captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for saturday, november 4: president trump embarks on aion five-nation trip to asia; systemic abuse in florida's juvenile justice system; and the syrian girl who called the world's attention to the siege of aleppo. next on "pbs newshour weekend." >> "pbs newshour weekend" is made possible by: bernard and irene schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. dr. p. roy vagelos and diana t. vagelos. the j.b.p. foundation. the anderson family fund. rosalind p. walter, in memory of abby m. o'neill. barbara hope zuckerberg.

corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're 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. ank you. from the tisch wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening, and thanks for joining us. president trump arrives in japan tonight to begin a 12-day, five- country trip to asia, expected to be dominated by concerns over north korea and strengthening economic ties. early today in hawaii, mr. trump boarded "air force one" for the long flight from honolulu to tokyo. on his way to the airport, he dropped by the trump international hotel waikiki and talked to staff. it is a hotel that licenses the trump name. during his hawaii stopover, the president and first lady, melania trump, also visited the u.s.s. "arizona" memorial at pearl harbor.

sailors placed a wreath where 1,200 sailors and marines died in the japanese attack in 1941. the trumps tossed white flower petals into the water above the wrecked hull. yesterday in hawaii, mr. trump met with the admiral in charge of the u.s. pacific command, which oversees pentagon operations in the pacific and indian oceans, including waters off north korea and china. after japan, the president is scheduled to visit south korea, china, vietnam and the philippines. the white house and the kremlin say mr. trump might meet with russia's president vladimir putin in vietnam, where both will attend the asia pacific economic cooperation summit. american government personnel working in somalia are being told to leave the country. today, the u.s. ordered all non- essential workers at its mission in mogadishu to leave immediately because of "specific threat information" at the capital's airport. the u.s. has no embassy in mogadishu, and the mission is based in neighboring kenya. car and truck bombings in mogadishu in the past month have killed hundreds of people. the pentagon said yesterday u.s. warplanes carried out their

first air strikes on isis targets in somalia. the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the american embassy in iran was celebrated by thousands of iranians today. the march and rally in tehran took place near the site of the former embassy where 52 hostages were held for 444 days. the u.s. has never opened a new embassy in iran. a top iranian security official told the crowd america is iran"" eternal enemy." iran used the occasion to display a ballistic missile with a 1,200-mile range, according to iran's state-run news agency. last month, the u.s. imposed new sanctions on iran over its missile program, and president trump declined to re-certify the 2015 nuclear deal. blaming iran's meddling in arab affairs, lebanese prime minister saad hariri made a surprise announcement today that he's resigning. during a speech in saudi arabia, hariri, prime minister since last year and in two earlier stints, denounced the iran- backed hezbollah group.

he also said he feared for his life if he were to stay on the job. hariri's father, former prime minister rafik hariri, was assassinated in a 2005 car bombing. carlos puigdemont, the man who called for the catalonia region of spain to secede, is now in belgium. he says he's willing to cooperate with belgian authorities if arrested and spain calls for his extradition. spain issued a european arrest warrant for puigdemont and four other members of the deposed government. the charges include rebellion, sedition and embezzlement. belgian prosecutors say a judge will decide if the five will be taken into custody. spain has set new elections for catalonia next month. a young mexican girl with cerebral palsy has been reunited with her family in texas after her release from u.s. custody. ten-year-old rosa maria hernandez has lived in the u.s. since her parents brought her here as an infant. all of them are undocumented. last week, u.s. border patrol agents stopped her ambulance at a highway checkpoint near the

mexican border. she was headed from laredo to corpus christi for emergency gallbladder surgery and was detained after the operation. hernandez was released after the a.c.l.u. sued the government for violating her rights, but she and her parents still face the threat of deportation. find out what to look for during president trump's asia trip. visit www.pbs.org/newshour. a new medical study is casting doubt on a heart procedure used by hundreds of thousands of americans every year. the study, published this week by "the lancet," found that stents, the metal wires implanted to unblock heart arteries, do improve blood flow but do little to ease chest pain. dr. ajay kritane is the director of cardiac catheterization labs at columbia university medical center here in new york, and he joins me now in the studio to discuss this study. first of all, how significant was the study? >> it's an interesting study. it was only 200 patients and in cardiac catheterization trials

