Latest news with #60MinutesOvertime
CBS News
27-04-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
The trends behind the historically low U.S. birth rate
What could be driving a low U.S. birth rate What could be driving a low U.S. birth rate This week, correspondent Jon Wertheim reported from Japan, the land of declining sons and daughters. Over the last 15 years, the East Asian country has seen its population decline, amid low birth rates and falling marriage rates. Last year, more than two people died for every baby born in Japan, a net loss of almost a million people. 60 Minutes reported on efforts by the Tokyo government to reverse this: shortened workweeks for government workers and a citywide dating app, both initiatives aiming to encourage people to get married and start families. A young leader was elected to the Japanese Parliament last year; her campaign centered on transforming rural areas—where there have been diminishing economic opportunities—into viable working and living environments for young families. She believes revitalizing the countryside will help ease the population decline. While these efforts are just the latest attempts to address demographic issues, previous attempts by the government have not made a significant impact on the country's fertility rate. Wertheim told 60 Minutes Overtime that, in some ways, Japan is a "canary in a coal mine." "This is a real barometer of what a number of countries, the United States included, is going to confront in terms of demographics in the next decades and even centuries," he said. In fact, like Japan, the United States has seen its birth rate steadily decline over the last 15 years. On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the total fertility rate was 1.6 children per woman in the United States, or 1,626.5 births per 1,000 women. That is a less than 1% increase from 2023— a year that marked a record low, and well below the total fertility rate of 2.1 needed to naturally maintain the population. 60 Minutes Overtime spoke with Dr. Thoại Ngô, chair of Columbia University's Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health. "The big data story from the CDC data is that women under the age of 30 are having less babies," Dr. Ngo explained. "Teenage pregnancy has been declining and… [there's] a macro-societal shift on how people value family, work, and personal fulfillment moving forward." Breaking down the data The recent CDC data shows the birth rate of teenagers between 15 and 19 dropped from 13.1 to 12.7, part of a long downward trend that started in the 1990s. 60 Minutes Overtime also spoke with Dr. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina. Guzzo said the largest contributing factor to the decline in teenage pregnancies is the increased use of more effective contraception. "The United States has always had much higher rates of teen and unplanned pregnancies than other countries," Dr. Guzzo explained. "This is a success story… that people are able to avoid having births early on, when they themselves would say, 'This is not the right time for me.'" But taking overall trends into account, American women between the ages of 20-29 are also having fewer babies, and may be opting out of having children altogether. Dr. Kenneth M. Johnson is senior demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. In an interview, Dr. Johnson said finding out what's happening among this particular age group is the "big question" and many factors are at play. He pointed to one trend that could explain part of it: many young women are delaying marriage, and a significant share of that group is delaying having children. And within those marriages, the time taken between marriage and childbirth is now longer than it has historically been. "In a sense, it's just pushing everything further out," he told 60 Minutes Overtime. And despite more women in their late 30s having children, "it's not making up for fertility declines among younger women," he said. "What's coming to appear is that a lot of these babies are just going to be forgone entirely. They're not going to be born." A fear of economic decline The worrisome scenario for countries who face low birth rates is a small young population and a much larger elderly population. In theory, a smaller young population would not be able to contribute to the workforce, attend schools and universities, pay for goods and services, pay taxes, start businesses and create economic growth at the level that the previous generation did, since there would simply not be enough people to contribute at the same scale. In that scenario, institutions used to larger amounts of young people, like hospitals, schools, and businesses, wouldn't have the number of patients, students and customers needed to maintain growth. And that could create economic decline and unemployment due to reduced