captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for saturday october 17: thousands of migrants hit a detour in central europe as hungary closes its border with croatia. and, concerns over expanding the american-trained national police force in afghanistan. in our signature segment, could hemp become the next big cash crop in kentucky and other tobacco-growing states? >> if you look at what their projected profit margin will be per acre, it's gonna be significantly greater than tobacco ever was. >> sreenivasan: next on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: lewis b. and louise hirschfeld cullman. bernard and irene schwartz. judy and josh weston.

the cheryl and philip milstein family. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we are your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. from the tisch wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thanks for joining us. thousands of migrants from the middle east, asia, and africa are being detoured on their desired path to western and northern europe. today, hungary closed its border with the nation immediately to its south, croatia, by completing a 216-mile long steel and barbed wire fence. last night, hungarian border

guards let in the final 2,000 migrants from croatia. today, croatia re-routed 1,800 migrants on trains into slovenia, which then lead to austria and germany. those two countries have accepted more asylum seekers than any other european nations. croatia's interior minister was quoted today as saying, "nobody can stop this flow without shooting." the entry point to europe often begins in greece, where today there was a reminder of how dangerous the journey is. a dozen refugees thought to be from syria or afghanistan drowned trying to reach the greek island of lesbos. turkey's coast guard rescued another 25 people from the aegean sea. the united nations estimates 400,000 refugees have crossed to greece this year. a month's worth of street violence is continuing this weekend in israel. today in jerusalem, israeli police shot and killed three palestinians who, according to the police, had attacked them with knives. eight israelis have been killed in stabbings in the past month, and at least 40 palestinians

have been killed by israeli fire. today in the west bank city of ramallah, israeli troops clashed with palestinian protesters. the unrest of recent weeks began because of rumors that israel might limit access to the al aqsa mosque in jerusalem's old city, which israel has denied. in syria, government troops are pressing an offensive to take back the country's second largest city, aleppo. rebel forces seeking to overthrow syrian president bashar-al assad have held the eastern half of aleppo for three years. assad's troops are being aided by russian air power and iran- backed militias. russia's military says it has carried out 400 bombing raids this week. russian prime minister dmitry medvedev said today russia's campaign in syria is not designed to prop up president assad, but to defeat islamic state militants. the family of a nigerian college student who died in a savannah, georgia, jail nine-and-half months ago says they are "not surprised" two former sheriff's deputies have been acquitted in his death. a jury returned "not guilty" verdicts yesterday on manslaughter charges brought in

the case of matthew ajibade, who died alone in his cell shackled to a chair. the deputies had used a taser on ajibade multiple times while he was restrained and then left him unattended. he had fought with deputies after being arrested on a domestic violence charge. ajibade's family says he suffered from bipolar disorder. a cousin said: "the same system that failed mathew would not be the system that got him justice." one former deputy was convicted of cruelty to an inmate. the obama administration intends to block future plans to drill for oil in the arctic waters off alaska. the interior department says it is canceling future auctions for offshore drilling rights for the next two years, and not extending any current leases to drill off alaska's northern coast. the announcement comes just a few weeks after royal dutch shell, the only major energy company actively exploring the area, halted its operations after spending $7 billion and finding relatively little oil.

the conservation group oceana said the administration's decision is consistent with" good public policy and economic realities." u.s. airways is no more. the airline's last flight landed in philadelphia early this morning, a red eye coming from san francisco with 187 passengers on board. it was flight number 1939, the same year the airline was founded. the world's biggest airline, american, bought u.s. airways. the merger announced two years ago is now complete. >> sreenivasan: president obama announced this week that american troops will not fully withdraw from afghanistan, as he had planned, by the end of his presidency. instead, 10,000 u.s. troops will remain deployed for another year to help afghanistan quell the resurgent taliban and also to keep training afghanistan's police force to expand and stand on its own. joining me in the studio to

