ecaptioning sponsored by t >> sreenivasan: on this edition for saturday, february 10th... rising tensions in the air over rael and syria. another white house staffer resigns id domestic abuse allegations. and in our signature segment, trying to prevent the resurgence of piracy in somalia. next on "pbs newshour weekend." "pbs newshour weekend" i 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. ithe j.p.b. found. onthe andeamily fund. rosalind p. walter berarbara hope zurg. corporate funding is provided ual of america-- designing customized individual

and group retirement producty that's 're your retirement company. >> additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and bynt butions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. from the tisch wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thank you for joining us. conflict in the skies over syria l this evening following the most serious skirmishes between the two countries since 2011. right now, two israeli pilots are being treated for injuries after syria shot down their f-16 while they were striking what israel says are iranian air bases within syria. but today's violence began after israel shot down an iranian drone which entered israeli airspace from syria. an israeli military spokesman warned, "iran is dragging the region int which it doesn't know how it will end." joining me now from beirut is

newshour weekend special correspondent jane fergun. jane, let's just clarify. there's been some confusion about theimeline of events. what happened when? >> at the minute, we're looking at a number of events today. the first thing that we heard was that this this israeli fighr jet, an f-16, had been downed. but the israelis have now said that, actually, the initial incident is what they're calling an iranian zone entered israeli air space. it was shot down imdiately by the israelis. they then launched attacks inside syria to take down what they say are iranian drone facilities. and it was then that one oae the ii fighter jets was shot down. we know that the two pilots ejected. one of them is supposed to be in decent condition. the other is actuallyti crilly ill at this point. >> sreenivasan: tell us, how is this playing out in the region when peopl are actually exchanging fire-- i know you're in beirut-- but what is media coverage of it?

are tensions higher? >> tengsions are hih because everybody is aware of the fact that this is a hugely complicated and region-wide conflict going on inside sria at the moment. what the israelis are really trying to prevent is to make sure that hezbollah, the iran-backed militia here ionn lebanon,'t get completely uninterrupted supply lines, basically frirut all the way across to iran. they want to make sure, also, that there iranians't building a permanent military presence inside syria. so they want to make sure that those military baseshat the iranian forces are on in syria already aren't going to stay, and are certainly not going to creep close to their borders. so from the israeli perspective to, have iranian drones coming into their territory, certainly increases the tensions aroundan thisthe israelis have said that that is something that they will not acceptre >>ivasan: and from the syrian government's perspective, they're saying you are attain

locations inside our borders. >> indeed. this it's war in syria has en for years, but even more so this week, we've seen that this is a hugely multifaceted war. essentially it's several wars going on at once, so the syrian government is saying, "well, israeli jets were inse our territory," but you've also got a ge amount of international involvement in this war. you've got iranians there fighting on the side of the syrians. you've also got american troops in with syriean rls. you've also now got turkish troops inside syria. so the situation is not oity one whereb extremely complicated, but it's also very dangerous because all of these multifaceted layers and various militaries that are present there are continaglly bumping up nst one another. and increasingly so, asi iss' territory has shrunk down to barely any. that territory is what they're now fighting over. >> sreenivasan: does thest

ss that's happening inside the israeli government right now and the tension that prime minister netanyahu is facing inside his own government, does that play to any ofs? t >> it certainly would put him under pressure. there's a pressure to make sure that there is there isn't seen to be any building iranian presence on israel's borders. we know whenver the fighter t was shot down today, that the sirens sounded across the goland heights and in northern israel. it certainly adds a lot of tension inside israel where israelis are extremely concerned about the iranian presence that could be building up close to their borders. that puts him under pressure. but we always have been hearing now for quite some time fiery rhetoric about what israel will and will not accept by itsle ership, but, of course, in terms of their response, they have to come out very strongly and show that they are protecting their territorial integrity. and that's what we saw today

after the fighter jet was shot down, the israeli defense forces have said that they then launched 12 more strikes deep inside syria. they say that severalf those were against iranian drone facilities. >> sreenivasan: all right, newshour's weekend special correspondent jane ferguson joining us via skype from beirut. thanks so much. thank you. president trump said he would not immediately release a tdemocratic memo fr house intelligence committee and has sent it back for revisions. democrats drted the memo as a rebuttal to the so-called nunes memo that alleged the f.b.i. abused surveillance power during the 2016 campaign. white house counsel donald hemcgahn wrote thatresident is "inclined to declassify" the democratic memo, but ited cont"numerous classified and especially sensitive passages." president trump tweeted this morning that the memo was "very political and long,"nd said it would have to be "heavily redacted." democrats decrd the president's actions as hypocritical. the top democrat on the house intelligence coe