demand. Dr. Ken Johnson of the University of New Hampshire described a scenario feared by universities called the "demographic cliff." "Right now, [the demographic cliff is] a big worry at the university level, because the amount of young people is declining," he told Overtime Dr. Johnson explained that babies who were born in 2008, when the birth rate first started to decline, are now 17 years old and matriculating into college. And the gap between how many babies would have been born, based on the birth rates then, and how many were actually born has already started to widen. "There will be 100,000 fewer kids than there might have been who reach the age of college freshmen next year, and the gap will widen to 500,00 a year in three years and nearly a million a year in ten years," Dr. Johnson said. Another concern is Social Security and elder care, which arguably requires a proportionate young population to take care of the elderly population. "Young people are paying tax into the system so that it can keep the [Social] Security system up and running for the older generation," Dr. Thoại Ngô of Columbia University told Overtime. "But it's also the young people [who] are meant to take care of the older generation." Trump administration hearing proposals The Trump administration is listening to proposals that would encourage more people to have children. Some of these ideas include financial incentives like a "baby bonus" for new mothers and an expanded child tax credit that would reduce the tax burden on new families. But Dr. Ngô thinks cash incentives are unlikely to have a significant impact on the U.S. fertility rate. "I think the global evidence is very clear: we can't buy fertility," he told 60 Minutes Overtime. "Japan [has] invested so much in the last 40 years, and their fertility [rate] is still at 1.2…South Korea [has] invested $200 billion into boosting up fertility, and it hasn't worked. Their total fertility rate is at 0.7." The University of North Carolina's Dr. Karen Benjamin Guzzo explained that the state of the economy and a hopefulness about the future are stronger influences on would-be parents. "People really need to feel confident about the future… having kids is sort of an irreversible decision and it's a long-term one,'" she explained. She said the Trump administration should take a closer look at solving the difficulties and expense of child care. "We have child care deserts in the United States where you cannot find affordable, accessible childcare in a reasonable distance," she said. "[If] you're in major cities… you're talking like $1,400 a month in child care and there's a nine month waiting list. "We don't have sufficient child care infrastructure. That's where we should be building." The Trump administration has also issued an executive order that aims to make IVF treatments more accessible for those who can't afford them. Dr. Thoại Ngô is optimistic that affordable IVF treatment would have an impact and allow couples who want children to do so more easily. "Lowering the cost of IVF is great for a couple who wants to have babies. And I think we have to do it in a fair way… all couples who want [a] baby should have access to that." Finding demographic solutions Fertility rates and birth rates are helpful indicators to understand where a population may be heading, but these statistics only focus on births. Population change is also influenced by mortality, immigration, technological advancements and many other social, economic, and technological factors. "Not everybody is going to like it, but… immigration, technology, and education can all help keep the economy dynamic," Columbia University's Ngô told Overtime. "The rise of AI [will] replace a lot of mundane and repetitive jobs… it opens [the] door for investment in training, and education in quality jobs, in enjoyable jobs." UNC's Dr. Karen Benjamin Guzzo believes that immigration could make up for future shortfalls in labor. "Our health care industry actually uses quite a bit of immigrant labor… they're often willing to work in places that are rural, where it's harder to get [Americans] to live." Dr. Ngô said a reallocation of resources, a supportive set of policies and programs, like paid family leave and better child care, and a strong economy could allow all parents to have a child more easily, without worrying about the financial stress. "Better health care, economic stability, and a more thriving set of [policies could] allow people to have a freedom of choice in terms of what kind of life they want for themself." The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Sarah Shafer. Jane Greeley was the broadcast associate.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Canada can expect a 'tsunami of illegal immigrants' thanks to Trump policies, professor warns