discuss this is austin long, a professor of international and public affairs focusing on security policy at columbia university here in new york. so, we spoke a couple of days ago on the broadcast about the military decision and assistance to the afghan military, but the police force has also been part of the strategy. where is that? was that a success or failure over the last several years? >> so the afghan police force is just one component of the afghan security forces. there is also an army. there is also an intelligence service. the police have more or less been the lagging security for0l they've been the least developed over time, and so they've been an integral part of security in afghanistan, but they haven't been highly effective >> sreenivasan: so some of the areas, especially in rural afghanistan, have a pretty tense relationship with any authority, whether it's the afghan government, whether it's the u.s. government or the taliban, right? >> so, that's absolutely right. and one of the big answers to this in theor was to create local police force. so there's an afghan national

police force that covers the entire country at the federal level. beginning in 2009, the united states began pressing a plan to build local police forces that would operate more or less at the village or district level, very local forces that would in theory have a big incentive to defend their home territory and wouldn't be expected to go fight anywhere else in afghanistan >> sreenivasan: so why didn't that work? >> well, there are several reasons why this program has been a problem. the first is the afghan government was initially very reluctant to do it. president karzai saw these forces as essentially resuscitated militia and militia is a dirty word in afghanistan after the 1980s and 1990s. so that was one reason. a bigger reason, i think, is once the afghan government bought off in 2010 and this became a formal part of the afghan police, called the afghan local police, there was a big push to expand this program very quickly. these units were seen as the key to providing security in these remote villages which, as you say, may have a very tense

relationship with the government. the problem was in the push to rapidly expand this program in 2011 and 2012, i would argue it grew too quickly. you didn't have sufficient vetting of the individuals to make sure they weren't going to commit the kind of abuses that president karzai was worried about. in some cases you had local police or individuals that claimed to be local police that were not from the local area. they essentially come in from the outside. so there were a lot of issues, i'd say, over the period 2011 to '12 and '13 >> sreenivasan: what happens next? along side the u.s. forces that remain on the ground, do they play a role in training of theav began police as well? >> i think it would be very difficult for these kind of local programs for the u.s. servicemen to peapt just because they tend to be very far from the bases that the u.s. is at now. so in 2010, the u.s. had small bases scattered throughout the country, in addition to very large bases. now we've more or less come down to the big bases so it's difficult to get out and do

training in these remote villages. i think this will be a very afghan-led program >> sreenivasan: all right, austin long from columbia university, thank you very much for joining us. >> thank you very much for having me. >> sreenivasan: the militant group known as the islamic state, or isis, controls huge amounts of territory in iraq and syria. and isis finances much of its military operations from siphoning and selling the greatest commodity in iraq and syria: oil. some estimates put proceeds from the isis theft at $1.5 million a day." financial times" reporter erika solomon has written about this, and she joins me now, from chicago. so, erika, how is it possible that they have this kind of an industry of oil in the middle of the war where different countries are attacking them? >> well, that's the very interesting part because actually, attacking oil fields

is quite difficult. you can't just bomb an oil field. it could cause a natural disaster and it could potentially hurt that country's future in terms of using its oil. so the coalition can only really go after refining processes or everything after the extraction. and isis has used that to its advantage. basically, it's taken over oil fields and has used employees who already were working at those fields to continue production. and the other thing is that syria has been in a war for about five years so, people in this region, when the government lost control, had been doing this for quite some time. what isis did was just take over production that was already ongoing and improve it >> sreenivasan: okay so who do they sell this oil to? isis sells this oil to everyone there. a lot of people think that the oil probably goes to turkey. but we found most of the oil is being bought by the people isis controls, or even their neighbors who are technically at with them.