we're used to much larger studies but it had a novel concept and that was the concept of a stent procedure and a placebo stent procedure, sometimes called a sham. what's interesting about it is patients with milder symptoms and disease in only one of the three heart arteries were aggressively managed with medicine, and then after some time, were actually randomized to one of those two techniques. and about six weeks later they were reassessed for not only their symptoms but how much they could exercise. there was an improvement in flow in the arteries, not only in the cath lab, but in follow-up. their stress test results were normalized. they could exercise a little bit longer than at baseline. but that increment at exercise was not that dissimilar to the patients who got the placebo procedure. >> sreenivasan: so were you surpriseed by that finding? >> , you know, at first i was but when one looks at studies in times of medicine you have to look carefully at the types of patients enrolled in the study. and what's interested here is

the medicines used to tree the patients up front and that they had single-vessel disease should cast it in a different light. at baseline, these patients had one episode of chest pain per month. in addition, their ability to exercise was pretty good. in fact if you measure something called the vo2-max-- you often see athletes with masks on, they're measuring vo2 max. that was basically the same as patients without any heart disease at the same age. >> sreenivasan: so it was almost a healthier population than people who get stents for severe chest pain and more advanced disease. >> exactly. and that's one of the problems i had, at least with the story. it generalized the study finding to a broad swath of patients with more severe disease and even those with more severe symptoms. >> sreenivasan: given the amount of money in these procedures in hospitals around the country, it's almost become a standard of care. you know, you're at a facility that does the research, you're

up on the latest. is there-- are there so many extra sort of stent prescriptions, so to speak? are there procedures that might not be necessary where perhaps medical treatment could work first, or exercise, eat right, that kind of stuff could help? >> absolutely. i think the key thing is that you have to treat the right patient. so in the hospital-- and i work at new york presbyterian hospital here in the city-- and in that setting, hospitalized patients with heart attack and acute chest pain, there's no doubt stents work in those pairntz but for patients that are more stable, like those in this study, who had chest pain for an average of nine months before that were stable, especially if you have milder disease and milder symptoms, medicines are very, very effect 95 that setting. oftentimes patients, in some respects get very concerned when you tell them they have a heart artery blockage, but if it does not obstruct flow then medication is often the best effect of therapy initially. >> sreenivasan: what happens now? this is a group of 200 people. are had there going to be other

researchers who say let's look at other types of patients, let's look at larger populations to see whether this is effective or not? >> i do think so. this is, cleecialg a springboard for further studies. i think the investigators, to their credit have, shown you can do this type of design, which is a little novel to be the placebo procedure, but i think for the way we treat parties we have to be patient centric, and treat the patient, not just angiogram or what we see in the path lab. >> ajay kirtane from columbia university, thanks so much. >> thanks for having. >> sreenivasan: once syria's most populous city, aleppo has been bombed into ruins during the country's six-year civil war. one of the faces and voices of the plight of syrian civilians during the siege of aleppo was a seven-year-old girl named bana alabed, who developed a worldwide following on twitter. bana is now eight, and, with her mother, she's authored a book about surviving the conflict and escaping it. it's called "dear world: a

syrian girl's story of war and plea for peace." "newshour weekend" special correspondent marcia biggs recently caught up with bana and her mother in turkey. >> reporter: in turkey's capital of ankara, this is a typical morning in the life of an eight- year-old-- making her bed, brushing her teeth and getting ready for school. but for bana alabed, this is a long way from where she was just one year ago. ( distant artillery fire ) she was caught between government forces and rebels, along with her parents, two brothers and thousands of other syrians during the four-year battle of aleppo, which ended last year. >> they still bomb in the night, in the morning, in afternoon, in the evening. >> reporter: her mother, fatemah, says the war turned their family's simple and idyllic life into hell, with syrian president bashar al assad relentlessly bombing the rebel- held eastern side of the city where the alabed family lived. what was it that made you stay so long?

>> we are syrian people, and this is our country. and what we face there, we kept hoping that this day maybe will... the war will stop, or that they... the bomb will stop this month or next month. >> reporter: in july of last year, when president assad blocked deliveries of food into east aleppo, the possibility of starvation became more threatening than bombs. the alabed family survived on rice and macaroni. >> i was very sick, and my... my dad go outside to find to me medicine because there is no medicine, no hospitals. i was too sick. hi, my name is bana. >> reporter: when bana's school was bombed, her mom says bana came up with the idea to post a video online. >> first thing i said to mom, "why the people didn't know about us?"

