GEOFF BENNETT: Good evening.
I'm Geoff Bennett.
AMNA NAWAZ: And I'm Amna Nawaz.
On the "NewsHour" tonight: Hundreds more troops are deployed to the West Bank after a new wave of violence between Palestinians and Israelis leaves vehicles torched and multiple people dead.
GEOFF BENNETT: Crime is the top issue for many voters in Chicago's mayoral race, setting up a tough reelection bid for incumbent Lori Lightfoot.
AMNA NAWAZ: And an Alabama artist works to correct the historical narrative around the beginnings of gynecology and honor the women who have been left off of state monuments.
MICHELLE BROWDER, Artist: Nothing of these 11 enslaved girls of African descent that were tortured, mutilated without anesthesia, nothing that talks about what they contributed, forcibly, of course.
(BREAK) AMNA NAWAZ: Good evening, and welcome to the "NewsHour."
Tens of millions of Americans are under winter storm advisories tonight, as a major front heads toward the Northeast and New England.
GEOFF BENNETT: It's the latest in a barrage of late-winter systems sweeping the nation.
They have forced blizzard warnings in California and piled up tornado wreckage in the Southern Plains.
Stephanie Sy has our report.
STEPHANIE SY: Homes and buildings were leveled in Norman, Oklahoma, after fierce winds and at least nine tornadoes touched down in Oklahoma and Kansas Sunday night.
MAN: What in the world is that?
STEPHANIE SY: In parts of Texas, winds reached 114 miles an hour.
KEVIN FOSTER, Norman, Oklahoma, Police Chief: As of early this morning... STEPHANIE SY: Norman police chief said no one was killed, but there were at least a dozen injuries.
KEVIN FOSTER: We have several homes, businesses and schools that appear to have some damage from the storm.
There are multiple roadways still closed due to debris and downed power lines.
STEPHANIE SY: A cold front left more than 5.5 feet of snow in the upper of Southern California this weekend, with more snow and rain expected through Wednesday.
JIMENA HERNANDEZ-ALATORRE, Stranded Traveler: We first were supposed to go out to our Airbnb.
And then, like, because of the snow, we could not get to the house, because the car was just trapped.
STEPHANIE SY: In a sight rarely seen, snow blanketed Los Angeles suburbs, while several inches of rain flooded highways and elevated area rivers.
All of that moisture led to more erosion and the collapse of this cliff, taking an R.V.
down with it.
KARISSA JOHNSON, Valencia, California, Resident: So, I haven't been to get back in order to work for a couple of days, and, also, I'm just kind of afraid we are going to have to evacuate if it gets any worse.
STEPHANIE SY: Meanwhile, in Michigan, more than 150,000 customers started today without power, five days after a historic ice storm snapped power lines.
And New England braced for its most significant snow so far this season.
While no single weather event can be blamed on climate change, scientists say the occurrence of more extreme events are likely due to the warming planet.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I am Stephanie Sy.
AMNA NAWAZ: The weekend snow in California followed a series of major snowfalls this winter, but the entire state remains under some form of drought emergency.
Air raid sirens sounded across Ukraine overnight and intense fighting raged in the east around the town of Bakhmut.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the situation there is worsening.
Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited Kyiv, and met with President Zelenskyy.
She also visited a memorial wall dedicated to war dead.
In Nigeria, all three presidential front-runners claim they are headed for victory, as results from the weekend's election trickle in.
Nigerians cast ballots to decide the next leader of Africa's most populous nation.
Officials said the voting was largely peaceful, despite widespread delays.
A winner may not be announced until Tuesday, at the earliest.
Another sizable earthquake struck Southern Turkey today, killing one person and injuring more than 100.
Emergency personnel worked to clear debris from cars and collapsed buildings.
The quake hit three weeks after a much stronger tremor devastated parts of Southern Turkey and Northern Syria.
The World Bank now estimates that overall damage in Turkey has exceeded $34 billion.
Back in this country, Wall Street manage to start the week on a positive note after last week's big losses.
The Dow Jones industrial average gained 72 points to close at 32889.
The Nasdaq also rose 72 points and the S&P 500 added 12.
Still to come on the "NewsHour": Chicago's mayoral candidates offer various proposals to crack down on violent crime; companies draw scrutiny for employing migrant children; the rise of sports betting places colleges in a difficult positions; plus much more.
The renewed wave of violence and vengeance between Israelis and Palestinians continued today, as a Palestinian gunman killed a motorist near the city of Jericho on the occupied West Bank.
The U.S. ambassador to Israel said the victim was an American, though the man has yet to be identified.
The killing comes amid intensified conflict in Nablus and the town of Hawara also on the West Bank.
It is a dark new chapter in an old conflict, punctuated by the worst violence in decades.
Overnight, Israeli settlers rampaged through the Palestinian town of Hawara, torching dozens of homes and cars.
Daylight revealed the extent of the damage, blackened buildings and burnt-out vehicles.
JOOD ABUSAREES, Palestinian Resident (through translator): At night, settlers attacked us.
I saw them.
When they burned the car, my mother went down with a bucket of water to put out the fire.
SULTAN FAROUK ABU SRIS, Palestinian Resident (through translator): They burned the container, burned the warehouses, burned the storehouse for electrical appliances, and destroyed the house.
AMNA NAWAZ: These attacks were retaliation after a Palestinian gunman killed two Israeli brothers in a nearby Jewish settlement.