representative, adam schiff, who authored the response memo, tweeted at the president "yoou concerns fores and methods would be more convincing if you hadn't decided to release the g.o.p. memo before reading it and over the objections of the f.b.i." democratic senator dianne feinstein, who has siviewed the cled documents, asked in a tweet about the president "what e hiding by blocking th schiff memo? any minor redactions should be ma as quickly as possible the memo should be released." white house speechwriter david sorensen stepped down yesterday after his ex-wife alleged that he was violent and emotionally abusive during their marriage. he is the second white house official this week to resign following allegations of domestic abuse. in an intervw with the "washington post," sorensen's ex-wife, jessica corbett, detailed the allegations including that he ran a car over her foot and put a cigarette out on her hand. sorensen denied the allegationss and told the "t" that he resigned because he, "didn't want the white house to have to

deal with this distraction." white house staff is still grappling with the fallout of former staff secretary rob porter, who resigned wednesday. two of porter's ex-wives have cused him of verbal and physical abuse. porter has denied the allegations. president trump raised a question about due procesroamid the corsy, tweeting" people's lives are beinges shattered andoyed by a mere allegation. some are true and some are false..." asking, "is there no such thing any longer as due process?" mr. trump has not addressed the women who stepped forward, or the f.b.i. investigation into the claims by porter's ex-wives that found the allegations credible. senator patty murray responded to the presidentn twitter saying, "women's lives are upended every day by sexual violen and harassment. i'm going to keep standing with them, and trusting them, even if the presiden't." last year u.s. intelligenc operatives paid $100,000 to russians claiming to have stolen

n.s.a. hacking tools. this according to the "new york times." the united states opened a secret communications back chnel with a russian, and after delivering that $100,000 as the first installment of a $1-million bounty, were given possibly fabricated formation about president trump. the u.s. later cut off the deal over concerns it was actually part of russian intelligence effo to create discord within the american government. find out what has changed in northern syria in the past six months. visit pbs.org/newshour. >> sreenivasan: the waters off the coast of somalia famously be ecame st lawless in the world between 2010 and 2012 as pirates hijacked and ransomed commercial vessels at record rates. since then, stepped-up international naval patrols and better security measures on ships appear to have put the pirates out of business. but appearances can be deceiving. once again, newshour weekend eecial correspondent jan

ferguson has our story. >> reporter: every morning is busy at bosaso's port, with fishermereturning from the sea and deli rvering their catchht onto the beach. ers off puntland, a semi-autonomous region of somalia, are rich with massive tuna. >> reporter: so, they migrate through somali waters? >> reporter: so, somalia is very blesd with these fish. >> reporter: it's not just fish that pass through these waters; commercial ships do, too. d just a few years ago, this was the most dangerous place in the world for thm. pirates operated along the coast in puntland, attacking 237 ships in 2011 alone, costing billions of dollars in ransoms, higher insurance premiums and improving security and rerouting vessels. sien, international navald patrols etter security

measures onboard ships made them harder to hijack. international efrts to arrest pirates were stepped up b various coast guards, and pirate prisons were built in somalia and abroad, and soon filled up. as business dwindled, many of the pirates here who used to hijack ships went back to their old jobs as fishermen. down at the port, we met zakaria abou and abdikader samatar, two former pirates. they're trying to earn an honest ling this time around. zakaria was a pirate for five years before spending a year in ja. y says he made over $100,000 but lost that moen he was arrested. even if piracy weren't soisky these days, he complains, it takes a lot of capital to get it off the ground. >> ( translated ): it's really very difficult to go back to piracy. you have to buy food, oil, gas, diesel, guns, bullets, everything. u have to take a loan f this. all of this money will go on your account, and if you don't

pay, it's very risky. but in fishing, it's very easy. you go out for a day and come back. youan will earn moneythen you can buy your things. >> reporter: but making a decent livin fg frhing is tough. >> ( translated ): whenever we go out a fishing fund 4-5 days, when we come back, the money that we make is very little. r eporter: 22-year-old abdi kader was just a teenager when piracy was at its height. unlike zakaria, he never got caught by e coast guard, and there's a part of him that misses the thrill of it. >> ( translated ): in piracy, you are a risk taker. immediately when you e a boat or ship, you risk yourself. you don't care about anything. your only aim is to catch it, and you do whatever is possible to catch the boat. there re some ships that will vanish, and we cannot catch them. y we catch them becaus we use ladders, hand grenades, bazookas, so that when we fire they stop immediately. a>> reporter: he's hardl fisherman by choice. given the chance, would you rather be a pirate or a fisherman?

