Tonight on PBS News Weekend, as the government shutdown begins on new month, uncertainty for the tens of millions of low income Americans who rely on government food assistance.

Then a new book looks at China's dazzling infrastructure and how modern China has been shaped by engineers.

and a remote island in the Indian Ocean where climate change is driving an ancient distinctively shaped tree to the brink of extinction.

It just looks like something out of a Dr.

Seuss book.

It has this umbrella shaped canopy and if we lose these trees, it would be devastating, not just symbolically, but for the entire ecosystem.

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Thank you.

Good evening.

I'm John Yang.

There is uncertainty tonight for the tens of millions of low-income Americans who rely on the government's biggest nutrition program.

Two federal judges have told the Trump administration it must use available emergency funds to provide at least partial benefits for the supplemental nutrition assistance program or SNAP, what used to be called food stamps.

This afternoon, one of the judges said full SNAP benefit payments must be made by Monday.

But even if the administration complies, they will likely still be at least a temporary lapse in benefits.

Chrisarro is Politico's food and agriculture policy reporter.

Grace, why is that?

Why would there still be a lapse even if the the administration starts putting out this money.

Absolutely.

So USDA, which controls SNAP, told state agencies and state administrators of the program starting October 10th, they put, they put out a memo to states, um, instructing them to delay preparing November benefits.

So at this point we're weeks behind where state agencies and administrators typically are in the process of preparing those benefits for SAP participants and putting those benefits on EBT cards.

So, even if the Trump administration complies with this court order, which is still TBD, um, we could be seeing days to weeks of delays in SNAP benefits, um, for November.

Are there states that are going to use their own money to fund this while this is going on.

Yeah, part of the difficult thing is that the federal government pays over $9 billion for Snap benefits each month.

So a lot of state budgets just don't have the money to make up for that.

Um, some of them are topping some emergency disaster funds or declaring states of emergencies so that they can access some money, but a lot of those states we've seen a couple dozen try to do something like that, but they don't have that much money compared to what they're used to getting from the federal government, and they're also not able to put that money directly on EBT cards for SNAP participants the way they'd typically get benefits.

So, um, they are donating money to food banks or trying to, you know, soften the blow on SNA participants, but it's just not the same as getting benefits in a standard way.

You should say EBT is electronic benefits transfers.

They don't get a check.

They get like a debit card like a debit card, exactly.

Who qualifies for SNA?

Yes, so nearly 42 million low-income Americans, a lot of them have children or are older adults or have disabilities.

Um, so, I mean, it's across the country, there are certain states that rely more on them.

For example, New Mexico has the highest dependence on SNAP, about 21%.

Louisiana and Oregon are also up there.

It varies by state, but, um, between, we've looked at between red states and blue states, it's pretty even.

It'll impact every state across the country, um, some more than others, but, um, there are so many people who are used to getting these benefits.

And I mean, this is the first time in history since the program was started that there's going to be a lapse in federal funding for it.

There's another nutrition program that may be in trouble because of this wickC women's infants and children.

Tell us about that.

Yeah, so Wick, a lot of folks who are on WIC are also on Snap.

They can co-enroll, um, so that is another program that uh at the start of the shutdown, we saw a lot of concern about being able to fund it.

The White House was able to use some unused tariff revenue to keep it going for a couple of weeks, but um that was about $300 million.

So compared to Snap it's a little bit less cash, but there's not really a solution that the White House has presented or that the court has presented to making sure that Wick continues so we could see a lot of families, especially mothers with young children who use WIC to get baby formula and just basic necessities and even healthcare, um, they will be impacted twice by both the WIC and the snap delays.

Has the wickite program run out of cash?

Is that, is that done?

It varies by state, but state agencies said around November 1st it's not as much of a funding cliff as Snap, where Snap just fully ran out of federal funds starting today, but that 300 million or so that was issued to states around mid October is starting to run out just around now.

Today is also the beginning of the enrollment period for the ACA insurance program.

Now this is an issue that's also central to this the shutdown.

Explain that connection.

Yes, so Democrats are really insisting on extending those um subsidies.

Um, and I think that's why this is such a big deal with the snap on top of the premiums going up so much.

Um, so I think this is at the core of Democrats' argument is that they want to prioritize low income Americans, and meanwhile, Republicans are saying that Democrats are stretching this out and hurting folks even more by also delaying SNAP payments and WIC payments on top of the increased premiums.

