JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend.

Across the country, a day of protest against President Trump's moves against federal workers, immigrants and U.S. trading partners.

Then, as the market for chewable vitamins grows, are they as effective as traditional vitamin pills?

And how weather reports from centuries old whaling ship logbooks are providing scientists new clues about climate change.

MAN: We wanted to know if we could extract that weather data to inform climate science.

And it turns out that you can.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening.

I'm John Yang.

Across the country and around the world today, tens of thousands of people turned out for what organizers say has been the biggest single day of protest against President Trump and his second term policies and actions in this country.

More than a thousand rallies were planned in small towns and major cities from coast to coast.

Ali Rogin begins our coverage.

ALI ROGIN (voice-over): In Washington, crowds descended on the National Mall, calling for lawmakers to rein in President Trump.

KELLY KEALY, Demonstrator: He's right now destroying our economy.

He's taken away all of our allies.

We're a pariah in the world and Congress sits back and does nothing.

ALI ROGIN (voice-over): The mass protest, dubbed the Hands Off National Day of Action, was organized by advocacy groups that opposed the president's policies during his first term.

Protesters railed against Mr. Trump's recent moves to lay off scores of federal workers, revoke protections for immigrants, and implement sweeping tariffs.

But for Democratic leaders, the president's threat to democracy took center stage.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D) Maryland: Our founders wrote a constitution that does not begin with we the dictators.

The preamble says we the people.

ALI ROGIN (voice-over): The movement spread far beyond the nation's capital, from the sidewalks of South Bend to downtown Boston and New York City.

Demonstrators took to the streets in protests, both big and small to oppose President Trump's agenda.

That resistance echoed around the globe.

In Germany, England, and Portugal, protesters flocked to public squares to show support and solidarity with Americans.

BILLY EASTON, Demonstrator: Freedom is at stake in the United States and for the whole world with what Donald Trump is doing.

And we need to stand up.

ALI ROGIN (voice-over): For PBS News Weekend, I'm Ali Rogin.

JOHN YANG: These protests cap a tumultuous week.

Overnight, President Trump's 10 percent global tariffs went into effect.

And in anticipation stocks lost trillions of dollars in market value in just two days.

Beverly Gage is a professor of history and American studies at Yale University.

Beverly, is there any precedent or even analogous events to what we've seen in the past few days?

BEVERLY GAGE, Yale University: Well, we've certainly had tariffs before in American history.

No, not on this scale and not for a while.

But I cannot think of another moment when it seemed like the White House and the president had deliberately tanked the stock market and told everyone, hey, no worries.

It's going to be okay.

JOHN YANG: You say there have been tariffs in history.

What has history taught us about tariffs?

BEVERLY GAGE: Tariffs were a big part of the way the federal government got its money in the late 19th and into the early 20th century.

We didn't have an income tax, and this was a huge source of federal revenue.

And we sort of did away with them because they were seen to create instabilities, to create these wild cycles of boom and bust that were so characteristic of that period, and then also to really be a source of political corruption and favoritism.

And a century ago, Americans decided that really wasn't the way they wanted to run their country.

But it looks like we're heading back to that now.

JOHN YANG: In recent years, we've seen presidents trying to globalize the economy, trying to make the United States part of a global economy.

And now the President seems to be fencing off the American economy from the rest of the world.

What do you make of that?

BEVERLY GAGE: I think that's a really important distinction.

If we go back to the 19th century, into the Gilded Age, which seems to be a period that Trump and his allies are thinking a lot about, looking back to, it was a very different story because you hadn't had a whole century of these ties across the continent, across the globe, and this kind of global business world that now is really being dismantled in many ways.

JOHN YANG: Taking a broader look at the administration, what's happened so far, we've seen President Trump trying to reshape the federal government through DOGE, trying to reshape relations with longtime allies and with trading partners and with the developing world.

And we're not even at the 100-day mark.

Can you think of a time where a president who's hit the ground running so hard and so fast?

BEVERLY GAGE: I think you can look at something like Franklin Roosevelt's first hundred days, which is where really we get this idea of the first hundred days as a critical period.

Lots of things happened, lots of things changed, and they were pretty fundamental changes in the political economy.

Americans were able to start drinking again because he ended prohibition.

But that moment, I think, is different from this one because people understood Roosevelt to be addressing really a cataclysmic crisis at home, the Great Depression abroad, the rise of fascism.

And now it seems like the crisis is sort of coming from the White House more than anything else.

JOHN YANG: Can the president keep up this pace of activity?

And also can the body politic keep up with this pace?

BEVERLY GAGE: It has been, I think, really overwhelming for lots of people, myself included.

And as you say, it's still pretty early on.

So we might think that some of this will slow down as the courts come in, maybe as Congress begins to try to play a bigger role in all of this.

But, you know, I think the Trump administration has been very smart at kind of creating narratives, controlling the news cycle, rolling things out piece by piece.

They didn't just come out and say, we're going to cut 10 percent or 50 percent of all government agencies or all universities are going to have to do that.

They're making it very personal and they're doing it bit by bit.

And it's possible that could go on for quite a long time.