Thousands of mourners attended their funerals today in Jerusalem, their mother grief-stricken.
WOMAN (through translator): Two loved ones, my sons, my loved sons, who walk in the path of God, for them, I cry.
We have suffered a rupture and there is no one to console us.
AMNA NAWAZ: Just days earlier, an Israeli army raid targeting militants in Nablus killed 11 Palestinians.
This latest spasm of violence is showing no signs of abating.
Israel is now deploying hundreds more troops to the West Bank.
KHALED ELGINDY, Middle East Institute: We have seen over the past several years a gradual increase in the number and intensity of settler terrorism against Palestinians.
AMNA NAWAZ: Khaled Elgindy is a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute.
He says settler violence in the West Bank isn't new, but has become more radical.
KHALED ELGINDY: This is happening within the context of Israeli politics that have steadily moved more and more to the right.
When you have this convergence of the state power, combined with the very strong ideological extremism of settlers on the ground, it is a recipe for escalating violence.
AMNA NAWAZ: Israel's ultranationalist public security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, called today for an end to vigilantism.
A settler himself, he spoke during the eviction of settlers from an illegal outpost on the occupied West Bank.
ITAMAR BEN-GVIR, Israeli National Security Minister (through translator): I understand the hard feelings, but this isn't the way.
You can't take the law into your hands.
Israel's government, the state of Israel, IDF, the security forces, they are the ones who need to crush our enemies.
AMNA NAWAZ: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed those same sentiments yesterday.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, Israeli Prime Minister (through translator): I ask that, even when the blood is boiling and the spirit is hot, not to take the law into your hands.
I would like to let the IDF and the security forces do their job.
AMNA NAWAZ: But the recent wave of clashes is exposing divisions in Israel's new right-wing government and fanning tensions.
Zvika Fogel, a lawmaker from the ruling coalition, said rampages like the one this past weekend could deter further Palestinian attacks.
DENNIS ROSS, Former U.S.
Envoy to Middle East: When there are those who say this enhances deterrence, that is actually the equivalent of incitement.
AMNA NAWAZ: Dennis Ross was a Middle East peace negotiator in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
He is now a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute.
DENNIS ROSS: I think there are rifts within the Israeli government.
The prime minister is calling very clearly that: We are a state of laws.
There has to be law and order.
But it's interesting that it took Ben-Gvir so long to say anything about that.
And that's why I say I see the difficulty, I see the challenge that Prime Minister Netanyahu faces.
He's got a government that is a very difficult government, probably more difficult than any one he's ever had to manage before.
AMNA NAWAZ: Ross also lays blame for the uptick in violence on Palestinian leaders.
DENNIS ROSS: Part of the problem with the Palestinian Authority is, it has almost no credibility with the Palestinian public.
It's a result of dysfunction.
It's a result of great corruption.
It's basically loss of faith in it.
If there was to be a serious effort at political and economic reform which would also produce law and order, I think you would see the ability to get greater control over the current situation as well.
AMNA NAWAZ: The weekend's violence broke out shortly after top Israeli and Palestinian envoys met in Jordan to discuss how to curb violence ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
They issued a joint communique that -- quote - - "reaffirmed the necessity of committing to de-escalation on the ground and to prevent further violence."
Israel also agreed to halt discussions of new settlement units in the West Bank for four months.
KHALED ELGINDY: The fact that the Palestinians were able to get an Israeli leaders to commit to anything along those lines is an achievement, in and of itself.
But there is almost no hope of it being implemented on the ground.
And that's, frankly, a responsibility of the international community to compel Israel in some form to abide by these commitments.
AMNA NAWAZ: Israeli forces have killed at least 62 Palestinians so far this year.
During that same time, Palestinian attacks have killed 14 Israelis.
The U.S. is pushing for an end to the bloodshed.
State Department spokesman Ned Price: NED PRICE, State Department Spokesman: These events underscore the fragility of the situation in the West Bank and the urgent need for increased cooperation to prevent further violence.
AMNA NAWAZ: But divisions within the Israeli government and increasing Palestinian despair cast doubt on whether they will answer that call.
GEOFF BENNETT: It was another deadly weekend in Chicago.
At least 14 people were shot and three people were killed by gun violence in that city.
More than 70 people have been murdered in Chicago already this year.
As John Yang reports, crime has become the top issue in tomorrow's mayoral election.
JOHN YANG: Miracle Boyd...
MIRACLE BOYD, Chicago Resident: Think of, like, the violence that's been happening.
JOHN YANG: ... and Carrie Hogan, two lifelong Chicago residents from two different neighborhoods and two different perspectives.
MIRACLE BOYD: Sometimes, I do get numb.
JOHN YANG: Boyd grew up on Chicago's gritty South Side.
Just 21 years old, she says she has already seen far too much gun violence.
MIRACLE BOYD: My brother was shot entering my freshman year of high school.
JOHN YANG: Her father, brother and uncle have all been shot.
One, she said, was mistaken identity, another a case of wrong place, wrong time.
Many of those she grew up with have also been victims of gun violence.
MIRACLE BOYD: I can count on more than both my hands how many classmates have died, because it's more than 10, since elementary school all the way through high school.
I wouldn't like to say that some of our high schools and some of our youth are cursed, but that's what it is seeming to be.
CARRIE HOGAN, Chicago Resident: I literally dropped to the ground.