>> so, she want to post in facebook. but i said, "no, twitter is more strong or more powerful." >> reporter: it reaches more people? >> yes. >> reporter: bana's first tweet said simply, "i need peace." hundreds more tweets followed, many with pictures and videos shot by her mother. >> good morning from aleppo. we don't have food. aleppo under siege. >> reporter: appealing to presidents assad and putin to stop the bombs... >> we are afraid. >> reporter: ...bana begged the world to listen and help children just like her. >> we can't go out! i want them to go to the park, play, learn; when they hurt themselves, go to the hospital. >> reporter: and you felt like if you told the world what was happening... >> yeah, they will help. stand with aleppo.

>> reporter: inspiring the hashtag "stand with aleppo," bana's twitter followers grew. today, she has over 360,000. assad called her account, which is managed by her mother, "propaganda." how do you react to those who say that she was only tweeting what you told her to tweet? >> i did what she wants. >> reporter: and she wanted to post all the time? >> yes, of course. she was... she was like, "yes, mom, today there was a lot of bomb. we should tell the people that today i am not fine." >> reporter: fatemah says they are not going to stop speaking out. >> i am a mother, and i want to go and protect my children not just for bana or her brothers; we were talking about... in syria about millions of families. we are normal family, and all the children deserve to live.

>> hello, my friends. how are you? we are fine today. >> reporter: she says the ved them.responses on twitter >> i love you, my friends. >> that's make us feel not just hope. no, we feel that the war will end, and we'll get peace again. >> i want to try to be alive on sunday if there is no bombing and life is good. thank you, goodbye. >> reporter: but as the alabeds and their twitter followers watched helplessly, the siege continued and the bombings intensified. one night, air strikes hit bana's best friend's house. she witnessed her lifeless body being pulled from the rubble. she later tweeted, "i can't stop crying." >> she was, like, sleeping. she was dead. yeah, like, i feel sad, and my mom said, "let's go, bana." >> reporter: three days later, the bombs made a direct hit on bana's own home.

she tweeted, "tonight, we have no house. it's bombed, and i got in rubble. i saw deaths, and i almost died." fatemah recorded this video the next day. >> our home disappeared. like, there was no hope now. everything now became like a shadow for us. i became a refugee in my country. >> reporter: the family finally decided to flee, and, last december, they were on one of the last buses out of aleppo, making a perilous journey on roads lined with bombs and snipers and finally arriving in turkey. >> i was very happy to see fruits and... and orange, apples, bananas. i feel very happy. >> reporter: it had been a long time since you had eaten any of those things? >> yes.

>> reporter: turkish president recep tayyip erdogan capitalized on her celebrity and personally welcomed the alabeds. and unlike most of the other 2.5 million syrian refugees in turkey, the family was granted citizenship. today, in ankara, bana can be a child again, but she hasn't forgotten those that she left behind. bana and fatemah say their book, "dear world," is dedicated to every child suffering in war, the millions of displaced syrians as well as those who still remain in cities under siege. >> i want the kids to be strong, not feel scared about... from the bombs. don't be scared, help each other, be good. >> sreenivasan: a "miami heral""

investigation into florida's juvenile justice system depicts a harsh and violent culture for teens behind bars. the story, "fight club," revealed steady beatings by guards, who also forced young prisoners to fight each other. the series is based on terviews as well as an in-depth review of documents and surveillance videos. as a result of the reporting, florida lawmakers have made two surprise visits to juvenile detention facilities to inspect conditions themselves." miami herald" senior investigative reporter carol marbin miller is one of the authors of the series, and i recently spoke to her about it. for people who haven't seen the report yet, first of all, what did it find? >> well, we looked at 10 years' worth of data that we obtained from the state department of juvenile justice. we found widespread use of unnecessary and excessive force. we found a number of instances in which officers and youth workers outsourced discipline.

what they were doing is offering honey buns and other treats to detainees to get them to beat up other kids who were unruly. we found rampant sexual misconduct, and we found that over many years, there was a persistent problem of medical neglect. >> sreenivasan: how pervasive was this? >> well, it's hard for us to say precisely how widespread it was. because we did not have access to all of the reports. what we did was we got a spreadsheet from the state with about 20,000 rows of data, and we went through the spreadsheet, and we requested cases that looked interesting to us. and in so doing, we found cases of outsourcing of discipline all over the state of florida. and what we read in those reports was remarkably

consistent across jurisdictions, where the youths were using the same language. we also found videos that were very disturbing in which you can see these kids fighting each other with officers or youth workers right there, appearing as if they're refereeing these bouts. >> sreenivasan: who are these officers? what are their backgrounds? >> that's one of the problems that we identified is the officers in the lockups and the youth workers in the commitment facilities were not professional staff. we drilled down into the background of many of these workers. we found some of them had criminal histories that were not much better than the youths they were supervising. we found there were a large number of men and women who had been hired by either the state or a private provider after they'd been fired for misconduct

