April 30, 2023 - PBS News Weekend full episode

JOHN YANG: Tonight on "PBS News Weekend," why Chicago is struggling to house thousands of migrants who crossed the southern border.

Then a look at the lack of research and treatment for menopause.

And a new book illustrates the importance of seeing the world through different lenses.

WOMAN: When we are seeing the world and building our visual record, almost exclusively through the lens of male photographers.

We are not only missing out on stories that those photographers may not have access to.

We're teaching our audience that those stories don't matter.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening, I'm John Yang.

The departure of private American citizens from Sudan move forward today.

The State Department says a second bus convoy organized by the U.S. government has arrived safely in Port Sudan from Khartoum that brings the total number of evacuated U.S. citizens to nearly 1,000 fewer than 5,000 others remain and are asking for help to leave.

There are reports that the U.S. Navy fast transport ship Brunswick is in Port Sudan, likely to ferry American citizens to Jeddah Saudi Arabia.

That's been the destination for thousands foreign nationals from other countries.

Cell phone video shows a crush of people at Port Sudan trying to get Saudi visas and to dance northern border Saturday, satellite imagery shows buses lined up waiting to enter Egypt for this Pakistani man at Port Sudan a sense of relief and sadness.

MOHAMMED ALI, Evacuee: I left everything my house, my car, my everything.

My all the same of 13 years I'm living here.

MAN: How do you fele?

MOHAMMED ALI: Just to save my life, I'm happy JOHN YANG: This afternoon amid a shaky ceasefire in Sudan.

The United Nations said the humanitarian situation there is reaching a breaking point.

General Mills is recalling some flour products nationwide after discovering salmonella in some samples.

The company is recalling two, five and 10 pound bags of gold metal bleached and unbleached all-purpose flour with a Best Buy date of March 2020.

The FDA and CDC having said whether this is connected to a multistate salmonella outbreak last month.

The U.S. Army has identified the three soldiers killed in Thursday's Apache helicopter collided in Alaska.

Chief Warrant Officer 3 Christopher Robert Aramco, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Kyle McKenna, and Warrant Officer Stewart Dwayne Wayment, were returning from a training mission when the incident occurred.

A fourth soldier injured in the crash is hospitalized and in stable condition.

It was the latest in a string of recent accidents that led the army to ground all non-critical air operations for safety training.

And President Biden used an annual Black Tie gathering of journalists last night to acknowledge their colleagues who have been unjustly imprisoned abroad.

He cited Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter in a Russian prison since March, and Austin Tice who disappeared in Syria in 2012.

JOE BIDEN, U.S. President: Our message is this journalism is not a crime.

Evan and Austin should be released immediately, along with every other American held hostage are wrongfully detained abroad.

JOHN YANG: Mr. Biden also acknowledged Marine Corps veteran Paul Whelan who's been in a Russian prison since 2018.

Still to come on "PBS News Weekend," the understudy and under treatment of menopause and elevating the worth of female and non-binary photographers.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: The migrant crisis has made its way north to Chicago.

More than 8,000 migrants have arrived there since last August.

That's when Texas Governor Greg Abbott began bussing asylum seekers to so called sanctuary cities as a protest against immigration policies.

Chicago officials say the daily arrivals there have increased tenfold over the last two weeks, and there's no place for all of them to go.

While they wait for beds in city shelters to become available, some are sleeping on floors in police station lobbies and for a time at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

City officials are saying this is a humanitarian crisis.

Heather Cherone has been covering it for Chicago's public television station WTTW.

Heather, is this reached crisis levels now or has this been a slow burning problem?

HEATHER CHERONE, WTTW Chicago News: So it's a little bit of both, John, the problem has really sort of ratcheted up significantly in the last 10 days.

And that is when as you said the number of immigrants arriving in Chicago increased significantly before the last 10 days about, you know, 10 of migrants a day were arriving in Chicago.

Now that number is anywhere between 75 and 100 per day.

And that has really stretched the city shelter system beyond the breaking point.

So it had been sort of a slow burning problem since the fall when really this reached the first peak.

And now there's a second peak of this humanitarian crisis according to city officials, and there's not enough money or capacity to house these people who are arriving in Chicago, really, with not much more than the clothes on their back.

JOHN YANG: Does anyone have an idea why this is this surge is taking place now?

HEATHER CHERONE: Well, I think it is a little bit to do with the fact that the weather has warmed up, and that there has been some change in sort of how officials at the border or pros -- are processing asylum seekers.

And of course, instead of caring for these people in Texas and another border states, they're being sent to Chicago, for the first time really on planes before they were really arriving on buses and the city had sort of set up a system to deal with those arrivals.

But this is presented new challenges for a city officials that were already sort of stretched to the breaking point.

