captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this ed, ion for sundptember 23: plans emerge for the supreme court nonee and the woman accusing him of sexual assault to testify this we. in our signature segment, the ethical question facing architects who design prisons. and new discoveries about plastic pollution on a microscopic level. next on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: bernard and irene schwartz. sue and edgar wachenheim iii. nd philip milstein family. dr. p. roy vagelos and diana t. vagelos. the j.p.b. foundation. rosalind p. walter. barbara hope zuckerberg. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- signing customized individual

and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. aadditional supporteen provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. ayou. from the tisch wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thank you for joining us. christine blasey ford, the woman who accuses supreme court nominee brett kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were ifboth teenagers, will te before the senate judiciary committee in an open session on thursday morning. but crucial details remain. the republican-led committee said in an email to ford's lawyers today that "the senate judiciary committee cannot hand over its constitutional duties to attorneys for outside witnesses. the committee determines which itnesses to call, how many witnesses to call, in what order tca them and who will question them.

th republican senator lindsey graham, a member of the senate eadiciary committee, said ford will be d "respectfully," o d that he also wants to be" fair"dge kavanaugh. >> what am i supposed to do? go ahead and ruin this guy's life, based on an accusation. i don't know when it happened, i don't know where it happened, and everybody named in regard to being there said it didn't happen. >> sreenivasan: senate democrats have unsuccessfully called for an independent investigationf ford's allegations. without an investigation, democratic senator pay murray says the republican-majority committee has already decided the outcome. >> the way the senate republicans have now set this up, that is what we're going to have is do you believe her or do you believe him? that is exactly why we have been pressing for an f.b.i. investigation that should only take few days. the senate republicans have edetermined the outcome this being a "he said, she said" byaking that away. sreenivasan: officials are warning that parts of eastern north carolina will continue experience flooding from

hurricane florence for days to come, making trav hazardous. sections of interstates 95 and 40 will remn submerged for a week or more. other part of interstate 40 was covered with dead fish that were left behind by the receding waters. and following a dam breach on friday, officials from duke energy say that they are testing the cape fear river for anypo ntial contamination from a nearby coal ash dump. the department of homeland security is proposing a new set es that would deny green cards to immigrants who legally rely on public benefits. under the new system, the government could deny visas to immigrants or members of their households who use medicaid, or housing or food subsidies. in a statement, d.h.retary kirstjen nielsen said there is long-staing federal law that requires immigrants to "show they can suppo themselves nancially" and that the proposed changes will ensure that they "are t likely to come burdens on american taxpayers." once the rules arentered into the w federal register, thereill be a 60 day comment period.

a somber scene in taszania today relatives of the victims of thursday's deadly ferryccident on lake victoria gathered at a mass funeral to mourn those lost. the overcrowded ferry overturned, killing at least 224 people. the captain of the ferry has since been arrested for neglceigen yesterday divers rescued one of ase ship's engineers who w found near the engine of the upturned vessel and survived there for t days. iranian president hassan rouhani is blaming yeerday's terror attack at a military parade on u.s. backed gulf arabtates. the attack in the southern city of ahvaz killed at least 25 peopland wounded dozens more. speaking with reporters before departing tehran for the u.n. general assembly in new york, rouhani said he planned to confront the u.s. and it's gulf >> (etranslated ): the small puppet countries that we see in the region are backed by amica, and the united states is provoking them and giving them the necessary capabilities commit these crimes.

>> sreeniva president rouhani and president trump are scheduled to address the u.n. generaassembly in new rk on tuesday. and in recent interviews, u.s. ambassador to the u.n. nikki haley wsaid president trul once again emphasize the administration's america first priorities. r a preview of what is in store during president trump's second appearance before the u.n. general assembly, i am joined now by the pbs newshour's foreign affairs and defdese correspon nick schifrin. >> sreenivasath let's start ran. rouhani is leaving the country and coming to new york saying, listen, i plan to express myself. there are rising regional tensions there and she blaming the united states for horrible attack on his people just a couple of days ago. >> yes. and the u.s. contin blame him for regional instability aull stop and there won't be day that goes by this week where u.s. officials will not try topu pressure on iran, secretary