Are there any other social safety net programs that are in danger of being threatened here.

I think those are the big ones.

I mean, Snap has really like, I think that was a big topic of conversation when I was on the Hill last week, um, I think a lot of folks didn't even consider that that was a possibility at the beginning of the shutdown because it's never happened before.

Um, the Trump administration during the president's first term was able to find some money.

It's different, it's a different situation than this go around, but they've been able to figure out how to cushion snap before, um, and this is looking to be one of the longest, probably the longest shutdown ever.

Um, so it's pretty unprecedented, um, and I think Snap is at the top of the conversation as well as, as you mentioned, the Obamacare fight.

Gracierro of Politico, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me.

In tonight's other headlines, Israel says the remains of three people Hamas handed over don't belong to any of the hostages, and it's not clear whose remains they are.

It's the latest setback in the fragile US brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Each side has accused the other of violations.

The bodies of 11 hostages haven't been returned to Israel yet.

Hamas says their efforts are hampered by widespread devastation and the continued Israeli military presence in some areas of Gaza.

Ukrainian forces say they've destroyed a key fuel pipeline deep inside Russian territory.

Ukraine says it was a 250 mile long pipeline that supplied gas and jet fuel to the Russian army.

It's the latest escalation as the two countries target each other's energy infrastructure ahead of winter.

It also comes as Russia claimed it captured the eastern city of Prokovsk, a key Ukrainian stronghold in the Donetsk region.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that wasn't true and that a battle for the city is still going on.

Planes carrying much needed aid are arriving and hurricane battered Jamaica, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom are sending emergency supplies and disaster relief workers to support recovery efforts.

Before Hurricane Melissa made landfall, a Florida nonprofit prepared boxes of food, water, and essentials, which are now on their way to the Caribbean.

You're going to need clothes, your shoes, your toothbrush, but clean socks, all these things that may be a minor thing in your normal routine, they're all gone, trying to make sure that we are there to help people that are going through a tough time.

Tonight British citizens who were stranded in Jamaica are set to return home, while some commercial flights are resuming, landslides and downed power lines have made it difficult to reach survivors most in need.

Two new suspects are in custody in Paris tonight in connection with the now infamous jewelry heist of the Louvre Museum, a sweeping investigation has led to the arrest of 9 people in all since the daring heist nearly two weeks ago.

The jewels worth more than $100 million still haven't been recovered.

The Paris prosecutor said the new suspects were arrested 3 days ago, and they've been charged with theft by an organized gang and criminal conspiracy.

And 20 years and a billion dollars later, the world's largest museum dedicated to an ancient civilization is now open.

The Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo features more than 50,000 artifacts including treasures from King Tut's tomb.

This will be the first time the entire collection will be displayed since the tomb was discovered in 1922.

The opening was delayed for years by cost overruns and political turmoil.

Egyptian officials hope the museum will boost tourism in the country's troubled economy.

Still to come on PBS News Weekend, a new book examines how China's engineering mindset has shaped its society and a unique tree found only up the coast of Yemen, now under threat.

This is PBS News Weekend from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, home of the PBS Newshour.

Weeknights on BBS.

For decades, China's government has reshaped the country with dramatic displays of state power from vast infrastructure projects that have remade entire provinces to nationwide campaigns that attempt to shape citizens' behavior.

Ali Rogan takes a look at what those sweeping measures say about China's ambitions and what they may mean for the future of US-Chinese competition.

From high-speed rail.

to state of the art factories.

and soaring bridges, China is building infrastructure projects at an unprecedented scale and pace.

The poor rural province of Guizhou is now home to nearly half of the world's 100 tallest bridges.

This fall, cars crossed the newest, tallest bridge in the world for the first time.

The bridge cut travel across the river from hours to mere minutes, according to state media.

Visitors and locals celebrated the grand opening with a water and light display and base jumps from a special viewing platform.

Part of the record breaking project's tourism appeal.

Its several purposes symbolic, political, economic, and just in terms of improving vastly the quality of life of people that use them.

Andrew Murtha is the director of the China Global Research Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

I think it's difficult for people in the US to understand just what a massive change, this type of infrastructure building over the past 30 years has meant for China.

In just a few decades, China has built highways twice the length of the entire US interstate highway system.

The country's first high-speed rail line opened in 2008.

Now high speed trains crisscross China in a network 20 times more extensive than Japan's, and China has built as much solar and wind power capacity as the rest of the world put together.

but the quest for efficiency isn't limited to physical infrastructure.