I was laying on the sidewalk thinking, I don't want to be the next person on the news that's killed by a stray bullet.
JOHN YANG: Hogan is an attorney who lived in a North Side neighborhood for nearly two decades and saw it change.
After a family member was shot during a botched carjacking, Hogan and her two chocolate labs packed up and moved to a sleek neighborhood in the center of the city.
CARRIE HOGAN: I'm living in a condo, so I have a door person now.
I have 24-hour security.
It just seems safer.
It might be an illusion, but I feel safer here because there are more people around and the neighborhood is lit up.
JOHN YANG: Ask each of them their top issue in tomorrow's nonpartisan mayoral election, and it may sound as if they are in agreement.
MIRACLE BOYD: Public safety is a number one issue.
And if we could address public safety, then we could address crime.
CARRIE HOGAN: For me, crime affects everything.
It's the only issue that matters in this election.
JOHN YANG: But, for Carrie, the answer is more police.
CARRIE HOGAN: You have less police generally, and then the police that are left don't feel empowered to really do anything.
And so that is a perfect formula for crime.
JOHN YANG: And from Miracle's point of view, the police are irrelevant.
MIRACLE BOYD: The police show up after the crime has already been committed.
They don't show up to prevent.
HEATHER CHERONE, WTTW: Public safety means very different things to very different people in Chicago.
JOHN YANG: Heather Cherone is a reporter for WTTW, Chicago's PBS station.
She says sentiments about crime in the city is as much about perception as reality.
HEATHER CHERONE: We are seeing crimes and high-profile crimes in neighborhoods that are not used to being in the headlines for those reasons.
And that, I think, can add to sort of people's sense that, well, I used to feel safe here, but I don't feel safe anymore.
And that is really in many ways disconnected from what the reality of crime is.
JOHN YANG: Shootings spiked in Chicago during the pandemic.
More than 800 people were murdered in 2021 alone.
While the number of homicides dropped last year, reports of violent crimes continue to rise, up 12 percent since 2019, the year of the last citywide election.
A recent poll found that nearly two-thirds of Chicago residents say they feel unsafe from gun violence and crime.
LORI LIGHTFOOT, Mayor of Chicago, Illinois: I'm not going to rest until we are the safest big city in the country.
JOHN YANG: That could spell trouble for Mayor Lori Lightfoot as she runs for a second term.
She faces a crowded field.
Eight challengers are trying to make her the first incumbent in decades to be defeated for reelection.
LORI LIGHTFOOT: What we don't need is somebody who doesn't support the police and, in fact, wants to divert resources from the police to other projects.
JOHN YANG: The candidates are drawing sharp contrasts over public safety in the city's police department, which remains under a consent decree imposed after the 2014 fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
PROTESTERS: Laquan!
JOHN YANG: Lightfoot points to her record as mayor, hiring more than 950 police officers last year and removing more than 12,000 guns from the city's streets.
LORI LIGHTFOOT: We are bending the curve on violent crime.
JOHN YANG: Every one of Lightfoot's challengers has pledged to replace the police superintendent she appointed.
Teacher-turned-Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson... BRANDON JOHNSON, Chicago Mayoral Candidate: Well, what's up, Chicago?
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) JOHN YANG: ... says he would reallocate funds in the police department and focus on the root causes of crime by investing in schools and housing.
BRANDON JOHNSON: Over 40 percent of the violence that happens in the city of Chicago happens in 6 percent of the neighborhoods, where I live.
JESUS "CHUY" GARCIA, Chicago Mayoral Candidate: Let's get Chicago back on track.
JOHN YANG: Congressman Jesus "Chuy" Garcia says he would increase staffing and improve data collection.
JESUS "CHUY" GARCIA: People need to feel safe to do business.
JOHN YANG: And current front-runner Paul Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago Schools, promises to hire 1,800 new officers with a focus on community policing.
PAUL VALLAS, Chicago Mayoral Candidate: The community policing is critical, because you can't have half of the high priority 911 calls not being responded to.
JOHN YANG: That's an approach Carrie Hogan says turned this one-time Lightfoot voter onto a new candidate this year.
Why did you decide on Paul Vallas?
CARRIE HOGAN: We have to give power back to our police.
We have to put more police back on the streets.
We have to start policing our city again to keep it safe.
So, Paul Vallas is the person that I think has the most rational, reasonable policies in that regard.
JOHN YANG: In the closing days of the campaign, Miracle Boyd and the gun violence prevention organization she works with held a forum for Chicago's youth to engage directly with the candidates.
MIRACLE BOYD: Our communities are suffering.
Our youth are dying of gun violence.
JOHN YANG: Of the four candidates polling in double digits, only Johnson showed up.
BRANDON JOHNSON: I believe a better, stronger, safer Chicago is possible, and we can build that together.
JOHN YANG: Johnson's plan for community-based interventions resonated with Boyd, and was a big reason she says she's voting for him.
MIRACLE BOYD: He's actually been in the communities, been on our talks, been on Zoom with us.
The citizens of Chicago is calling for treatment, not trauma, and not police to show up.
JOHN YANG: While voters have been casting ballots for a month, it may be weeks more before they know which candidate will be tasked with trying to lower crime in Chicago and to restore faith in the police department.
If no candidate wins a majority of votes tomorrow, the top two finishers advance to a run-off election in April.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I am John Yang.
GEOFF BENNETT: The Biden administration announced new steps today to crack down on child labor violations, including tougher investigations of the companies who may benefit from the work.