of state, the national security advisor are both speaking to 0 group that advocates for iranian regime change, the president you mentioned is dhairg sharing a security council meeting that will focus a lot on iran, meeting with family memberof political prisoners inside iran, so what they are trying to do is increase pressure on iran and have europe join them. the europe -- said wait a minute, hold on, we are trying to keep iradeinside the nuclear and you will see european dealers meet with iranian officials and meet with themselves to try to resi the u.s. pressure, trying to help iran get around all of these sanctions which are going to increase throughoutest of this month and into early november, and the u.s. official made a rare admission to me. he said that look, we do wantpe eu help, we need european help to put the, ressure on irt right now, europe says we don't want to put pressure on iran, that may lead them to leave the deal, so it is not clear europe is going to play gll. north korea, on this one hand you have the heads of south and north korea saying, we want to end our official war, president

trump,nt your help with this. but is the u.s. foreign policy on the same stage in. >> this is an inflection point right now because people and the president of south korea are unified, ty want the war to end because in 1953, it ended with not a pce declaration but just wita temporary pause, right? and so they want the u.s. to decle the end of the war. there is a real debate inside the u.s. administration, one side says wait a minute, north korea hasn't taken enough steps toward de nuclearization and the eps they have taken closing of plutonium reactor for example and engine missile siy have done that before and promised that before, that is one side, the other side said wait a minute, these are good things and positive steps, look where we were a year ago we were talking about war. let's end the war or at least let's give positive reinforce tonight the north korea, noh koreaians and if we end the war that will end tensions on the peninsula therefore the nuclear weapons are less relevant. >> sreenivasan: we still have

soldiers on the border. finally let's look at a quoteom hat president trump said last year in an effort to try to set the table for what he mightr say this y. listen to this. nited president of the u states, i will always put america put, just like you as the leaders of your countries will always and suld always att your country's first. >> sreenivasan: s president trump's message to the world this year? >> the word is sovereignty in u.s. official minds and that line we just heard went down like a rock last year and he will have a line similar to that going down like a rock again b this yeaause most of the world when they hear the u.s. talk about sovereignty, most of the world hears unilerism, this is a reflection of the world view, of the president and his aithes believe that countries are a lot more important an multilateral institutions like the u.n. and countries should and will act only in their national interests. here is the thing. president trump is not alone. t

he is no only populist speaking at the u.n. this week and so we will hear that message riom minute count and that l what led the u.n. secretary-geneis week to say that multilateralism is under attack. now, the u.s. ws ill play rt this week, this is the super bowl of diplomacy, the u.n general assembly will see the u.s. inside the multilateral institution but th are not apologetic about talking about sovereignty, as they say, as nikki haley said we are not saying nult laterallism can't work but we are just saying sovereignty is our priority. >> sreenivasan: a lot to report this week. nick schifrin, thank joining us. >> thank you. >> sreenivasan: the prison industry is a multi-billion dollar business in america, and designing and building the facilities can be lucrative. but for a growing number of american architects, one aspect of that work is increasingly lloublesome: designing solitary confinement newshour weekend special

correspondent david tereschuk has our report >> reporter: california-based architect raphael sperry has mound a campaign. he wants his fellow-architects to stop designing solitary confinement units in prisons and execution ambers, too. >> if you're hiring an a.i.a. architect, we are like the best. we're committed to the highest standard. >> rorter: practically speaking, for an architect the chance to design a new execution chamber ocrs very rarely. but given the nation'sin cong boom in prison- construction, there are plenty an solitary confinement units to be designed d built. as sperry barnstorms through design schoolsrchitecture firms' offices, he argues for re-writing the profes code of ethics-- in effect to outlaw work on designing solita units. >> architects should not design spaces for solitary confinement. it's a form of torture that's recognized by the entire international human rights community.

we're enabling and frankly participating in human rights abuse. >> reporter: sperry's efforts to get architects out of designing for solitary are gaining traction among the profession's grass-roots. >> individually it doesn't make a difference but as a cprofession, as a whole, start saying, "no, we're not going to take part in that." >> we are interested in bettering our communities and hatow can you do hen you're when you're putting people in small boxes and not giving th access to daylight. >> the best way to do it is to just not do it. >> reporter: america's use of solitary confinement in effect started here at eastern state penitentiary of pennsylvania in 829. ate british arc won a $100 for his design. and the basic operating pratinciple was olitude would enable prisoners to get regretful and "penitent" abo their crime, hence the word" penitentiary." agaacinst around of grim prison conditions, pennsylnia's early 19th-

century quakers saw introducing solitary confinement as a way to reform. >> they believed that if you put peoemple in solitary conft long enough, people would lookt ino their hearts and they would find their inner goodness, their inner light and they would behave themselves. >> reporter: sean kelley works pefor thtentiary, nowadays effectively a museum of incarceration, on interpreting its historical and social significance. he>>risoners would live inside the cells and they'd do some kind of simple work in the cell. they would make shoes or weave or make furniture. wothe prisonerd go out a little door into their own exercise yard, about the same tssize as the cellf, that opened to the sky, and that was their world. those two spaces: the cell for 23 hours a day, the exercise yard for one. no visitors, nothing to read aside from the bible. silence. >> reporter: two centuries later, psychiatric studies repeatedly find that prolonged soloary confinement can lead profound mental disorders.

