November 18, 2025 - PBS News Hour full episode

Sometimes, the right learning environment can change everything. For Courtney Irwin, that place was a youth development center in Salinas, California. She shares her Brief But Spectacular take on how cooking and community helped her find her way.

Catholic bishops are speaking out against the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort and its treatment of immigrants in detention. In a special pastoral message, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote, “we pray for an end to the dehumanizing rhetoric and violence.” Amna Nawaz spoke with one of the bishops behind the message, Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, Texas.

The Trump administration's battles over higher education have mostly focused on elite and some public universities. But the president's policies are also creating challenges for some community colleges, and could undermine those schools' plans to build more economic opportunities and jobs. Paul Solman reports for our series, Rethinking College.

The United Nations climate summit, known as COP30, will wrap up later this week, and its achievements will likely be more muted this year. Delegates from nearly 200 countries are meeting near the Amazon rainforest, but the Trump administration decided not to send anyone. As part of our Tipping Point series, William Brangham discussed more with former Secretary of State John Kerry.

In our news wrap Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that Meta does not have an illegal monopoly over social networking, Cloudflare says it has resolved an outage that disrupted internet users, the NTSB says two electrical blackouts disabled the ship that crashed into Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge last year and the Trump administration is accelerating plans to dismantle the Education Department.

President Trump welcomed the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia to the White House. During the visit, the president dismissed the U.S. intelligence community’s finding that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the plan to kill Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. White House correspondent Liz Landers reports.

With bipartisan support, Congress voted to release the Epstein files. To discuss the vote and what comes next, Amna Nawaz spoke with Spencer Kuvin, an attorney representing multiple survivors of Epstein's abuse.

On Capitol Hill, both the House and the Senate approved a measure requiring the release of the Epstein files. Congressional correspondent Lisa Desjardins reports.