It comes days after a New York Times investigation into the explosive growth of migrant child labor across the U.S.
The Times found a major surge in child migrant labor in every state and under punishing working conditions, on factory floors, inside slaughterhouses, and atop buildings with children working as roofers.
The Times found at least a dozen underage migrant workers have died on the job since 2017.
Hannah Dreier is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who broke the story, and she joins us now.
So, Hannah, tell us about some of the children you encountered and the harrowing stories you uncovered.
HANNAH DREIER, The New York Times: Thank you so much for featuring this story.
And, I mean, when I first started this reporting a year ago, I thought that this would really be an agriculture story.
I thought that kids would be working, but mostly on farms, maybe in restaurants.
And I was shocked that I actually found most of these kids outside of factories, so in parking lots of meat processing plants, outside of auto parts suppliers.
And the kids were young.
I talked to a 13-year-old who had just come to this country a few months ago.
He was looking for his first day of work at a day laborer site.
I talked to a lot of kids who were making snack foods.
Some of them were making Nature Valley bars, Chewy bars.
And I ended up spending a lot of time talking to one girl who came to this country when she was 14 and ended up making Cheerios.
GEOFF BENNETT: Tell us more about her.
HANNAH DREIER: So her name is Carolina.
She found herself in Guatemala living with her grandmother during the pandemic.
There wasn't a lot of food.
There wasn't a lot of electricity, and she decided to come to the U.S.
So she came walking.
And she was encountered at the border.
She went through a government shelter and was released to her aunt, who she'd never met, in Michigan.
And her aunt said, sure, you can come and stay with me, but I can't really provide for you.
We are living on $600 a week.
And so when I met her, Carolina was going to ninth grade every day.
And then every night, she was working eight hours a night in a dangerous factory, a place where there are fast-moving conveyor belts, there's mechanical arms, and she would work until midnight each night, get a couple hours' sleep, and then go back to school the next day.
GEOFF BENNETT: We should emphasize something that you note in your reporting, and it's that these children didn't sneak into the U.S. undetected.
The federal government knows they're here.
And the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for matching them with sponsors.
But you note in your reporting that the systems meant to protect children have really broken down, especially since 2021, when this problem really exploded.
HANNAH DREIER: I mean, one thing to understand here is that the nature of who's coming across the border has changed.
So, there used to be some number of kids who would come here unaccompanied.
And they were mostly released to their parents.
Now the majority of these kids that are coming here, they're really being sent by their parents.
And they're living with more distant relatives, family friends, sometimes strangers.
And once they're released by the government to these people who are supposed to take care of them, there's no follow-up for the majority of these kids.
They get a phone number for a hot line that they can call.
And several of these children told us that they ended up in real trafficking situations, called the hot line and never heard back.
GEOFF BENNETT: Well, the Labor Department is supposed to find and punish child labor violations.
But you spoke with inspectors in a dozen states, and each said that their offices are understaffed, and that they could barely respond to complaints, let alone open new investigations.
Now the Biden administration, because of your reporting, says it's going to crack down on these violations.
How is that going to work when the Department of Labor is saying they can't keep up with the current demand?
HANNAH DREIER: That is a great question.
One thing that I found really surprising and kind of appalling with this reporting was how easy it was to find these kids.
I mean, I thought I would have to crack some kind of subterranean trafficking ring.
But what I actually did was, I showed up in different towns and cities, and, by the next day, I was usually talking to a migrant child who'd come here without their parents and was working in illegal conditions.
So, throughout this whole process, I just kept asking myself, why isn't the Department of Labor here?
And one thing that inspectors told me is, there hasn't been an emphasis on proactive child labor investigations.
And that's one thing that hopefully will change.
With this new Biden initiative, the Department of Labor is going to launch a new operation to go out, not just respond to tips, but go actively try to search for these kids.
And the same staffing issues that have been there will be there.
But I think a lot of people who work with these children are celebrating that part of the announcement, at least, today.
GEOFF BENNETT: Yes.
Help us understand.
I mean, these kids aren't working because they want to.
They're working because they have to.
They are under intense pressure to earn money, to send it back home as remittances.
What do solutions look like, when that pressure will still remain?
HANNAH DREIER: I mean, solutions for immigration issues are tortured.
In a lot of cases, I think they're going because their parents can't go to the U.S. Their parents would like to be here instead of them working and sending home remittances.
But the way the system is set up right now, those parents know they will be turned around at the border.
And so, instead, these kids come.
One thing that a lot of child welfare advocates think is, at least, at the very least, the government could provide these kids with social workers, with someone to check up and monitor if they have fallen into a bad, exploitative situation.
Another thing that struck me is that a lot of these kids actually could work legally.
They're not here undocumented.
The government knows they're here.
And if they had access to legal services, they could get work permits and be working at McDonald's.
But because they can't get that lawyer, they end up in these jobs that will take fake Social Security numbers.
And it's sort of the worst-case scenario in every way.
GEOFF BENNETT: Hannah Dreier, thanks for your time and for sharing your reporting with us.
We appreciate it.
HANNAH DREIER: Thank you.
AMNA NAWAZ: We are mere weeks away from college basketball's March Madness and, with it, billions of dollars' worth of wagers on the games.
As more states legalize sports betting, Paul Solman reports on worries that some colleges are too involved in its promotion, a particular concern since, in all but four states, residents must be 21 years old to place a legal bet.
