SUMMARY: At least 25 people were killed when tornadoes tore through central Tennessee early Tuesday. The storms blasted downtown Nashville and damaged or destroyed at least 140 buildings, including some Super Tuesday polling stations. Four counties reported storm-related deaths, hospitals treated dozens of injuries and rescue crews searched for missing people amid the rubble. Stephanie Sy reports.
SUMMARY: A study suggesting the benefits of pre-K may not be long-lasting has sparked debate in Tennessee, where proposals for state-funded, universal programs are an issue in this year's governor's race. What’s behind the finding, and what are the keys to quality early education? John Yang reports from Memphis.
SUMMARY: Wednesday on the PBS NewsHour, Yamiche Alcindor joins Judy Woodruff to fact-check some of President Trump’s claims.
President Donald Trump made several misleading statements Tuesday during an hour-long campaign-style speech in Nashville. Trump traveled to Tennessee in part to boost the Senate candidacy of Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn).
But Trump’s support for Blackburn, who is running to replace retiring Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn) was largely overshadowed by criticism that he exaggerated his record in office. Here’s a look at four misleading or outright false assertions Trump made in his speech.
SUMMARY: President Trump has been called out before for not sticking to the facts. Gwenda Blair, author of "The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President," joins Judy Woodruff to discuss his lifelong predilection for “truthful hyperbole.”
SUMMARY: Singer-songwriter Valerie June says inspiration comes to her in all forms, at all times of the day. The Memphis, Tennessee, native reflects on her unique voice.
SUMMARY: Downtown Nashville has been a backbone of the nation's music industry for more than six decades, giving the nation stars such as Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton. But the increasing demand for new apartments and office buildings is threatening its historic music spaces. Jeffrey Brown reports on the city's struggle to find a balance between preserving history and making room for the future.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Nashville often likes to refer to itself as Music City. And given its history and heritage, that seems just right.
But as real estate development explodes in one of the nation's fastest growing cities, some of the very studios, locations and neighborhoods that were so important to country music, and the industry as a whole, are now threatened.
Jeffrey Brown reports. It's part of his ongoing series on Culture at Risk.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Inside an unassuming house on Nashville's 16th Avenue South, guitarist Philip Shouse is laying down a track at the recording studio 'House of David.' Meanwhile, just up the road, the punk rock group Paramore is recording percussion in 'RCA Studio A' for the group's forthcoming album.
It's just another day on Music Row, the collection of recording studios, publishing houses and offices two miles southwest of downtown Nashville and its famous honky-tonks, and the place collectively responsible for an important part of the nation's music industry.
TAYLOR YORK, Paramore: From, like, the early days even to present, there's been such an amazing group of people that have recorded here, you know, and when you walk into a room, you really can feel an energy and an inspiration.
JEFFREY BROWN: It all began in the 1950s, with Owen and Harold Bradley, brothers who opened a recording studio in a converted home in this part of town.
Other studios, like Capitol, Decca, and RCA Victor followed; and in 1957, RCA victor's Nashville division, headed by Chet Atkins, opened 'Studio B,' where Elvis Presley would record many of his most famous hits.
A few years later, in 1963, 'Studio A' was built next door. And between the two, the likes of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, and many more recorded hit records.
With the studios came the musicians, the publishers, the lawyers and others, a clustering that created a music industry.
CAROLYN BRACKETT, National Trust for Historic Preservation: All of those are still here. And so you still have that sense of community.
JEFFREY BROWN: Carolyn Bracket is a Nashville native with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
CAROLYN BRACKETT: It's something that we have maybe taken for granted, because you can walk by these buildings or drive by a lot of them and not realize that this incredible music was made in that old house or in this small building.
And so a lot of the work that we have done in the last couple of years has been to document the history of Music Row all the way up to the present, what's happening here today.
MEGAN THOMPSON (NewsHour): And now an update to a story we first reported in January about the increasing number of pregnant women who are struggling with opioid addiction.
As a result, the number of babies born withdrawing from those drugs taken by their mothers, has also skyrocketed.
Tennessee is among the states hardest hit by this epidemic. It has the second-highest rate of opioid prescribing in the U.S. And the rate of babies born withdrawing from opioids is three times the national average.
In response, two years ago, Tennessee became the only state that explicitly allowed prosecutors to charge a mother with “fetal assault” for using drugs while pregnant.
Sponsors of the law say it was not intended to penalize women but to get them into treatment and protect the welfare of their babies.