the most striking examples would be areas to the northwest controlled by the syrian option, which is at war with isis. they fight isis at the same time that they actually have to buy their fuel because they have no other option >> sreenivasan: so the hospitals are all powered by generators using oil from isis. >> yeah, that's the really shocking part. at some point, isis has blocked fuel moving to rebel areas to make this point, and a few months ago what happened is we saw hospitals that didn't have any fuel. they couldn't power some of their operations rooms and people actually died because they didn't center fuel is there why is this so difficult to stop? you said it's hard to bomb oil fields for environmental repercussions. why is it so difficult to stop the pipeline of oil getting for one place in syria or iraq to another? >> there are differences of opinion among the international coalition about how to handle this. in reporting the story, i went to places on the border between syria and iraq where kurder peshmerga forces are fighting

isis with support from coalition air forces. they would like it bomb routes where you can see trucks going by with oil, but their coalition partners it's americans say we don't want to do that. we don't want to turn what are essentially civilian traders against us because what isis has done is allow locals to buy their fuel. they don't actually control the entire system. they only control the extract and sell crude oil. locals are the ones who refine it and still it on and they're benefiting from it because they don't really have any other economic opportunities right now. and that's yet coalition has really struggled to find an effective way to fight oil industry in syria >> sreenivasan: all right, erika solomon, normally based in beirut but joining us today from chicago. thanks so much. >> thank you. >> sreenivasan: for decades, hemp has been taboo in the united states.

federal law prohibited farmers from growing it, because hemp comes from the cannabis plant, the same plant species as marijuana. but the hemp ban is starting to soften. last year, congress approved pilot projects to grow a limited amount of hemp, and one state in particular, kentucky, is at the forefront of this agricultural experiment. and, at a time when tobacco farming is in decline, some farmers see their future in hemp. the newshour's christopher booker reports from kentucky. >> basically, a barn like this, with twenty guys, we can load this barn in two days. >> reporter: brian furnish and his family have been growing tobacco for eight generations. they started in virginia nearly two hundred years ago then migrated in the mid-1800s to the rolling hills of central kentucky. >> i guess it's a labor of love, one we have always done. we grew up in it and i guess we always will as long as it's available to us. >> reporter: but life as a kentucky tobacco farmer is not as lucrative as it once was. thanks to anti-smoking campaigns

and high taxes on cigarettes, domestic demand is down and federal government price supports are gone. the days when kentucky's crop grossed nearly $1 billion a year are no more, forcing brian, and farmers like him, to imagine a future without tobacco and diversify their farms. his move to cattle paid off with rising beef prices, but brian's most recent bet is cannabis sativa, also known as hemp. but there is a catch. to the federal government, hemp is just as illegal as marijuana. kentucky agriculture commissioner james comer is determined to change that. >> there is no reason why industrial hemp should've been outlawed in the united states or in kentucky. >> reporter: both marijuana and hemp are cannabis plants, and to the naked eye they look and smell the same. the main difference comes down to the amount of tetrahydrocannabinol, commonly referred to as t.h.c., the psychoactive chemical in the cannabis plant. hemp has a t.h.c. level below .3% percent, essentially making it impossible to get high on the plant, whereas marijuana has

t.h.c. levels are above .3%. potency levels generally vary between 1% and 20%. >> it's a crop that today we make a lot of products from plastic and wood, tomorrow those products will be made from industrial hemp. the problem is that when people thought of hemp, they thought of marijuana. >> reporter: in order to move forward, comer and other leaders have tried to change the misperceptions. and this was a hard sell. kentucky's state police commissioner wasn't convinced. he declined our request for an interview, but has voiced his skepticism on the local pbs program "kentucky tonight." >> the main, number one concern that law enforcement has is that it is impossible for us with aerial surveillance, which is how we cut most of our marijuana, 441,000 plants last year on the governor's marijuana strike task force, you cannot distinguish that from the air or even on the ground when you're in the field to the naked eye. but the big issue that we have is what is to prevent an unscrupulous farmer, maybe with or without his knowledge, from someone going in and planting