This story is a partnership with the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, both at the University of Maryland's Merrill College of Journalism.
SAUL MALEK, Former Gambler: I'm winning.
Then I feel like an idiot for not betting higher and betting more often.
PAUL SOLMAN: Saul Malek, betting on sports through an online bookie at his Texas college in 2017.
SAUL MALEK: With my strategy, I can make hundreds of dollars in a minute.
PAUL SOLMAN: Once, says Malek: SAUL MALEK: I was up a few thousand credit that week, and I lost it all betting on someone in an individual tennis game.
And I didn't even know if it was a man or a woman.
PAUL SOLMAN: Eventually, he owed nearly 10 different bookies between $15,000 and $20,000.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a ban on sports gambling, making it even easier to bet.
More than 30 states have legalized sports gambling since, and enticing ads are now everywhere.
KEVIN HART, Actor: Two hundred dollars instantly just for betting five bucks.
PAUL SOLMAN: Offering free first bets.
And now five major colleges, Michigan State, LSU, Maryland, University of Denver, and the University of Colorado, have announced multiyear partnerships with sports betting companies that include placing ads at games, along with promises to, for example, focus on responsible gaming and education.
Colorado was actually paid for bets made using a university promo code, until that deal became public.
ANDREW ZIMBALIST, Smith College: I think it's very scary.
PAUL SOLMAN: Sports economist Andy Zimbalist.
ANDREW ZIMBALIST: There are many colleges now that are jumping into bed with sports book companies.
They're allowing the sports book companies to come onto campus and to appeal to the students to get involved in gambling.
PAUL SOLMAN: Hey, I gamble on sports.
It can be fun, sometimes lots of fun, but, says Zimbalist: ANDREW ZIMBALIST: Six percent of betters tend to become problem or compulsive gamblers.
So, we're talking about tens of thousands of students who are likely to become or if they're not already problem gamblers.
PAUL SOLMAN: Students like these at the University of Maryland.
JOEY HAAVIK, College Student: To introduce something like gambling on campus seems like putting kerosene on a fire.
AYELETTE HALBFINGER, College Student: If there is supposed to be some sort of educational aspect about betting cultures, the negative ramifications that betting can have on students, particularly at a young age, why aren't we seeing that side of a program?
PAUL SOLMAN: Now, some Maryland students said they like the partnership, but not social work professor Greg Stewart.
GREGORY STEWART, University of Cincinnati: I am concerned that certainly the state of Ohio has made this an option.
PAUL SOLMAN: Stewart studies addiction at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, where sports betting became legal last month.
GREGORY STEWART: It's so convenient for people to engage in this experience, the use of my phone, and I don't have to go anywhere.
I don't have to talk to anyone.
PAUL SOLMAN: You could do it in class.
GREGORY STEWART: You could.
PAUL SOLMAN: And as MIT finance Professor Andy Lo once told me: ANDREW LO, MIT: Neuroscientists have documented that the component of the brain that gets stimulated when we engage in financial rewards is really the same component that is stimulated by cocaine.
It's the dopamine system.
KEITH WHYTE, Executive Director, National Council on Problem Gambling: We have seen a big spike since 2018 in risk for gambling problems.
PAUL SOLMAN: Keith Whyte is tracking that impact at the National Council on Problem Gambling, supported in part by the gaming industry.
KEITH WHYTE: Our national surveys between 2018 and 2021 show a roughly 30 percent increase in risk for gambling problems nationwide.
But the majority of that increase in risk is among those young male online gamblers.
People with gambling problems have much higher rates of substance use and abuse.
But what we're really concerned about are things like the very, very high rate of depression amongst people with gambling problems and also a very high rate of suicidal behavior.
PAUL SOLMAN: College kids, especially young men, are more vulnerable than most because they think they know sports, they like risk, and they are comfortable doing everything on their phones.
FMR.
GOV.
MITCH DANIELS (R-IN): Much of the promotion that the gaming companies have sought to bring to college campuses seems pretty clearly aimed at building new customers.
PAUL SOLMAN: And that's the problem, says former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who wouldn't allow any betting on Purdue University sports when he was, up until recently, president there.
FMR.
GOV.
MITCH DANIELS: Young people are facing more emotional and mental and psychological challenges, it appears, than they have before.
At a minimum, schools should be careful not to be facilitating, enabling, and, while they're doing so, profiting off the marketing that might spread this behavior further.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, are they?
All universities declined our five requests for interviews.
The University of Colorado sent a statement - - quote -- "The last two years have demonstrated that the necessary safeguards are in place to ensure this agreement is beneficial and safe.
The betting companies involved just didn't respond."
But Martin Lycka of Europe's Entain did.
And his is one of the world's largest gambling companies.
MARTIN LYCKA, Entain: I strongly believe that any country, including the United States, is much better off having regulated this space and help drive out the black market, the unlicensed bookmakers that afford their customers absolutely no protection tools, no nothing, than continuing to step in the dark.
PAUL SOLMAN: If you were running a university now, would you invite in your company or another sports betting company, or would you say, no, too much risk, too many young people?
MARTIN LYCKA: I definitely would, because the young people -- now, we are filming this right after the Super Bowl, so all of them arguably would have gotten exposed to gambling-related adverts in the TV coverage.
PAUL SOLMAN: But does your company have any deals with universities to do advertising, sponsorship and the like?
MARTIN LYCKA: No.
That is a categorical no.