But in a hearing this past week, Tennessee representatives voted to discontinue the controversial law which is set to expire in July 2016.
The measure was found not to help those women and to have unintended consequences.
Doctors testified that the threat of arrest kept many addicted pregnant women from seeking treatment and medical care. Other critics say addicts were choosing abortion over being found out and prosecuted.
At the hearing, lawmakers also discussed increasing funding for drug treatment programs.
SUMMARY: A shooting at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, has left two dead, and nine injured. The shooting comes in the wake of two recent mass shootings; one in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where four Marines and a sailor were killed; and another in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine members of the Charleston AME church were killed.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): We take a deeper look now at last night’s deadly shooting in Louisiana and the broader questions raised after tragedies involving guns.
William Brangham starts us off.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Police and emergency responders quickly descended on the Grand 16 movie theater after gunfire erupted during a showing last night of the comedy “Trainwreck.”
WOMAN: We were buying popcorn at the concession stand when a whole group of people, teenagers mainly, running out, telling everyone to run for their life. And then we saw a lady with blood all over her leg. I just grabbed my child. I mean, we just all ran.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The gunman, identified as 59-year-old John Russel Houser, opened fire on the crowd just 20 minutes into the film. Investigators this morning characterized Houser as a drifter.
JIM CRAFT, Lafayette, Louisiana, Police Chief: It is apparent that he was intent on shooting and then escaping. What happened is that the quick law enforcement response forced him back into the theater, at which time he shot himself.
SUMMARY: Following recent mass shootings, NewsHour begins a series called “Guns in America” where we will talk with people intimately involved in the gun control debate. Tonight we speak to author and advocate Mark Kelly, husband of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in 2011, and Meghan Hoyer, part of the team at USA Today producing “Behind the Bloodshed: The untold story of America’s mass killing.”
SUMMARY: Officials are describing their case on the shooting rampage by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez on members of the U.S. military as a terror investigation. Hari Sreenivasan speaks to Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, about what we know about the shooter and whether he may have been influenced by groups like the Islamic State, which has called for lone wolf attacks.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now we take a deeper look at what we know about the attack in Chattanooga and the current threats against Americans.
Hari Sreenivasan picks up the story.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Investigators are combing through clues to find out why Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez went on a shooting rampage yesterday in Chattanooga.
Officials describe the case that targeted members of the U.S. military, taking the lives of four Marines, as a terror investigation.
For more, we turn to Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
So, Michael, on the one hand, we have federal authorities saying we do not have a direct link yet to ISIS. On the other hand, this is exactly the type of attack that ISIS and al-Qaida are trying to inspire around the world.
MICHAEL LEITER, Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center: That’s exactly right.
And I think federal officials are being appropriately cautious. It is only 24 hours after the event and much evidence that will be uncovered is not yet open or public. All that being said, it’s quite clear, I think by all of the indications, that there was some inspiration from al-Qaida or ISIS ideology.
Exactly what those links are back to those organizations, that’s what we still have to figure out.
As controversies over lethal injection drugs surge, Tennessee has found a way around the issue: It is bringing back the electric chair.
Eight states authorize electrocution as a method of execution but only at the inmate's discretion.
Now Tennessee is the first state to make use of the electric chair mandatory when lethal injection drugs are unavailable.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed the measure into law Thursday.
"This is unusual and might be both cruel and unusual punishment," said Richard Dieter, president of the Death Penalty Information Center.
"No state says what Tennessee says. This is forcing the inmate to use electrocution," according to Dieter, who believes "the inmate would have an automatic Eighth Amendment challenge."
The amendment protects against cruel and unusual punishment.
"The electric chair is clearly a brutal alternative," Dieter said.
Controversy over lethal injections has been brewing in recent years after European manufacturers, including the Denmark-based manufacturer of Pentobarbital, banned U.S. prisons from using their drugs in executions.
In April, a botched lethal injection in Oklahoma catapulted the issue back into the international spotlight. It was the state's first time using a new, three-drug cocktail for an execution. Execution witnesses said convicted murderer and rapist Clayton Lockett convulsed and writhed on the execution gurney and struggled to speak, before officials blocked the witnesses' view. Lockett died 43 minutes after being administered the first drug, CNN affiliate KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City reported.
Earlier this year, a convicted murderer and rapist in Ohio, Dennis McGuire, appeared to gasp and convulse for at least 10 minutes before dying from the drug cocktail used in his execution.