by a state prison or a local police department. >> sreenivasan: you detailed so many particular case where kids were just brutally beaten to within an inch of their life, or in a couple cases, had lost their lives. have any of these people been charged for criminal misconduct? >> there have been a hand full of cases where youth workers who used really egregiously excessive force were criminally charged, and a hand full of convictions that we saw. with regard to the children who lost their lives, we are not aware of a single instance in which a worker was sent to prison for wrongdoing. >> sreenivasan: what about the department of juvenile justice? what's their response been? >> in the hearings that have been held since we published, they have acknowledged that all of the facts of this series were

accurate. they have argued that the "herald" was not fair to them. they say that we did not give them adequate credit for some reforms in recent years. we did give them credit, for instance, for the civil citation program that was launched in 2011 in which kids who commit nonviolent, nonserious offenses can be given the equivalent of a ticket, and they avoid getting arrested and sent to a youth facility. d.j.j. also is taking credit for the significant reduction in youth crime. that's kind of a stretch, however, in that youth crime nationwide has been reduced by greater than 50% in the last decade. that's happened all over the country. we have seen this very significant reduction in youth

criminality across the board. >> sreenivasan: what's the response been to your articles? >> there was a bill filed last week by a couple of lawmakers who want the authority to go to go into the facilities without advance notice to the state. there are other ideas being bounced around, a couple of senate committees that have held hearings right after our series ran. one probably would be to have the equivalent of school resource officers inside every one of these facilities so that you would have an independent set of eyes and ears watching what's going on and folks who would be able to report misconduct to an entity separate from the department of juvenile justice. >> sreenivasan: all right, the investigation is called "fight club," by the "miami herald." we're joined by carol marbin

miller. thanks so much for joining us. >> thanks for having me. >> this is pbs newshour weekend, saturday. >> sreenivasan: the "washington post" reports president trump's long-time personal bodyguard, keith schiller, will speak to one panel investigating russian meddling in last year's presidential election. the "post" says schiller will be interviewed tuesday by members of the house of representatives intelligence committee, specifically about mr. trump's 2013 trip to moscow to attend the miss universe pageant. a dossier compiled by a former british intelligence officer, christopher steele, suggested mr. trump had engaged in personally compromising behavior on that visit. that information has not been verified, and president trump has called the allegations a" disgrace." schiller, who served as the white house director of oval office operations until september, may also be questioned about the firing of f.b.i. director jim comey, according to the "post." netflix is suspending actor kevin spacey from "house of cards," the show that put t streaming service on the map as a source of original

programming. the network and the show's production company, media rights capital, announced the move last night. they suspended production of the sixth and final season earlier this week. netflix also announced it won't release a movie about gore vidal starring and produced by spacey. the decisions follow sexual harassment accusations against spacey, including cnn's report of eight anonymous "house of cards" employees complaining about spacey's behavior on the set. spacey's troubles began sunday when buzzfeed published accusations by an actor who says, when he was 14, spacey made an unwanted sexual advance toward him at a party 31 years ago. six miami firefighters have been fired for a racist act. they were involved in a september incident in which a noose was draped over a framed family photo belonging to a black lieutenant in their station. city officials say 11 firefighters were involved, and five others could be suspended or demoted.

finally, a spokesman for rand paul says the senator from kentucky is "fine" after being "blindsided" in his home in bowling green yesterday. the 54-year-old paul suffered only a minor injury. police have arrested rene boucher for the assault but gave not further details. that's all for this edition of" pbs newshour weekend." i'm hari sreenivasan. thanks for watching. have a good night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: bernard and irene schwartz.

the cheryl and philip milstein family. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. dr. p. roy vagelos and diana t. vagelos. the j.p.b. foundation. the anderson family fund. rosalind p. walter, in memory of abby m. o'neill. barbara hope zuckerberg. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. 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. be more, pbs.

[helicopter blades thrumming] [scattered gunfire and explosions] thomas nash: to know that you're gonna get into a helicopter and fly into hell... [rock-'n'-roll playing] and don't even... know if you can reach your objective because of the fire you're taking. and they would come, and they would land, or they would be three feet off the ground, and they would pick people up, wounded people. and people, they would be hanging off the skids, trying to get on that helicopter. you could see it in their eyes, guys looking up a-and wanting to get on that helicopter to get out of there. and you could see it in the pilot's eyes and think-- and "we can't take any more." you know? "we're not gonna be able to get out of here."