A Canadian professor warned that illegal immigration and drug smuggling could surge in Canada thanks to the Trump administration's strict border enforcement. Kelly Sundberg from Mount Royal University spoke on "60 Minutes Overtime" Sunday night about a "tsunami" of illegal immigrants that can be expected to cross through the United States into Canada out of fear of being arrested or deported. "I hope I'm wrong, but it would appear that we're going to be overwhelmed by the illegal immigrants fleeing American authorities coming into our country, and they very well might be bringing guns and drugs with them," Sundberg said. Tom Homan Delivers Bold Message To Sanctuary Cities 'Slowing Down' Ice, Warns They're 'Going To Keep Coming' Sundberg cited President Donald Trump's move to send thousands of "criminal illegal aliens" to Guantánamo Bay as a huge factor in encouraging migration to Canada, exacerbating concerns about fentanyl trafficking. Elsewhere during the segment, an anonymous Mexican cartel member revealed he has seen more migrants hoping to be smuggled through the U.S. rather than into the U.S. compared to before the Trump administration. Read On The Fox News App "Most of them are Venezuelans," the cartel member said. "Those people are afraid of being deported to their countries. Normally before, we didn't see that much, maybe out of every 30 people we crossed, three or four would come up. Now, maybe out of every 10 we cross, five go up to Canada." The Canadian border got more attention last month after a report uncovered Canadian traffickers allegedly advertising what looked like a human-smuggling operation to sneak illegal immigrants into the U.S. through the northern border. Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture Trump has also been critical of Canada's border, accusing the country of failing to properly secure its border to prevent an influx of fentanyl into the U.S. In response, he enacted 25% tariffs on Canada's steel and aluminum and has threatened additional tariffs on all Canadian products on April 2. In February, Trump's first full month of his second term, illegal border crossings dropped to a record-setting low number of 8,326 apprehensions of illegal immigrants by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). This marked a 96% drop from the highest numbers reported by the Biden administration in Dec. 2023 with 301,981 encounters at the southern article source: Canada can expect a 'tsunami of illegal immigrants' thanks to Trump policies, professor warns
Fox News
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Canada can expect a 'tsunami of illegal immigrants' thanks to Trump policies, professor warns
A Canadian professor warned that illegal immigration and drug smuggling could surge in Canada thanks to the Trump administration's strict border enforcement. Kelly Sundberg from Mount Royal University spoke on "60 Minutes Overtime" Sunday night about a "tsunami" of illegal immigrants that can be expected to cross through the United States into Canada out of fear of being arrested or deported. "I hope I'm wrong, but it would appear that we're going to be overwhelmed by the illegal immigrants fleeing American authorities coming into our country, and they very well might be bringing guns and drugs with them," Sundberg said. Sundberg cited President Donald Trump's move to send thousands of "criminal illegal aliens" to Guantánamo Bay as a huge factor in encouraging migration to Canada, exacerbating concerns about fentanyl trafficking. Elsewhere during the segment, an anonymous Mexican cartel member revealed he has seen more migrants hoping to be smuggled through the U.S. rather than into the U.S. compared to before the Trump administration. "Most of them are Venezuelans," the cartel member said. "Those people are afraid of being deported to their countries. Normally before, we didn't see that much, maybe out of every 30 people we crossed, three or four would come up. Now, maybe out of every 10 we cross, five go up to Canada." The Canadian border got more attention last month after a report uncovered Canadian traffickers allegedly advertising what looked like a human-smuggling operation to sneak illegal immigrants into the U.S. through the northern border. Trump has also been critical of Canada's border, accusing the country of failing to properly secure its border to prevent an influx of fentanyl into the U.S. In response, he enacted 25% tariffs on Canada's steel and aluminum and has threatened additional tariffs on all Canadian products on April 2. In February, Trump's first full month of his second term, illegal border crossings dropped to a record-setting low number of 8,326 apprehensions of illegal immigrants by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). This marked a 96% drop from the highest numbers reported by the Biden administration in Dec. 2023 with 301,981 encounters at the southern border.