And they say they can't really do much more because they've yet to get any financial aid from the federal government and have only received $20 million from the state government, which they said they've already spent leaving them really with empty pockets to deal with this surge that they really did not anticipate happening until after the public health rule Title 42 is lifted in a couple of weeks.

So that has also added to the problem.

JOHN YANG: The city agencies are really bearing the brunt of this if they asked for help, or are they going to get help from either the state or the federal government?

HEATHER CHERONE: Well, to city council committee has held a hearing on this on Friday, where city officials said that they were pleading with state and federal officials to do more.

But there's really no timeframe for those requests for help to be answered, which means that the city is going to ask the city council to dip into the city surplus and set aside $53 million in the coming weeks to help care for these immigrants.

But that assumes that the surge will continue at this current level and not get significantly greater, which is a bet I don't think anybody is willing to take.

So this problem is much more likely to get worse than better anytime soon.

JOHN YANG: And the city is about to have a change of governments, change of mayors, the new mayor is inaugurated May 15th.

Is that going to complicate things?

HEATHER CHERONE: So they say that it's not going to complicate things because the outgoing administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot says they're coordinating closely with mayor elect Brandon Johnson.

But this is a difficult time to sort of make sure that programs are continuing and nobody's missing a beat.

So that is certainly an added complication.

When you have sort of a crisis to the point where people are sleeping in police stations and at the at the airport, prompting a lot of hard questions from older people who want to know what's being done to address this now once, again, very visible problem in Chicago.

JOHN YANG: You know, Chicago has been an essentially asylum city since Harold Washington was Mary issued an executive order saying the police wouldn't enforce immigration laws.

Are people beginning to rethink that because of this?

HEATHER CHERONE: No, I don't think so.

I think that the Chicago believes that this is a crisis, as mayor Lightfoot has said, very time, really created by Republican governors, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who are trying to sort of make this a political problem that where it doesn't otherwise need to be.

But there's no sense that Chicagoans don't want to care for these people, but are in fact frustrated that the city has fallen behind essentially the eight ball and having the ability to care for these people.

Now, if you talk to city officials, including Mayor Lightfoot, she says city's doing absolutely everything its can and this is -- this problem is due to the lack of response, both by the federal government and the state government.

A politically complicated stance to take, of course because President Joe Biden and Governor JB Pritzker are both Democrats, as is Mayor Lightfoot, Lori Lightfoot and mayor elect Brandon Johnson, JOHN YANG: Heather Cherone from Chicago public television station WTTW.

Thank you very much.

HEATHER CHERONE: Pleasure to be with you, John.

JOHN YANG: The transition into menopause is an inevitable part of life.

For many it's accompanied by a range of symptoms including hot flashes, insomnia, and weight gain.

Yet it continues to be under studied and undertreated.

Ali Rogin has more -- as part of our ongoing series unequal treatment.

ALI ROGIN: Menopause is the period when menstruation ends, someone officially enters this phase of life 12 months after their last period, but symptoms often begin during perimenopause, which is a transition period that can last years.

It's something many people go through but just one in five OBGYN residents have any training in it.

And studies show that many menopausal women aren't getting any treatment, and often don't even talk about it with their doctors.

We wanted to find out more about why this stage of life is frequently ignored, especially in the United States, and why getting treatment for its symptoms is often such an afterthought.

I'm joined by Stephanie Faubion.

She's the director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women's Health and the medical director for the North American Menopause Society, which promotes women's health during midlife and beyond.

Dr. Faubion, thank you so much for joining us.

For something is so ubiquitous as menopause, why is it so stigmatized?

STEPHANIE FAUBION, Mayo Clinic, Center for Women's Health: Well, I think it has been stigmatized in the past because it's so tied to aging.

You know, the mean age of menopause in the United States is 52.

So I think that's part of it.

It's also a mysterious women's event and just like menstrual cycles, and puberty and all of that sort of thing.

You know, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, it's been one of those things.

It's not as talked about, but I think it's doubly so for menopause because it's tied to aging as well.

Menopause does have that that stigma.

If you look up Google images of menopause, you see harried hot, sweaty, angry women.

And you know, that's not the reality for most of us, but it does have a negative stigma.

ALI ROGIN: And you mentioned angry, hot, sweaty, but let's talk about what the symptoms tend to be and also what sorts of treatments are available for these symptoms?

STEPHANIE FAUBION: So the typical symptoms of menopause and let's just say that some women have none, the lucky few that have none.

But most women will have some symptoms and the most common symptoms are vasomotor symptoms, which are hot flashes and night sweats.

A lot of women have sleep disturbances and mood disturbances like irritability and anxiety.

But there's also some ones that many people don't necessarily associated with menopause like joint aches, palpitations, that sort of thing.