>> ( translated ): there is no chance to do piracy now. it's closed. but it is better than fishing. >> reporter: somalia's ongoing civil war began in 1991 when the government collapsed. decades of chaos since then created an environment of lawlsness in a country full of guns and desperately po people. a nato effort to tackle piracy, operation ocean shield, began in 2009, with war ships patrolling the waters. they declared mission accomplished a year ago and stopped.in ben laweorks with the colorado-based think tank oceans beyond piracy. >> a lot of the kind of on-the-scene mitigation efforts, whicalwere: international n inalitions; deployment of armed guards; and somecalled adherence to best management practices, or industry-recommended best management practices, which are things like reporting in, you know, a vessel's location going into this... what's called the high-risk area; and the kind of

simpler things like driving ships fastu er, ow, kind of hardening the... the vessel. all that really brough, you know, the incidents of somali piracy, but it really just kind of mitigated the... the problem at sea. >> reporter: despite all of those security measures, the conditions that created pirates in the first place still exist. people here need jobs. somalis don't trnaity eat much fish. as an animal herding culture,fe many prer to eat livescack like goatsle or sheep. so, fishing as an industry here is rudimentary and often unprofitable. efforts are under way to change that andake advantage of the country's vast, more than 1,800-mile-long coastline rich with fish. ndcess to domestic a international markets could change lives. but to sell fish internationally, they will have to raise their standas.rd

there might be plenty of fish here, but there's also plenty of filth. and if people want to make money out ofd these fish port them, they are going to have to make this whole area much more clean and much more professional. the united nations' food and agriculture organization is tryingt. to do t they are building a new fish processing plant next door. it's not being used yet but hopes to provide hygienic places to chop up fish and chilsro to store it. other changes will bthneeded in hofish are caught and brought in from the water, too. john purvis is the project's manager. >> what is needed here is a transformation of the... the sector. and that... that's going t involve change at the point where the fish is caught; it's going to involve change wheresh the s moved from the fishing ground to the land, particularly the landing site; and then, the... the whole marketing, processing, export area. and there needs to be change at every point in that value chain, if you like. >> reporter: animal herders from

inland are sufferingm a devastating drought. as their camels and goats die, they are fleeing destitute to refugee camps like this one just outside the coastal town of bosaso. the u.n. is teaching the women from the camps to process and dry fish so they can feed their families as well as sell it to make money. boys from the camp are also being taught to fishme these young n grew up around boats, so the experienced about fishermen down at the port are passing on their knowledge. s eager w us around their training vessel, they gave us a toth. the hope i one day they will make good wages from an export industry here. are we likely to see somali fish exported to europe, to the states? >> yeah, yeah. why not? you look at the... the target is... a lot of the targ is for the migrating tuna that is caught by vessels in kenya, nzania, seychelles, mauritius. and that fish goes... it's handled well, and it goes globally. you can find it in any market

across the globe. and there's no reason that that same stock tuna fish coming into n'somali waters shouenter the... the same market. >> reporter: that will take many years, however, years during which these communities will keep struggling to develop, leaving the lure of piracy to remain. last spring, pirates in puntland snatched the first commercial vessel in years. it was a reminder that piracy might return if conditions on land don't improve and surity at sea continues to relax. and it not just small-time piracy the world has to fear. there are more powerful figures waiting in the shadows,ays john purvis. >> the part that is not here active at the moment is the... the organized syndicate part of it. that probably has businesses elsewhere on the continent and in the... the world. but if they decide to see an opportunity to come back again and reorrkganize their net that's still there. the kingpins, the so-called kingpins, are still... still

active. s >> reporter: and tha warning for sailors worldwide, that the waters off somaliaco d once again become a pirates'aradise. >> sreenivasan: if you are concerned about the impact that s litical ads on facebook are having on electiound the world, you are not alone. facebook is notoriously opaque when it comes to letting t public know who is being targeted and how. go, several months "propublica" released a tool for your browser called the political ad collector, which crowd sources the job of monitoring the ads that you might not even talize are poical. now, we are seeing some of the results from this tool. orlia angwin is a reporter propublica. so first, what does the tool do. >> so, basicalt', a little teenyibility of software you can add to your ochro firefox web browser.