ten, fifteen, twenty marijuana plants in the center of this one acre, ten acre tract? >> reporter: the appeal of hemp is based on the productivity and diverse usage of the plant. the fiber can be used in rope, clothing, building materials, even car dashboards. whole foods sells a variety of products derived from hemp seeds-- from hemp granola bars to hemp milk. and the body shop, offers everything from hemp hand cream to hemp soap-on-a-rope. but all of the hemp fiber, seeds, or oils in these products comes from hemp grown outside of the united states to the tune of about $500 million a year. after comer took office in 2012, he pushed the state legislature to pass a law that set the basic framework for a kentucky hemp industry. but getting hemp seeds in the ground required the federal government. so, the state turned to one of the most powerful politicians in washington for help: the senior u.s senator from kentucky and current republican majority leader, mitch mcconnell. when the 2014 farm bill arrived in the senate, it included a house of representatives amendment granting colleges and universities the right to grow

and study industrial hemp. in the senate version of the bill, senator mcconnell inserted a key measure extending the rights to state agriculture departments, clearing the way for states to license individual farmers to grow hemp. after it passed, mcconnell issued a statement applauding what this might mean for kentucky, saying: "this is an important victory for kentucky's farmers, and i was pleased to be able to secure this language on behalf of our state. we are laying the groundwork for a new commodity market for kentucky farmers." brian furnish was one of the first kentucky farmers approved last year to grow hemp, but it wasn't that simple. because the state lacked a controlled substance import permit, the drug enforcement administration held up the first batch of seed for weeks. >> they seized one of our shipments and we had to go to court in louisville to get the seed released and to lay out the framework of what we would have to do to get our licensing permits. last year was a really slow process. this season it wasn't so bad. they only delayed us about maybe ten days.

>> reporter: even with seeds in hand, furnish was monitored from planting to harvest. >> everything we do has to be reported. we have to go through a criminal background check. all of our fields have to be g.p.s. when they're planted. samples will be taken of every field to test for the t.h.c. levels. >> reporter: while furnish and the state view this effort as a way to push farms into a post- tobacco future, the move to hemp is actually a return to a plant that once dominated the kentucky landscape. >> with philippine and east indian sources of hemp now in the hands of the japanese, american hemp must meet the needs of our army and navy, as well as our industries. >> reporter: at the height of world war two, the u.s. government temporarily allowed and encouraged farmers to grow hemp for the war effort. >> rope for marine rigging and towing, thread for shoes for millions of american soldiers, and parachute webbing for our paratroopers. >> reporter: at the war's end, came the end of kentucky hemp. despite the state's history, there are essentially no farmers remaining that have direct experience with the plant. unlike the tobacco farming

techniques that have been passed down through the generations, kentucky farmers that are looking to experiment with hemp are mostly relying on the techniques developed in other counies. >> the uses of hemp at that period of history are very, very different than why we would grow hemp today. >> reporter: following the passage of the last year's farm bill, professor david williams helped launch the university of kentucky's hemp research program. >> if you consider a plant that has three potential harvestable components there aren't too many other crops that we're growing in kentucky that can serve that role. we have experiments for all three this year. the one behind me is a natural fiber trial. we have two trials investigating grain production, growing hemp just for the seed for food purposes, animal or human food. and then we also have some trials investigating the production of cannabinoids. >> reporter: it is these cannabinoids, the biochemicals in hemp that some believe have potential medicinal applications, from reducing seizures to treating cancer. the state feels, this is where most potential profit lies, but james comer says, this is where

they are facing another challenge from a federal agency, the food and drug administration. >> some of our most profitable pilot projects now are focused on the cannabidiol from a pharmaceutical standpoint. if you look at what their projected profit margin will be per acre, it's going to be significantly greater than tobacco ever was. >> reporter: but any medicinal application would require the approval of the f.d.a., the agency responsible for the regulation of medication and dietary supplements. in an excerpt from a statement to the newshour, the f.d.a. said: "it is important and appropriate to use the same scientific standards in the development and assessment of potential therapeutic uses of cannabidiol as with any unapproved drug that the agency reviews." >> with all new industries, there's an element of risk. >> reporter: trey riddle hopes to cash in on hemp. he relocated his materials company, sunstrand, from montana. >> my company right now is prepared to chart a path into the unknown and invest time,