My company has no commercial partnerships with universities.
PAUL SOLMAN: And will you never?
MARTIN LYCKA: No, we never will for those reasons you have just alluded to, because a shattering majority of college students are underage.
They're under 21, and they have got nothing to do on the gambling side.
So that is not our target audience.
That is not the industry's target audience.
PAUL SOLMAN: But how can it not be the target audience of firms that partner up?
In which case, why should universities allow it?
Well, says a former congressman: FMR.
REP. TOM MCMILLEN (D-MD): I don't think you can stop sports betting on college campuses.
PAUL SOLMAN: Also a former Maryland basketball star, Tom McMillen winces at the partnerships, like his own alma mater's.
FMR.
REP. TOM MCMILLEN: But this is unique America.
that you're going to have betting on campuses, on events on campuses.
And I think there are risks to higher education with that, but it is almost inevitable.
You have this huge sports enterprise on campuses across the country.
And so universities are adopting it, much like they adopted beer drinking and liquor at football games.
PAUL SOLMAN: As for Saul Malek, he went into rehab four years ago and is still in recovery, still paying off his debts, and more worried than ever about college kids, like he once was.
SAUL MALEK: It doesn't seem like you could just go off to college and lose your entire livelihood gambling, and you just don't know any better.
PAUL SOLMAN: Until, for an estimated tens of thousands of U.S. undergrads a year, if all colleges were to follow suit, it will be too late.
For the "PBS NewsHour," Paul Solman.
GEOFF BENNETT: The history of gynecology as a medical specialty has deep roots in the American South, but that legacy is as complicated as the history of the South itself.
Correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro has our report from Alabama's capital, Montgomery.
It is part of Fred's series Agents For Change and our arts and culture series, Canvas.
MICHELLE BROWDER, Artist: Welcome to more than a tour.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: For some years, Michelle Browder has conducted trolley tours of Montgomery.
MICHELLE BROWDER: This is her apartment.
So I would invite you to get out.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: From Rosa Parks' home to the bus depot that is now the Freedom Rides Museum.
MICHELLE BROWDER: This is where they were beaten and bludgeoned right here.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Alabama's capital is a living history museum of the civil rights era, with so many iconic events, people, and places.
But, for Browder, artist by training, activist by leaning, there is one chapter of an earlier history that she is working to rewrite.
It has manifested in a monument on the capitol grounds to James Marion Sims.
He was a physician who practiced here in the 1840s, developing tools for pelvic exams and a technique to suture vaginal tears called fistulas.
To Michelle Browder, that is only half the story.
There is nothing on the monument now that says anything about the women that he worked on.
MICHELLE BROWDER: Oh, absolutely not, nothing of these 11 enslaved girls of African dissent that were tortured, mutilated without anesthesia, nothing that talks about what they contributed, forcibly, of course, FRED DE SAM LAZARO: No mention of them either in a well-known paintings immortalizing Sims as the father of modern gynecology.
Michelle Browder first saw it as an art student three decades ago.
MICHELLE BROWDER: I was triggered.
From there, I promised myself that, one day, I will change that narrative.
Got the welding station.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: A promise renewed years later when she moved to Montgomery and discovered the statue at the capitol.
MICHELLE BROWDER: I was horrified.
I still am.
If he's the father of gynecology, the father of modern gynecology, then they are the mothers?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Browder decided she'd do something about it.
Relying heavily on Sims' own notes, she focused on the only three women actually named in his writings.
That is a lot of welding and sculpting.
How many people doing this?
MICHELLE BROWDER: Fifteen volunteers.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Today, about a mile from the Sims monument are soaring wrought iron tributes to the women she calls the mothers of gynecology, Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy.
MICHELLE BROWDER: They didn't have autonomy, so it just makes sense for them not to have arms and feet.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The young woman endured months of trial and error as Sims honed his technique to repair their fistulas.
The humiliating vaginal injury usually caused by obstructed labor renders women incontinent and unable to bear children.
MICHELLE BROWDER: If you see around her legs there, that wire represents the silk suture, sutures that he used to basically torture them.
And then of course, Betsey, her crown is made up of the speculum.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And tell us the significance of the flower and its place.
MICHELLE BROWDER: Yes.
So, throughout all of the trauma, something came out of it that's been useful for women suffering from this condition.
LAUREN MARCELLE, Artist: The first time that I ever viewed the monument, I cried.
And I didn't know exactly why.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Lauren Marcelle and Alana Taylor are local artists and recent transplants to Montgomery.
They were on the day's tour.
ALANA TAYLOR, Artist: just seeing that work erected in such a way as a healing device was beautiful.
LAUREN MARCELLE: The only thing that differentiates us from these women is time.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: There was no such thing as informed consent from patients or subjects in experimental medical trials in Marion Sims' day.
The only consent that mattered had to come from slaveholders, who had a keen economic interest in the health of their workers and, because these were young women, a particular interest in their reproductive health, especially so after the transatlantic slave trade was abolished.
MICHELLE BROWDER: If it's outlawed in 1808, that we cannot go back and traffic folks from Africa, then where are we getting these people?
From the neighborhood?
Breeding plantations.
Breeding.
DEIRDRE COOPER OWENS, University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Black women's -- their wombs are the engines that maintained the institution of slavery.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Deirdre Cooper Owens is a medical historian and author.
As for anesthesia, she says, it was not commonly used in Sims' day.
