john: marcia coyle who will be helping us keep an eye on the term ahead.hank you very much. >> my pleasure, john. judy: facebook and its group of apps and social media channels went down for most of this day. william rangham look at the lathes all of it coming on the eve of a new congressional hearing of a giant. >> facebook's app and its website along with instagram and what's app went dark for several hours. and at this moment it appears be slowly coming back up the cause of the outage hasn't been explained but for the three billion people these outages were a huge description and a reminder of these app's influence. our co-author of "an ugly truth" is back on the newshour. can you help us understand what is it that happened today? >> starting at about 9:00 a.m. pacific out here in california, facebook and its family of apps went down that includes instagram, what's up, occulus. these impact 3.5 billion people. and for several hours including security engineers new what was going on. this was amplified by the fact that facebook's own internal communicati

marcia coyle, chief washington correspondent for the "national law journal," was one of the two dozeneporters in the courtroom this morning. she is back in the studio now. >> yes. marcia, what was it like this morning? >> you know, john, it was normal and it was abnormal. was normal in the fact that there are were justices actually on the bench and they were hearing oral arguments. but it was abnormal, first days at the supreme court you usually have a court building that's full of tourists on the lower level, lines of people who are waiting to get seats in the court room, lines of lawyers in suits waiting to be sworn into the bar. and the whole floor seems to be humming with talk. but today silence. a few supreme court police officers, staff people going in and out of offices, everybody masked. you go into the court room and you see the press, those of us who attended, we were in the public seats cannot in the usual press section but in public seats so that we could be spread out. and we wear masks. and also the lauers-- laiers who were going to argue, they were limited to having onl

. >> yang: marcia coyle is chief washington correspondent for the "national law journal."nk the bottom line here is that the court may very well, in a divided opinion, reinstate the death penalty for tsarnaev. i think the court is divided, in terms of the six conservatives being more sympathetic to the government's arguments, that the federal appellate court here was wrong to set aside the death penalty for tsarnaev, and also wrong on how the trial judge should've questioned jurors about the publicity they had experienced. >> yang: the justices are expected to rule by next summer. but, no matter what they say, tsarnaev wl die in prison, as the appeals court ruling did not affect his 11 life sentences. for the pbs newshour, i'm john yang. >> woodruff: it's been two months since the taliban took control of kabul and solidified their grip on afghanistan. since then, living conditions have deteriorated. the banking system is said to be in free fall, and the economy all but collapsing. afghanistan needs help, and needs it fast. that was the message from the head of one of the l