CBS News
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
How Werner Herzog makes documentaries
In an editing suite in Los Angeles, filmmaker Werner Herzog and editor Marco Capaldo played back footage of murky water at the bottom of a desert pool. "It's very strange now. Look at this here," Herzog told correspondent Anderson Cooper, seated just behind him. A tail swung past the frame, suddenly recognizable as belonging to an elephant, who could now be seen playfully bathing to the soundtrack of Schubert. "I love it," said Herzog, beaming as he turned to Cooper. The sequence is from Herzog's unreleased documentary film, "The Ghost Elephants." It's about a herd of mythic elephants in southern Africa. But Herzog insists it is not a wildlife film. "[It's] a fantasy of elephants. Maybe a search, like for the white whale, for Moby Dick. It's a dream of an elephant," he told Anderson Cooper. Herzog made a name for himself in the world of cinema with epic dramas like "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo." But over the course of his career, he has also created unconventional documentaries. He's made films about volcanologists, primitive cave paintings in France, and a man who lived with grizzly bears in Alaska. The documentaries are usually narrated by Herzog himself. In what's become a signature, he shares his contemporaneous thoughts and philosophical musings of on-screen images in a slow-paced, poetic narration. He often asks questions that don't have answers: "Are we floating in a strange and beautiful reality? Do we dance in our minds?" Herzog "is probably one of the most unusual filmmakers working today," Cooper told 60 Minutes Overtime. "And it's fascinating to watch the way he works because… he doesn't storyboard a documentary film out. He doesn't even look at transcripts." Herzog and editor Marco Capaldo will watch all the footage shot for a film in one sitting, and only one time. Herzog takes notes as he watches, marking the shots he likes with exclamation marks. "And when something has three exclamation marks, it means, 'If this is not in this film, I have lived in vain,'" the filmmaker told Cooper. "[He] falls in love with particular images, and then just starts to put the film together, shot by shot," Cooper told Overtime. As the film is edited, Herzog will look for moments to punctuate images with narration. 60 Minutes was with Herzog when he found one of these moments for "The Ghost Elephants." "Hold it as long as we have…I need to say something over this here," Herzog told Capaldo when he saw a shot of the bottom of a lake with nothing in the frame. He jotted down notes, got up from his seat, and walked back to a makeshift audio booth behind the edit suite. Capaldo gave him a cue to begin recording. "Here comes a fundamental question I'm asking myself. Could it be even better just to dream of the elephants than finding them in reality?" In the edited sequence 60 Minutes saw, Herzog's question is followed by an elephant's legs walking along the floor of the pool, a barely-recognizable, dreamlike image. Herzog also showed 60 Minutes a sequence from "Theatre of Thought," a documentary about the human brain, playing in theaters now. "I spoke to someone who created Siri… I noticed that he hadn't switched off his TV screen in the background with fish, which he had filmed himself." In the film, Herzog leaves his interview subject behind, filling the frame with images from the man's television, and then uses his own narration over the images of fish. "Do fish have souls? Do fish have dreams?" Herzog asks. "Do they have thoughts at all? And if so, what are they thinking about? Is the same thought simultaneously in all of them?" Herzog explained that the narration is key to making a sequence of images memorable for the audience. "With the commentary that I'm putting in there spontaneously… I put something into your soul or into your dreams," he told Cooper. "You will not forget it easily… It's poetry." Cooper noted that broadcast journalism does not allow the opportunity to "live inside these incredible images" the way Herzog's documentaries do. "Well, news is something different, and journalism is something different," Herzog said. "I transport the audience into something they have never seen, and into something which is outside of reality… beyond information." "In 30 years from now, when I'm not around anymore, people will still remember this sequence."
CBS News
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Remembering CBS News correspondent Bob Simon, 1941-2015
Legendary CBS News correspondent Bob Simon's family and coworkers are remembering him 10 years after his death. The award-winning newsman, who died suddenly in a Feb. 11, 2015 car accident in New York, earned more than 40 major awards over a 47-year career at CBS News. Simon's decades covering news around the world He reported from around the world and the U.S., including a stint as the network's State Department correspondent. Simon also worked as a war reporter, covering the Vietnam War and violence in Northern Ireland. He reported from war zones in Portugal, Cyprus, the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and Yugoslavia. Simon was named CBS News' chief Middle East correspondent in 1987. He worked in Tel Aviv for more than 20 years, becoming the leading broadcast journalist in the region. The correspondent was imprisoned and tortured by the Iraqi