But his reason for avoiding it rested on a widely held stereotype, that Black people do not feel pain, something contradicted, she says, in his own work.
DEIRDRE COOPER OWENS: I call it racial cognitive dissonance.
He holds on to the ideologies or sets of beliefs that are swirling in the 19th century, that Black people are somehow different than white people biologically.
But he will write: This patient lost sense of herself and struggled violently as we had to restrain her during surgery.
Why would you need to restrain a Black patient who is insensible to pain?
DR. LATOYA CLARK, Jackson Hospital: And you look at today, but even with all the advancements that we have, that African American women tend to have higher mortality and morbidity, and I think it's just a trickle down from the -- from the troubles that our ancestors had to endure.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: LaToya Clark, a Montgomery obstetrician-gynecologist, says anti-Black stereotypes have endured through the years.
Even today, she notes, studies find many providers believe African Americans feel less pain, that their complaints are exaggerated.
The flip side, she says, is deep distrust of the health care system.
Do you have patients who actively want to see you because they think you're more culturally competent, because they think that you would better understand their predicament?
DR. LATOYA CLARK: Yes, I have had numerous patients I'd say that: I have seen a man gynecologist all my life, and now I want to see a female gynecologist, or I wanted to come to an Afro-American gynecologist.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: For Michelle Browder, the next step in reframing Sims' legacy is quite literally, a mural based on that fateful painting, this time with Sims on the operating table.
It will be installed in a new Mothers of Gynecology Center she's opening in a downtown Montgomery building that's brimming with history and irony.
MICHELLE BROWDER: This is the site of the Negro women's hospital.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The very sited, it turns out, where J. Marion Sims experimented on his enslaved patients.
When they weren't on the table, she says, these women became skilled surgical attendants, nursing women through their ordeals.
And tell us your grand plan for this space now.
MICHELLE BROWDER: Prenatal care for women, upstairs, a teaching clinic, with the hopes of teaching empathy, dignity and respect.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Browder says she's faced occasional pushback in this deep red state, where Sims is revered for work that was indeed groundbreaking.
MICHELLE BROWDER: I have had some doctors say that I'm actually trying to stain this man's reputation who's actually done something good, he was a man of his time.
In any case, whether or not he was a man of his time, then his time was barbaric, and, therefore, he was barbaric.
So let's start there, and then seek out ways to help and repair what is broken.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And then there have been moments of grace, notably after she explained her plans for the new center to the white owners of the building.
MICHELLE BROWDER: She says: "Oh, Michelle," just little Ms. Gone With the Wind.
She was like: "We're just so proud of you.
And if you're going to do all of that, we're going to let you have that building for $35,000."
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Not what you expected.
MICHELLE BROWDER: Just don't judge the book by the cover.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The building is appraised at $250,000, she says.
A ribbon-cutting for the Mothers of Gynecology Health and Wellness Museum and Clinic is scheduled this coming Mother's Day.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Fred de Sam Lazaro in Montgomery, Alabama.
GEOFF BENNETT: Fred's reporting is supported in partnership with the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
AMNA NAWAZ: And we will be back shortly with a Brief But Spectacular take on the power of a name.
But, first, take a moment to hear from your local PBS station.
GEOFF BENNETT: It's a chance to offer your support, which helps keep programs like this one on the air.
AMNA NAWAZ: For those stations staying with us, a reprise of a conversation with a Nobel laureate.
Last year, French writer Annie Ernaux received the Prize in Literature for her work mixing fiction and memoir.
When announcing the award, the Nobel Committee called her novels -- quote -- "uncompromising and written in plain language scraped clean."
Jeffrey Brown sat down with the author to discuss what inspires her and how her writings are resonating today.
JEFFREY BROWN: In a new documentary titled "The Super 8 Years," we see a young French woman named Annie Ernaux, a wife and mother, a high schoolteacher, in the early 1970s.
What we don't see taking place at this time secretly off-camera, the book she's working on, her first.
The film, based on home movies and produced many years later by Ernaux and her son, captures the early inner struggles of a woman, as she says, tormented by the need to write of her life, to become what she would later call an ethnologist of myself.
ANNIE ERNAUX, Nobel Prize in Literature Winner (through translator): I truly hoped to transmit an individual personal experience, but in such a way that it would be received by others.
It was really that desire that motivated me to write.
To be an ethnologist of myself means to speak from my being, from my experience, but looking at it from a great distance, approaching it from the exterior of myself.
JEFFREY BROWN: Many books later, Ernaux would win literature's biggest prize.
MAN: The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022 is awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux.
JEFFREY BROWN: Soon after the announcement, Ernaux, now 82 and living outside Paris, came to New York.
We spoke at the office of her longtime U.S. publisher, Seven Stories Press, and I asked about mining the past, and a line that begins "The Years," one of her best-known books.
"All the images," she writes, "will disappear."
ANNIE ERNAUX (through translator): I do think that, in each of us, images disappear when we die.
And perhaps that's what made me write, to think of this moment when all the images I have seen would disappear, this feeling of the loss of things.
But I also think that the true reality of the world is forgetting.
We forget a great deal, from a collective perspective.
For instance, we're always surprised when war arises again, as we are seeing now.
So, it's more a question of forgetting than of memory.
And to write is to fight forgetting.
JEFFREY BROWN: In some 23 volumes, 16 of them translated and published in English, she's written one woman's story, a woman who is both her and not her.