ALI ROGIN: And even still, we found 120 21 study that said 73 percent of women aren't getting the treatment for their menopause symptoms.

Why is that?

STEPHANIE FAUBION: Well, let's be clear, not everyone needs treatment for their menopause symptoms.

But for those women who do have symptoms, women end up in a bunch of different doctor's offices for some of the symptoms and aren't necessarily putting it together that this is menopause related, when they do end up in a physician's office.

They are sometimes dismissed as their, you know, they're told that their symptoms aren't important or not bothersome enough to be managed.

ALI ROGIN: And a related element of this seems to be that there isn't a lot of training happening in menopause management.

Why is it so understudied?

STEPHANIE FAUBION: I think that's a great question.

We published a study a few years ago on how much training medical residents were getting and those were residents and internal medicine, family medicine and OBGYN and the bottom line is that none of those residency programs were receiving much in the way of education on menopause about one to two hours at most, and the majority of those residents felt uncomfortable managing menopause when they graduated their training programs, but also I think, many physicians feel that there isn't anything to do about the symptoms.

So, I think the Women's Health Initiative has contributed to this, that there's a big fear of hormone therapy out there.

ALI ROGIN: You mentioned the Women's Health Initiative.

Can you explain briefly what that was and the impact it had on the treatment of menopause?

STEPHANIE FAUBION: Well, the Women's Health Initiative study looked at women between the ages of 50 and 79 years of age, and their goal was really to see if hormone therapy was good for disease -- chronic disease prevention, that's the way it was designed.

So the women entering the trial were not necessarily and for the most part did not have menopausal symptoms at the time.

They carried on the study for several years.

And after five years, in 2002, the combination therapy arm was stopped due to increased risk of cardiovascular disease and breast cancer.

So there were a number of concerns raised about it.

But the problem with the study was that the mean age of the women in the study was 63 years of age, which is not the age of the women that we commonly see in our offices who are having trouble with menopause symptoms.

And the results were analyzed by the entire group at one time and not by decade of life.

And so the key findings were a little bit misleading initially.

ALI ROGIN: And what was the result once those findings were released?

STEPHANIE FAUBION: When the findings were released, there was a dramatic drop off in the hormone therapy use rates in the United States such that we went from roughly 40 percent of women using hormone therapy postmenopausal up to roughly 4 percent and that really hasn't rebounded much since then.

ALI ROGIN: And Dr. Faubion how does the medical field need to change in order to better serve patients going through menopause?

STEPHANIE FAUBION: We need to educate providers on what can be done about menopause symptoms.

Not everyone needs hormone therapy, but providers should be definitely comfortable with understanding the risks and benefits of hormone therapy and who would be a good candidate for it, as well as the non-hormonal options that we have out there for management of menopause symptoms.

ALI ROGIN: Stephanie Faubion with the Mayo Clinic and the North American Menopause Society.

Thank you so much for your time.

STEPHANIE FAUBION: Thank you.

JOHN YANG: The world of photojournalism has always been dominated by men, which means that front page photos and images of other world events are seen from a male perspective when 2018 survey found that worldwide only 18 percent of photo journalists were women.

Women photograph is a nonprofit group working to elevate more female and nonbinary photographers.

They published a new book called "What We See: Women and Nonbinary Perspectives Through the Lens," and includes 100 images from both up and comers and industry veterans.

Daniella Zalcman is the founder of Women photograph.

She was also one of the curators of the photos and the book.

Daniella, in the introduction to this book, you write that photo journalists are tasked with a unique privilege, teaching others how to see.

Why are so many, the vast majority of people teaching us how to see white western males?

And what's the effect of that?

DANIELLA ZALCMAN, Founder, Woman Photograph: I think photojournalism remains an incredibly classist industry.

It's really difficult to graduate from a university program with student debt with no access to generational wealth.

And then think about becoming a freelance photojournalist where you may have to invest $10,000 into gear and not have any kind of job security to hope that you can work for the best newspapers and magazines in the country.

But, you know, I can say that the impact of that is a huge ethical crisis because when we are seeing the world and building our visual record, almost exclusively through the lens of male photographers, male photo journalists, we are not only missing out on stories that those photographers may not have access to.

We're missing out on stories that they don't think should be prioritized.

And in turn, we're teaching our audience that those stories don't matter.

So making sure that the documentary photography community is as diverse as the communities the people we hope to cover is absolutely critical.

JOHN YANG: Well, let's get to some of the photos from the book.

The first one is family bonding.

DANIELLA ZALCMAN: This is a photograph from size of a Connie who is a Filipina photographer currently based in the United States.

She herself has worked as a domestic worker and her mother continues to work as a domestic worker in Hong Kong.