In 2009, the U.S.-based manufacturer of Sodium Thiopental, a drug also commonly used in executions, stopped making the painkiller.
Many states have scrambled to find products from overseas or have used American-based compounding pharmacies to create substitutes.
This month, a group of criminal justice experts recommended that federal and state governments move to a single lethal drug for executions instead of complex cocktails that can be botched.
The controversy over legal injection drugs raises the question of when a case will arise to test the new law.
The last death penalty by electrocution in Tennessee was that of Daryl Holton in 2007.
Holton -- a convicted murderer who killed his three young sons and his ex-wife's daughter -- elected to be killed by the electric chair.
Before Holton's execution, Tennessee had not used the electric chair in 47 years.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Now: A showdown for big labor raises questions about its future in the South and beyond.
Jeffrey Brown has our look.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Two weeks ago, employees at this Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga voted against joining the United Auto Workers. It was close, 712 to 626, but the outcome ended the union’s two-year-long effort to organize the plant.
Officially, Volkswagen was neutral, but it had made clear it wanted to create an employee management council at the plant, and, legally, it can’t do that without union involvement.
Frank Fischer is CEO of V.W.’s Chattanooga operation.
FRANK FISCHER, CEO, Volkswagen Chattanooga: I want to thank all of our Chattanooga production maintenance employees for their participation in this election to decide the question of union representation. They have spoken. And Volkswagen will respect the decision of the majority.
JEFFREY BROWN: For its part, the UAW hoped a win in Chattanooga would launch it toward organizing 20 foreign auto plants across the South and reverse a long decline in its membership.
In 1979, the UAW’s ranks peaked, at 1.5 million members; 35 years later, that number has plummeted to around 390,000. The UAW’s efforts in Chattanooga ran into strong opposition, including from Republican Senator Bob Corker, a former mayor. He insisted unionization wouldn’t have provided any real benefits.
SEN. BOB CORKER, R-Tenn.: The pay out there is already above what UAW workers make that have worked the same amount of time. I don’t see how they can improve the environment that they work in or the safety. We have probably the number one environmentally-sound building in the world. And so this was about one thing, and I think the employees realized that.
JEFFREY BROWN: The UAW has filed a formal objection with the National Labor Relations Board, charging Volkswagen workers were unfairly influenced and intimidated by outsiders. But five V.W. Chattanooga workers filed their own petition yesterday, asking the NLRB to block any revote. They accused the company and the union of colluding to force unionization.
SUMMARY: Jeffrey Brown gets debate from Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity and Kate Bronfenbrenner of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University on the significance of Volkswagen auto workers in Tennessee rejecting UAW membership and the outlook and importance of unions for today’s workers.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): They started voting yesterday in the snow at the V.W. plant in Chattanooga, at issue, whether to join the United Auto Workers. The vote comes in an era when many foreign automakers have moved to Southern states, where overall union participation is low, and as UAW membership has fallen dramatically, from 1.5 million members in 1979 to just over 382,000 in 2012.
JUSTIN KING, Volkswagen Employee: I’m proud to be working at Volkswagen.
JEFFREY BROWN: Hoping for a win in Chattanooga, the union has released YouTube videos of V.W. employees who are voting yes.
JUSTIN KING: Volkswagen will be stronger when they come together with the UAW, because that combines not only Volkswagen’s history of working with labor, but it also adds in UAW’s experience of working in the U.S. market.
JEFFREY BROWN: Volkswagen itself has remained officially neutral on the question. But it does want to set up a German-style works council to allow employees and management to collaborate on decision-making. Labor experts say by law that means the plant must first unionize. But support for the union is hardly unanimous.
SEN. BOB CORKER, R-Tenn.: I think everyone in the community knows that I have tremendous concerns about the UAW being a part of our community in this way.
JEFFREY BROWN: Among others, Republican U.S. Senator Bob Corker, once the mayor of Chattanooga, and a group called the National Right to Work group (conservative anti-union shill) argue that unionization will jeopardize jobs. And Republicans who control the state legislature have threatened to withdraw millions of dollars in tax incentives for Volkswagen if the UAW wins.
SUMMARY: Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted to reject what would have been United Auto Workers’ first successful organization of workers at a foreign automaker in the South. Jim Efstathiou of Bloomberg News speaks with Hari Sreenivasan about the significance of the vote.