army for 40 days, along with three CBS News colleagues, at the beginning of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Simon landed major interviews for 60 Minutes, including the first Western interview with extremist Iraqi cleric Muqtada al Sadr, and another with his Shiite Muslim rival, the Ayatollah al-Hakim, who was killed shortly after the interview. The weekend before his death, Simon's interview with filmmaker Ava DuVernay aired on 60 Minutes. At the time, he was working on a story about Ebola with his daughter Tanya, who is now executive editor at 60 Minutes. Bob Simon reported over 200 stories for 60 Minutes during his time with the broadcast. Below, watch some of his memorable work. In 2011, Bob Simon stepped back in time when he got rare access to monks in ancient monasteries on a remote Greek peninsula who had lived a spartan life of prayer in a tradition virtually unchanged for a thousand years. Upon his return, Simon told 60 Minutes Overtime: "I've been around the world many times but I've never, ever seen a place like Mount Athos." In 2006, he traveled to Bangladesh, where giant ships were being torn apart for salvage by men and boys earning a dollar a day. Simon discovered appalling working conditions and toxic waste polluting the beaches. Simon became affectionately known to some of his colleagues as the de facto 60 Minutes wildlife correspondent. In 2011, when asked by 60 Minutes Overtime about reporting animal stories, he embraced the honorary title. "An animal is never duplicitous. An animal will never get involved in gratuitous cruelty. It's very refreshing to go see them after you've spent a lot of time interviewing politicians." One animal story he shared with 60 Minutes viewers several times over the years is that of the elephant orphanage. He first met Dame Daphne Sheldrick and visited the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the Kenya-based orphanage for elephants, in 2006, describing it this way: "It's actually a pretty lush life for these elephants here at the orphanage ... like any good school, this place prepares its students to leave, to get ready for life in the real world, to go back to the wild from whence they came." Sheldrick, who passed away in 2018, worked with elephants for over 50 years. In 2008, Simon reported on how the growing demand for bluefin tuna, highly coveted in Japan and the rest of the world as the ultimate taste experience in sushi, was pushing fishermen worldwide to find new and more efficient ways to land this prized catch. Simon reported from the Tokyo fish market, explaining "the price of a single bluefin tuna is anywhere between $2,000 and $20,000. It all depends on the size, the season and the fat content. The fattier, the better." "The Lost Boys" documented the epic survival of thousands of Sudanese boys who had escaped war and walked a thousand miles across East Africa to a refugee camp in Kenya. After meeting the boys in 2001 in Kenya, some of the young men were relocated to the U.S. and Simon followed their journey over a 12-year period, airing an update in 2013. Producer Draggan Mihailovich, who worked with Simon on the story, said: "Bob loved underdogs, and The Lost Boys of Sudan were the ultimate underdogs." In 2011, Simon interviewed the Iraqi defector code-named "Curve Ball," whose false tale of a mobile, biological weapons program was the chief justification for invading Iraq. Curve Ball abruptly ended the interview and walked out after Simon pressed him for "the whole story." Simon traveled to Oslo to meet then 21-year-old chess grandmaster and number one player in the world Magnus Carlsen in 2012. He also spent time in London, following him at the London Chess Classic. A few years later, producer Michael Gavshon shared some insight into Simon's chess skills: "There were a number of stories that he knew nothing about, but that really did not prevent him from being extremely enthusiastic about them … Bob didn't know the moves of each piece on the board. And yet, he found a way of telling the story coherently and brilliantly." The same year Simon also traveled to Serbia with tennis star Novak Djokovic, meeting the legendary athlete's first coach, and visiting his grandfather's apartment building, where his family sought refuge during the war. In 2011, he reported from Tunisia, where protests against the repressive government not only toppled its autocratic ruler, but sparked the uprising in Egypt that forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign. Simon's studio introduction ended with this line: "If the Middle East is being transformed before our eyes today, it all began when a poor fruit vendor decided he just wasn't going to take it anymore." In 2014, Simon met Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who in 1939 traveled to Czechoslovakia and saved 669 children from the Holocaust. That same year, Simon also traveled to the Chernobyl exclusion zone to report on the cleanup there decades after the nuclear power plant disaster. At the time of his death in 2015, correspondent Scott Pelley said: "Bob Simon was always ready for an adventure, a chance to travel somewhere he'd never seen and tell us all about it. He had a gift for finding the surprising, even the magical, in the most unexpected places." One of the places Pelley might have been referring to was Simon's 2007 trip to Indonesia's Foja Mountains, for the story "Garden of Eden."