During the pandemic, China implemented a zero COVID policy, one of the world's most restrictive COVID-19 lockdowns.

The system of surveillance, mass testing, and forced quarantine kept China's case numbers lower than most countries early in the outbreak, but the response to the Omicron variant in 2022 prompted sudden lockdowns lasting far longer than expected, and draconian restrictions on residents.

Over four decades, China's one-child policy achieved its goal of birth rate reductions but led to enforcement actions that traumatized generations.

Today China's birth rate is in freefall, and the government is hoping to reverse it by pushing a three-child policy.

And for all of that building, massive housing and infrastructure projects are saddled with enormous debt.

and many projects get abandoned, leading to entire ghost cities, feats of engineering with no one to enjoy them.

For more on the costs and benefits of China's approach.

I am joined by Dan Won.

He is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of a new book Breakneck China's Quest to Engineer the Future.

Dan, thank you so much for being here.

It's great to be here.

You frame China and the US as a nation of engineers versus the lawyerly society.

Why is that a useful framework to view these two countries.

So China is a country I call the engineering state because at various points in the recent past, all 9 members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the Communist Party's highest ruling echelon had degrees in engineering.

They treat the physical environment as an engineering project.

They engineered the economy and they're also social engineers.

I think about the United States as a lawyerly society, because it seems like if you want to be president or a member of Congress, you have to go to law school.

5 of the last 10 US presidents went to law school.

The issue with lawyers is that they tend to block everything, good and bad, so you don't have stupid ideas, like the zero COVID policy or the one child policy, you also don't have functional infrastructure.

I would say almost anywhere in the US.

You write about the tradeoffs of China's rapid approach to change that the state moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people.

Explain that.

China is defined by in part by these big spasms of construction over the last 40 years.

China built its very first highway in 1993.

18 years later, China built one America's worth of highways.

Nine years after that, China built another America's worth of highways.

Every year since 1980, China has built an average of one New York City plus one Boston area worth of housing every single year.

And so you can take a look through a lot of these infrastructure projects which I would say for the most part improve people's lives.

People feel a sense of optimism for the future when they see new subway lines in their cities, new parks, more big bridges in the countryside.

And so people get really excited about what could be coming next.

That has produced a lot of costs, uh, with the infrastructure alone, there are very heavy debt costs, very heavy financial costs with these really tall bridges that do not produce an economic return.

There is an environmental cost and then there's the social engineering.

The one child policy is something that I describe in my book as a campaign of rural terror that was carried out against overwhelmingly female bodies throughout the countryside throughout the 1980s, in which, according to China's official statistics, uh, over the 35 years of the one child policy era, China conducted about 300 million abortions, um, it had sterilized 100 million women and sterilized 25 million men in order to reduce population.

And of course the great irony now is that China is facing a demographic crisis in which it would really like for more women to have kids, to have bigger families.

Living in China really feels like they treat society as yet another math exercise, as if people were just another building material to be torn down and remolded as they wish.

So she also talks about the need to plan for some sort of extreme scenario, and that is happening at the same time that China is also ramping up its military production which is far outpacing what the United States is doing.

Is he talking about a military confrontation, and if one were to happen, what would that look like?

Xi has spoken about extreme scenarios, but as is pretty typical for a lot of the Communist Party.

They speak in these euphemisms, they speak in these obliquities, and that it is not always very clear what exactly that they're referring to.

And so I think that they are planning for uh some sort of extreme severance from the rest of the world in which China is very intent on becoming more energy secure, for example.

They're very serious about all sorts of food security issues, and so local provinces and local cities are really expected to produce a vast majority of their own food.

Xi has a much greater sense of seriousness about patching up a lot of China's own deficiencies.

He is trying to, you know, pivot away from foreign sources of energy, and they are trying to become technologically self-sufficient as well.

And when the, we take a look at some of these figures showing that China has about 1500 ships under construction and the United States has 5.

These are some really obvious disparities, and that's not necessarily because China builds too much.

There's also that the United States builds too little.

And so I am very interested in the US trying to fix up a lot of its manufacturing problems, defense industrial based problems because it has not been very good at building ships that has not been very good at building munitions.

It has not been very good at building drones, and there are all these ways at which the um United States military might feel outclassed if there is ever going to be, God forbid, any serious conflict.

You write, quote, I like to imagine how much better the world would be if both superpowers could adopt a few of the pathologies of the other.

