm megan thompson. thanks for joining us. good night. captioning sponsored by wnet

captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> 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 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 been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

[gunshots] [sirens wailing] (woodard) 1965-- in a predominantly black neighborhood in los angeles, decades of pent-up frustration and anger came to a head over poverty, racism, and police brutality. (man) get your hands up high. you can lift them higher than that. get them up there. first one drops their hands is a dead man. (woodard) the city that once shimmered with promise for african-americans exploded in gunfire and flames in the worst racial riot in postwar america. [shouting] (man) all we want is jobs. we get jobs, we don't bother nobody. if we don't got no jobs, we'll tear up los angeles, period. the police-- we'll burn them up too.