so when you log on to facebook, it will just notice what ads are being shown to you on your newsfeed, and grab them,igure out which ones are political, and send those political ones to this public database re collecting all the political ads we can find from facebook. >> sreedivasan: this is erent because it's not like the tv ads that you and i might see at the same time. there's a chance that you're going to see ads that i will never see and vice versa. >> the explicit goal of facebook is sort of niche microtargetting, so most likely you and i will not s the same ads. so the goal here is to get as many as we can, because,rw ote, no one would see wem, except for their targeted audiencech could be a very small niche. >> sreenivasan: you have also rolled this out to help in other elections around the world. how is that going? >> it's been really interesting. we started with the ger tn elections fall, and then we went to australia's special referendum on gay marriage, d we have been rolling it out in all these other countries since then. and in aralia, for instance they, did find some misleading

ads they found some sort of antempts to mislead certain groups. in germany, we saw the same thing with the far-right party, an ad mieading, characterizing a crime, blaming it on an immigration but idere is no ce it was based on immigration. it allows for for journalists to do the ct checking they had already done all the time on radio, tv, anod prins. >> sreenivasan: and is this a little different from the tv ad, where the candidate comes bsack and s, "i endorse this ad" at iae end. on social m msms they don't have to say that and it could be third-party groups. >> these ads could be tied to facebook page, "americans for america," and it's impossible to tell who are those people. locebook said they will add more required disres. that hasn't happened yet. right now it allows people to grvestigate who are thesps who are placing them. >> sreenivasan: how does this translate into what will happen 2018 in the u.s. elections and all the ads we are likely to be targeted against, or targeted through? >> our goal is to really blanke the nation with our tool for

this 2018 midterm elections becaus twe wanthere to be as much transparency as there can be about political speech during this election. >> sreenivasan: is there something that you've learned about what's happening in australia or somhere else in europe that can be applied to what happened whaps here? >> what we i have to each and every location is we have it-- we actually build an algorithm to teach it what is political speech in that country. and so it takes us a while to train the algoy.thm in each ing to have to do that one're local elections. right now, we have sort of a national idea of what political speech is, but there may be really local issues that we don't catch. so what we're going to be constantly doing is training our algorithm to be better and better at catching political speech, which is kind of ironic, because our whole goal here is to police algorithms and then we have to build agrisms to police the algorithms. >> sreenivasan: and not allli cal ads are just about a specific candidate. you're also finding that there are topics that institutions, even companies are weighing in on that are political. >> yes.

there'a lot of issue-based advertising, particularly now early in the cycle. and what is frustrating is the federal election commission is trying to build new disclosure rules that make it so internet ads have to be more accountable. they have to have the kind of "i paid for this," line but they're not necessarily going to apply to issue ads. they're really only going to be for the candidates so there will be issue ads unaccountable in this election unless something changes with the way our election laws are regulated here. sreenivasan: right now anyone can download this trool? >> you can basically go to our website, propublica. "help us monitor political ads." ere is a link to the firefox or chrome browrs selection. what's really fun for users, when you open the browser shows ads you're not seeing. it says, here are the ads you're seeing that are political," and "these are the ones that weren't targeting you." >> sreenivasan: julia angwin of propublica, thanks so much. >> thank you.

>> this is "pbs newshour weekend," saturday. >> sreenivasan: the diplomatic thaw between north and south korea appears to be picking up steam on day two of the olymc games. north korean dictanvr kim jong uned south korea's president moon jae-in to pyongyang for talks. the invitation was delivered by kim's younger sister kim yo jong who is attending the pyeongcha games. there is no word yet on when that visit might happen. it would be president moon's first time visiting the north korean capital. both president moon and kim yo jong were on hand for the unified korean women's hockey team's debut in the with only a few weeks of practice together, they faced- off against switzerland, losing eig to zero. north korea's han soojin nearly broke through with an early shot on goal that bounced off the crossbar. the korean team will play agai centers for disease control show one out of every ten u.s. deaths

this week was caused by the flu or pneumonia. in a conference call, the c.d.c.'s acting director anne schuchat warns that deths from the current flu season are climbing. this year's flu outhas now reached as high as the peak of the 2009 swine flu pandemic and is likely to cause more deaths. the cdc says 63 children have died so far from flu-related symptoms this season and that number is expected to rise. we are now learning that last september's masve data breach at equifax exposed more customer data than was previously reported. documents given to the senate banking committee show that equifax not only exposed the names, social security numbers,i h dates, addresses, driver's license numbers, and credit card numbers of more than 145 million people, but tax identification numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, and credit card expiration dates were also cessed by online criminals. >>

sreenivasan: finally tonight, we remember veteran actor reg e. cathey. he is best remembered as norman wilson from hbo's "the wire," and freddy the barbeque owner on netflix's "house of cards," a role that earned cathey an emmy in 2015.t he circumstances surrounding his passing have not yet been 59de public. reg e. cathey waears-old. that's all for this edition of" pbs newshour weekend." i'm hari sreenivasan. thanks for wooching. have anight. 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.

cheryl and philip milste family. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. dr. p. roy vagelos andgeiana t. s. the j.p.b. foundation. the anderson family fund. rosalind p. walter barbara hope zuckerberg. corpe funding is provided by mutual of america-- desigusningmized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company.na additsupport 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.

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