eastern state penitentiary discovered that early on. it eventually gave up being a purely solitary institution after 85 years. and it eventually closed down completely as a prison in the 1970s. >> the great lesson of eastern state turned out to be that solitary confinement did not abilitate people there's debate about how damaging it was but wide agre iement was damaging. >th> reporter: but roughout the nation's prison systems today, solitary remains in regular use in theory, mainly for no difficulty ty of prisoners, the badly-behaved, and sometimes to prinmates who'd be at risk among the general population. nevertheless, modern-day reformers increasingly argue that solitary is now vastly overused, and all too often it cont lengthy periods, even many years in some cases. such alleged overuse, which gets ts what's galvanizing concerned architike sperry.

>> even though solitary confinement is a really common practice in the united 80ates; there'00 people in solitary confinement, almost as many as licensed architects as we have. the number of americans who know that fact is very, very small because it's a practice that's done to prisoners who are already neglected and discarded bunch of people. >reporter: there is a body of opinion among architects, though, that does not object toy designing solionfinement units. >> solitary confinement and maximum, maximum security confinements are necessary under certain very, very distinct circumstances. >> reporter: jim muelr has designed many prisons over decades, including solitary units. e firm he recently retired from is among the w ld leaders ofat the trade calls justice architecture. he believes their expertise as architects has brought a more humane approach to solitary confinement. >> it's better that wt do it than it because i'm worrisome about who would do it

in the absence of architects doing it. >> repter: architecture is a commercial enterprise, of course, and designing prisons is good for business. there's been an almost four-fold increase in the number of state and federal prisons from 500 in the 1970s to nearly 2,000 now. and if an architectural practice turned down such work on grounds of conscience or ethics, they could end at a competitive disadvantage, according to mueller. >> the justice environment is a competitive business. they have to allow us to compete. but it would be very doubtful that they would select us. >> reporter: so if solitary confinement remains embedded in the business of prison design, can architects balance the deends of their clients, th prison authorities, with their own efforts to be humane? berly prior is another california-based architect who's designed forany different kinds of detention. >> i feel like i'm responsible

not just to the owner that is planning to do this fality but i'm also responsible to the greater community. i also have a guiding principle ndaranting the environment to be healthy not only for the inmates that are there but also for the staff that work there. >> reporter: prior accepts solitary confinement as necessary, but she prefers it ould make up only a smal element of any facility she designs, like this unit she's working on for santa clara county. >> it's more like a time-out type of situation. they have observation into the cells. they have an exterior wall where alsll the cre able to get light in from the outside as well as views out. and that's one of the driving principles these days for health, is to have the long views to experience daylight, to experience sunlit. >> reporter: but the basic

dispute persists, no matter how humane some archkeects try to heir designs. should architects ever design for solitary confinement at all? feelings have run high. >> people invaded our office and sprayed paint across all of desks and throughout that office. so it was very, very destructive and disruptive. but it did not deter us. st reporter: the american ute of architects, or a.i.a., has so far resisted any substantial overhaul to its code of ethics. the a.i.a. told the newshour weekend that their code already has a provision that applies gey to work on prisons. it's a "standard," not an "nforceable "rule," and it says: mbers should employ their professional knowledge and sn ll to desildings and spaces that will enhance and facilitate human dignity -- and the health, safety, and welfare of the individual and the public." but sperry still presses his case, hoping this fall to win over local chapters of the

institute, ahead of next year's .national a.i.a. conferen he and his supporters feel they're gaining ground. >> yeah, a.i.a. has not come all the way around, but they started to come around. i think it just takes them a while to accept some difficult facts about the criminal justice system that they really haven't paid attention to in the past. once they do that, they' know what the right thing to do is. m sreenivasan: plastic pollution e than bags and bottles and things we can see. a good deal of plastic pollution exists in things we can't see: they are called micro-plastics and new scientific resis underway to find out what impact they might have on humans and the environment. this coming week pbs newshour is launching the series "the inastic problem"-- a deep dive to the dangers of plastics and possible solutions to the problems they present. i spoke recently with andrea thompson, associate editor for sustainability for scientific american, about her series on