How do you see that playing out?

I would love it if the United States could be 20% more engineering um to have a few more people building the homes that we desperately need to fix up the mass transit systems, build better public works, and fix up the manufacturing base as well.

At the same time, I think it would be a really amazing if China could be 50% more loyally because the Communist Party has never really respected individual rights.

It has been very intent on strangling the creative impulses of young Chinese, and I think that Chinese youths are a wonderfully creative people.

They can meme with the best American youths.

Um, they have amazing TikToks, they have amazing Douyings, and I think that fundamentally what I would really ask is for the Communist Party to learn.

to leave people alone.

The book is Breakneck China's Quest to Engineer the Future.

Dan Wang, thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Ali.

The Yemeni island of Sukotrirus, it's in the Indian Ocean between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa.

It's one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, sometimes called the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean.

More than a third of the plant species on the island doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth.

That includes a type of dragon's blood tree.

Some of them are centuries old, but now they're struggling to survive in the face of intensifying threats from climate change.

Associated Press Oceans and climate correspondent Ani a Hammerslaug went to Sukotra for a firsthand look.

Anika, first of all, this island, it's isolated.

Not many people go there.

So tell us what this island is like.

It just looks like nowhere else I'd ever been.

There's very little infrastructure on the island, and visitors camp their way across it, which I really loved, and many of the plants look totally surreal, like the bottle trees that jut out of the side of cliffs and the frankincense trees that have these wild gnarled limbs, and then of course you have the dragon's blood trees on top of all that, you just get these incredible varied landscapes.

There's a network of cave s that snake through the island for several miles.

There's massive dunes that drop right into the ocean.

And my favorite place was the Waddis, which have these natural freshwater pools.

I swam in one that was longer than an Olympic pool, and it had this steep canyon running beneath it.

It was the highlight of the trip.

And you say that these plants have distinctive looks.

The dragon's blood tree has a pretty distinctive look.

Yeah, and it's really the emblem of Socotra.

It's on the currency.

It's what draws tourists into the island, and it just looks like something out of a Dr.

Seuss's book.

It has this umbrella shaped canopy and when you cut the bark, it bleeds a red sap, which is where it gets its name from.

And that resin has been used for centuries for things like cosmetics and medicines and dyes.

The trees also play a crucial role in the ecosystem.

The canopy captures moisture from fog and channels it into the soil, which helps other plants survive, and that's becoming increasingly important as rains there become less predictable with climate change and how threatened is it and where are the threats coming from?

So cyclones in the Arabian Sea have become increasingly intense and frequent.

And Socotra has been hit repeatedly over the last decade with the most intense cyclones on record, and that's uprooted thousands of these dragon's blood trees, some of which were over 500 years old.

Climate models all over the world forecast that this trend will continue, especially as greenhouse gas emissions rise, to make matters worse, the trees grow incredib ly slowly at just 1 inch per year.

There's invasive goats all over the island who feed on dragon's blood saplings before they have a chance to grow back.

And then there's the political instability.

Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world.

It's been mired in conflict for years, both the Civil War and now regional tensions.

So there was very little capacity to support conservation.

One security analyst I spoke with put it really well.

He said, Yemen has 99 problems right now addressing climate issues would be a luxury.

And what is being done or what can be done to try to save this tree.

It was really heartwarming to see how the locals are so determined to protect what they have, even with so few resources.

I spent some time with one family, the Kibonis, who run their own dragons, Blood Tree nursery.

They felt simple enclosures out of wood and wire to keep out goats, but the wind and the rain often break them down.

So they're constantly having to rebuild.

For them, the work is deeply personal.

They see the trees as part of their family, and one of the Kibaniss, I spent some time with Sena.

She told me that watching them die is like losing one of your babies.

If this tree goes extinct, what's lost?

What, what, what goes with it?

The dragon's blood tree helps keep a lot of other species alive.

So without them, the island would become even more arid, and it could lose a lot of its unique biodiversity.

And beyond that, the trees are central to the island's identity, and economy.

So if the trees disappear, so could the tourism many locals depend on.

It would be devastating, not just symbolically, but for the entire ecosystem.

And aa Hammerschlag of the Associated Press, thank you very much.

Thank you for having me And that is PBS Newsweekend for this Saturday.

I'm John Yang for all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us and for most of you, don't forget to set your clocks back an hour tonight.

The next hour of sleep.

See you tomorrow.

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