money, resources into developing capabilities to take the material to the next step. we do feel that there is a large market potential for hemp, and so are willing to make those investments. >> reporter: what if there's a change in policy and they basically say, "okay no more, no more hemp?" >> i'm not too worried about that myself. i don't really see the laws going backwards. i think it would be a hard sell, because we are making a lot of progress. >> reporter: particularly thinking about your own trajectory, you know, brian furnish, whose farm we visited, he has a hundred acres. i mean, if you're talking about scaling up, you're going to need a lot more hemp. >> that's right. i mean we expect to need 5,000 acres of hemp in the not-so- distant future for just a portion of what we think is a major industry. >> reporter: a potential major industry for kentucky and dozen or so other states looking at alternatives to tobacco. but even with the current framework in place, one that will require a bit more than investment and development to move forward in the way some are hoping. >> once they have confidence that the federal government is

going to leave them alone there, there's going to be a huge investment made all over the state and i can see the interest from, from wall street. i can see the interest from, from hedge funds and, and investors all across the united states that want to come to kentucky and, and get in on the ground floor of an industry that they know ten years down the road is, is going to be huge. >> sreenivasan: the drug enforcement administration tells the newshour, it has "taken numerous steps to ensure that the industrial hemp provisions" of last year's farm bill "are carried out." in addition to kentucky, the d.e.a. says it has granted several dozen permits to grow hemp in eight other states. learn more about hemp's history in the u.s., including how britain once required american colonists to grow hemp in the 17th century. visit us at pbs.org/newshour. >> this is pbs newshour weekend,

saturday. >> sreenivasan: researchers in italy are now using modern medical technology to shed more light on an ancient mystery: the volcanic eruption that destroyed pompeii. newshour's megan thompson has the story. >> reporter: 2.5 million people visit pompeii every year, making it one of italy's busiest tourist attractions. the ancient city, close to modern day naples, is famous for being frozen in time, preserved as it was when the volcano mount vesuvius erupted more than 1,900 years ago, in 79 a.d. pompeii, buried in tons of volcanic ash, along with the remains of some 2,000 people killed, was first excavated in the 1800s. those early discoverers created plaster casts of the ancient people's remains, but little was known about them.

so, last month, researchers brought in a cat scan machine, like one you might find in a doctor's office. the machine penetrates the thick plaster and creates a 3- dimensional image of each body. the cat scans reveal two big discoveries. first, many victims did not die from suffocation, as previously thought, but from the falling buildings. ( translated ): we have found a lot of broken skulls. this tells us many died from falling roofs under the pressure of the pumice. >> reporter: second, the researchers are finding of pompeii's victims had practically perfect teeth, a reflection, perhaps, of a healthy mediterranean diet low in sugar, and high levels of fluoride in their water supply. ( translated ): we discovered the absence of cavities in the teeth. this is very interesting, it is not completely surprising because we know about the mediterranean diet and its positive aspects. >> reporter: the researchers plan to scan all 86 casts of the human remains, to help us learn more about not only how the people of pompeii died, but how they lived.

>> sreenivasan: and finally, astronaut scott kelly has set an american record for living in space. today is his 204th consecutive day in orbit, bringing his grand total on 384 days over four different missions. kelly is halfway through a yearlong mission on the international space station, along with a russian cosmonaut, to study the effects of long-term space travel on the human body. kelly is not due to return to earth until next march. that's all for this edition of pbs newshour weekend. i'm hari sreenivasan. have a good night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

>> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: lewis b. and louise hirschfeld cullman. bernard and irene schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. judy and josh weston. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we are your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

[reflective music] ♪ [female vocalizing] ♪ (female narrator) walking in the light in deep, endless beauty. a memory filters through. carved against the canopy of sky are faces of ancient beings, smiling and familiar.