micro-plastics. >> sreenivasan: andrea thompson thank you for joinings us. >> definitely. >> sreenivan: we heard these stories about whales beaching up onshore with 17 pounds of plastic in their bel and we have heard about the damage that plastic does in the oceans but you are focusing on something much more interesting whichs microplastics on a very, very small scale tell us, firsof all what is microplastic and why is it dangerous? so microplastic, has a huge range of classes which is oneth g that makes them so worrisome. th are five millimeters down to, you know, maybe the size of a virus, so that is a huge, huge scale, and at a small scale means they can be ingested bay wide raping of animals from tiny plankton which are toc basis of thn food chain, to even whales, to us. they are the fragments of the plastic dendis we see arouhe bottles, bags, things like that, it gets broken down in the environment by sunlight, waves,

cwind, as well as fibersoming off of our cloes, they are call microfibers and some of the n products, that are iings like toothpaste, cosmetics. >> sreenivasan: ex-goal want cream and so forth that have the gritty feel. >> yes. >> sreenivasan: what are the treffects it could have um to say for example you are eating a fish that came from the ocean that has microplastics in it, you may not see a chunk of plastic in the flesh, but it might actually be in the sysyotm anare consuming it. >> that's one of the biggest areas of scientific research now what that might actually be muing to us in our system and a lot depends on hoh we are ingesting every day, there isit possibs if it is small enough it could penetrate the gut lining and get into h systems and cause inflammation which can lead to other health problems. >> sreenivasan: you looked at plastic in soil, how does it get there? it is not just the stuff w we ae leaving in the landfill. >> righ there are a couple, several ways it can get there. one, and i think people aren't really familiar with is that the

things that are cleared out of wastewater and wastewater treatment plants makes udis that gets treated and then is often applied toal agricultields, because it is very rich in nutrients but also has, is very rich in croplastics, particularly microfiners from the testing that has been done so far so scientists a trying to figure out, is, in the soil, how deep is that microfiber getting into the soil, is it washing into water ways and impacting the health of the soil we are growing our food in and therefore how -- the ability to grow crops and things like that. they have shown that earthworms can eat these and that that could travel up the food chain as those creatures get eaten by other ones. >> sreenivasan: as we look at the scale of this problem, this is part of theeries of stories you are writing, what are the solutions here? how do we even start to tack until. >> sreenivasan:. >until? >>alost of the scientists i to are pretty okay if not, you know, full supporters of a lot of these bans that are being done against plastic bags,

straws, they consider those the low hanging fruit and the easiest we don't need those things, but there are also the plastics, ings we need to use plastics for, but we are not considering making these and des these things, what happens to them when we are done with them, so that starts to need to be incorporate good the design process and howe -- how we make plastic, so there are scientists actua ty doing work to make plastics that can be recycled more easily over and over again, like glass can,or instance. and to try and close some of those loops in our waste system where it is just getting out into the environment. so it is a whole bunch of different things that will have to be done, and we needo reevaluate our relationship with plastic. >> sreenivasan: all right. andrea thompson, associate editor for sustainability at scientific american, thanks so much for joining us. >> thanks for having me. >> sreenivasan: read about artist trevor paglen's project to send a sculpture into space on our website,

pbs.org/newshour. >> this is pbs newshour weekend, nday. >> sreenivasan: e ebola outbreak in west africa from 2014 to 2016 resulted in more than 11,000 deaths and was one of the most acute public health ises of the modern era. one of the countries hardest hit in that epidemic was sierra p.one. a nev. documentary on pbs reveals the complexity of the epidemic ithe midst of the erola outbreak in that country"" survivors" pre tomorrow on p.o.v. check your local listings. re's an excerpt. >> that is sick. you are putting this on your body. what are we going to do? >> when -- i see ebola as an enemy to us, because it attacks

the fabric, the foundation of our beliefs, the vision of what makes us africans, and that is our ability to seek each oter, our ability to come into contact with one another. physical contact is very, very important. it is impossible to meet someone without having a hashake or ag some form of contact. so with the advent of ebola, it is like everything that makes me who i am is under attack.

>> >> sreenivasan: coming up this week: from garbage to recycling to innation, the newshour will be exploring more on plastics in a four-part series "the plastic problem." 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 pt ned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by:

bernar asue and edgar wachenheim iii. the cheryl and philip milstein family. dr. p. roy vagelos and diana t. vagelos. lihe j.p.b. foundation. ro p. walter. fuarbara hope zuckerberg. corporating is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement pro wcts. that 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. thank you.

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