She's been described as genre-defying, her books not quite novels, but not traditional memoirs.
ANNIE ERNAUX (through translator): I don't try to define myself in terms of a genre.
For me, the most important thing is to find the form of the writing that fits with what I'm writing.
So, to me, the right term is writer.
JEFFREY BROWN: One constant theme, her working-class roots in Normandy, where her parents ran a grocery, far outside France's traditional literary culture, her move through education and writing into a more intellectual world, and the distance that created from her family and within herself.. ANNIE ERNAUX (through translator): I remain divided between two world's.
Writing is the place where, with these tools I have acquired, I see the world, but always from the world of my youth, which I never could erase, what the writer Albert Camus called "The First Man."
Well, there is the first woman in me, which means that I will always write from that separate place.
JEFFREY BROWN: Has it been important to you as a woman to tell stories that perhaps are less told?
ANNIE ERNAUX (through translator): It's obvious that these stories haven't been told, especially because they haven't been told in the way I wanted them to be told.
JEFFREY BROWN: Without sentimentality, but with finely crafted language and probing honesty, always working from memory, she's written of deeply personal and traumatic experiences.
In "Happening," first published in 2000 and recently turned into a feature film...
UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS (through translator): Does it hurt?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS (through translator): Yes, the whole procedure.
JEFFREY BROWN: ... she looks back to a 1963 pregnancy and abortion, an almost barbaric procedure that nearly killed her, at a time when abortion was still illegal in France.
The story, she knows, has a new relevance.
ANNIE ERNAUX (through translator): It is a problem that wasn't ultimately resolved.
I think my book "Happening" reveals the savagery of abortion for women when it is banned.
But those things are forgotten.
JEFFREY BROWN: Are you surprised that what you experienced so long ago and then wrote about could perhaps be with us again?
ANNIE ERNAUX (through translator): Above all, I'm horrified and outraged that this could happen again.
At the same time, I think that there is something about the power of women to bring children into the world that men wanted to appropriate and once again want to appropriate.
JEFFREY BROWN: Sometimes, in the books, you seem to be trying to understand what you're writing.
At the end of "A Woman's Story," you write; "This isn't a biography.
Neither is it a novel, maybe a cross between literature, sociology and history."
ANNIE ERNAUX (through translator): The sentences that you quoted from "A Woman's Story," the book about my mother, were indeed about trying to situate myself in relationship to what I'd just written.
It's work to write.
And I want the reader to understand that I'm asking myself questions.
For me, to write is to go looking for what I don't even know myself before I write it.
JEFFREY BROWN: In her Nobel lecture, Annie Ernaux spoke of her hope that her work can - - quote -- "shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed and enable beings to reimagine themselves."
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in New York.
GEOFF BENNETT: Elliot Wade is a trans advocate who co-founded The Louisiana Trans Name Change Fund.
He was born and raised in Cecilia, Louisiana, where he didn't have much access to conversations about identity.
He says he's looking to change that for others.
Tonight, Wade shares his Brief But Spectacular take on the power of a name.
ELLIOT WADE, Founder, Louisiana Trans Name Change Fund: I'm looking at these statistics, right, and I know that there are high rates of violence.
I know that Louisiana is one of the highest rates of murders in the country for trans people.
I know that Black trans people, especially Black trans women, are subjected to that violence at a higher rate.
I know that I have to maybe prepare myself to be homeless.
But I would rather live as myself or not live at all.
I'm in Cecilia, Louisiana.
People haven't really heard of trans people.
It didn't really make sense to people.
It wasn't something that they could conceptualize or wrap their head around.
So I'm struggling with my gender identity and what that means for me.
I'm agonizing over what feels like living a lie, because I have to interact at home in this kind of way or talk to my friends and have them call me Elliot and then, whenever my parents are there, make sure that they're not calling me Elliot.
There's like a weird split that happens.
And it's hard to keep up.
You spend nine months in a womb, and your parents are thinking about the sort of person that you're going to become.
And choosing a name for you, that is the first gateway into forming yourself as a human being.
Whenever you choose your own name, you take the power to shape your destiny for yourself.
The name change process is daunting, it's expensive, it's tiring, and it's intimidating.
You have to go and interact in these courthouses with majority old white men that probably don't respect you.
And, on top of that, you have to spend, depending on what parish you're in, maybe half-a-grand.
In pretty much all facets of everyday life, you're going to need documentation for something, whether that's going to school or going to work.
If you want to go to a bar and even just get a drink, they have to look at your I.D.
A lot of the times, one of the first instances that folks have where they can be put in a dangerous situation is when those documents don't match their presentation, right?
So, starting the Name Change Fund, for me, was a necessity.
I need other people to have the same access that I did.
And I think about being the person that I needed when I was 17.
In a sort of trans queer utopia in Louisiana, people would just mind their business.
That's it.
Folks would just have an awareness that trans people exist, that they're human beings, and they're just trying to live their lives like everyone else.
So, in a trans utopia, no one cares that I'm trans.
My name is Elliot Nicholas (ph) Wade, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on the power of a name.
GEOFF BENNETT: And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.
And join us again here tomorrow night, when we will have the latest on a Supreme Court case challenging President Biden's student debt relief plan.
That is the "NewsHour" for tonight.
I'm Geoff Bennett.
AMNA NAWAZ: And I'm Amna Nawaz.
On behalf of the entire "NewsHour" team, thank you for joining us.