And this is actually a photograph of her own family, something that we wanted to really address in the book is the fact that a lot of journalists work as outsiders and we're having increasingly nuanced conversations about the fact that we need inside and outside perspectives for holistic and meaningful journalism.

But for the longest time, almost all photo journalists have worked as outsiders.

JOHN YANG: The next one is Dias eternos, project called Eternal Days.

DANIELLA ZALCMAN: Again, I think this is an incredible example of an image that we might not have seen in mainstream media without the attention of a woman photographer.

This is documentation of a women's prison in Venezuela, one where you can see the living conditions are very grim.

Women do not necessarily have access to justice at the speed at which they should they're crammed into these cells.

I think, in this particular instance, with 22 women living in one very small space.

And again, you know, between access and interest and hoping to focus on the story I, you know, I think without honors work, we might never hear about these women.

JOHN YANG: Talk about the choice between black and white, which was the first picture we saw the family portrait, and color.

This is a very grim situation in this women's prison, but vibrant colors.

DANIELLA ZALCMAN: I think that's a very intentional choice that makes images feel sometimes a little more calm.

But I think it's also important to remember that even when you're working in grim situations, images don't necessarily have to just convey trauma.

You know, I think there are aspects of that photograph of Ana's photograph that even while these are women in prison in very severe situations, this photo is about family and community and the way that they're all coming together to survive this ordeal.

JOHN YANG: The next photograph is called Portrait for A. DANIELLA ZALCMAN: This is an incredible long term project that photographer Smita Sharma has worked on for years, it was published, is a long form piece of National Geographic about sex trafficking of young girls, between India and Bangladesh.

And you know, something that photo journalists have to contend with on a day to day basis is how do we make sure that we are centering the safety of the people who trust us with their stories.

And in this particular case, these are girls that are under age, they have dealt with trafficking and sexual trauma.

And so it was of utmost importance to me to Smita that she make sure that you protect the identity and the image of every single one of these women who she was trusted to photograph.

And I think she did a incredibly poetic, very powerful job.

JOHN YANG: The next image is from Afghanistan, it's called Mayhem.

DANIELLA ZALCMAN: This is, you know, a really classic example of a space that a male conflict photographer just absolutely would not have been able to gain access to, you know Kiana (ph), though Iranian has worked in Afghanistan for years and years, and in 2021, with Taliban retaking control and explicitly targeting women, girls and women's education.

In particular, this is an image that was taken in the aftermath of a school bombing.

She was able to walk into this space and with her knowledge of the community and the culture was able to make this photograph of women mourning their children, their daughters.

JOHN YANG: As you say, this is a image a man couldn't have captured because they just are not comfortable because of the culture.

It's a different situation if a man walked in.

DANIELLA ZALCMAN: Or it may not have existed at all, I think it's very likely that a man would have been physically barred from entering that space.

And so if we want to see and hear stories from those spaces, we need to make sure that women from those communities and women in general are behind the lens as well.

JOHN YANG: The next one is the Flying Cholitas.

DANIELLA ZALCMAN: I love this photograph so much.

This is a Brazilian photographer, Luisa Dorr, who came to the story of us are I Mara and Quechua women who have created this incredible reversal where they have taken clothing that was part of the sort of colonial imposition that they were forced to wear when they worked in sort of service to colonizers, and now they use them as sort of these powerful decorative costumes as they fight.

And it's both this otherworldly and spectacularly beautiful, and kind of funny image that I think is a really wonderful moment of levity in the book.

JOHN YANG: That's a great one.

The next one was taken in Kenya, it's called Last Act.

DANIELLA ZALCMAN: This is from Ugandan photographer, Sarah Waiswa, who has lived all over East Africa and is an incredible photographer.

And you know, she speaks very explicitly in the book about how she wanted to subvert the imagery that she's so used to have, particularly outside photographers coming into poor communities in East Africa and making photographs that we've seen before of young children in poor neighborhoods in Nairobi in Kampala.

And you know, these are two young girls doing ballet which she comments is very often associated with upper class children and children have privilege, but they're still having this wonderful happy experience and that can define their identity as well.

JOHN YANG: Tell me about the organization you founded Women Photograph?

DANIELLA ZALCMAN: Women Photograph is a nonprofit I created in 2017.

We have 1400 women and nonbinary members based in about 120 countries.

We also are a grant making organization.

We hold skills building workshops annually.

We run a mentorship program for early career photo journalists and I co-curator on the book.

Sarah Aiko is part of that team alongside Mallory Benedict and Piera Moore.

JOHN YANG: The book is "What We See: Women and Nonbinary Perspectives Through the Lens."

One of the curators is Daniella Zalcman.

Daniella, thank you very much.

DANIELLA ZALCMAN: Thank you so much for having me.

JOHN YANG: And that is "PBS News Weekend" for this Sunday.

I'm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

Have a good week.