JOHN YANG: Is this an inflection point in terms of the United States role in the global world order and relationship to the global world order, or is that taking it too far?

BEVERLY GAGE: I do think that it's an inflection point.

Not because we know all of the consequences yet, not because it's a done deal or nothing's going to happen.

We're seeing waves of protest, lots of pushback starting.

So we're still very early on.

But I think what's happened in a pretty fundamental way is that a lot of certainties have been upended.

Certainty that if you are a scientist, you're going to be able to think about a lifetime career in the United States and think about sources of funding.

Same thing for federal workers.

And I think that you can take that into the global scale as well.

Diplomatic relations, business expectations, all of these have been pretty profoundly disrupted.

And we might go back, we might change policies, but the fact that people can't be really secure anymore about what the fundamental assumptions and structures are through which to plan for the long term, I think that's not something that we're going to go back from so easily.

JOHN YANG: Beverly Gage of Yale University, thank you very much.

BEVERLY GAGE: Thank you.

JOHN YANG: In today's other news, the Senate pulled an all-nighter to pass a Republican bill that advances President Trump's proposed tax and spending cuts.

Approval on a 51-48 vote came before dawn, mostly along party lines.

Only two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky, joined Democrats to vote against it.

The bill lays out a possible $5 trillion in tax cuts, raises the debt limit and calls for $350 billion to fund mass deportation efforts and to build up the military.

Democrats argue the bill will lead to cuts in social safety net programs.

The measure now heads to the House, where Republicans are taking a different approach, including $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and envisioning changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other programs.

Severe weather is still a threat in much of the country as strong storms hammer areas damaged by tornadoes.

The National Weather Service warns that life threatening and potentially historic flash flooding is possible from the Ohio Valley to Texas and Louisiana.

Across the Midwest, they're still cleaning up after tornadoes ripped through the area.

And in Sentobia, Mississippi, about 60 miles south of Memphis, one man credits the city's emergency alert system for saving his family's lives.

GREG GRIFFIN, Senatobia, Mississippi: Without it, my daughter and my grandson would have been in that room right there where there's no wall anymore, and they found one of his toys about a mile and a half out in the county, one of his little Mickey Mouse toys.

So they very well could have been with it.

JOHN YANG: Forecasters expect the storm pattern to shift eastward on Sunday, taking the risk of severe storms to the southeast.

A fire in Myanmar following last week's devastating earthquake there has left residents with little hope and pleading for help.

People in Mandalay say that whatever the 7.7 magnitude earthquake didn't steal from them, the fire did.

This as search and recovery efforts continue for the more than 3,000 dead.

PBS News has learned that a three person USAID disaster assessment team sent to Myanmar has been laid off while there.

The team, which has been sleeping outside with residents fearful of aftershocks, learned of their termination notices yesterday during an agency call.

And Washington Capital's left winger Alex Ovechkin has tied Wayne Gretzky's all time record of goals scored in the regular season.

The 39-year old got his 894th goal at a home game last night against the Chicago Blackhawks.

It brought fans to their feet as Ovechkin's teammates rushed onto the ice to congratulate him.

Gretzky himself was on hand to see his record tied.

Ovechkin has his first chance to claim the record for himself tomorrow afternoon in a game against the New York Islanders.

Still to come on PBS News Weekend as vitamin gummies grow in popularity, how do they compare to traditional vitamins?

And how 200-year-old wailing logs are helping today's scientists track climate change.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Making sure you get the right amount of daily vitamins can be difficult.

Today, a booming multibillion dollar industry of gummy vitamins and supplements says it makes it easier and tastier.

But how do they compare with traditional vitamin pills?

Ali Rogin is back with her conversation with Shyla Davis-Cadogan, a registered dietitian at the Virtual Nutrition Service Culina Health.

ALI ROGIN: Shyla, thank you so much for being here.

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN, Culina Health: Of course.

ALI ROGIN: Let's take a step back and talk about how do people know what vitamins they need to take in addition to the nutrients that everybody just gets with the food that they eat?

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: Yeah.

So it's easy to think that you need a whole bunch of vitamins for whatever reason, but there are ways to know.

And the most concrete way to know is to get a blood test so that you have a visual representation of what you're lacking and what you're sufficient in.

ALI ROGIN: And why is it that gummy vitamins have become so popular in recent years?

What is driving people to go out and buy them?

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: They're tasty and the marketing is really appealing.

It's a fun, chewable, candy like way to get nutrients in.

So that's appealing to a lot of people.

ALI ROGIN: But how effective are they, especially when you compare it to a more traditional vitamin that you take as a pillow?

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: I'd say for the most part the efficacy is relatively the same.

However, there's a couple of things.

The first thing is that it can be difficult for manufacturers to get enough or the same amount of vitamins and nutrients in a gummy vitamin versus a pill or a tablet.

And then the second part is that the efficacy, it can go down quicker in gummy vitamins because they're more susceptible to moisture versus like a pill or a tablet supplement.

ALI ROGIN: And how easy or difficult is it for somebody to figure out how much of a particular vitamin they're getting when they ingest a gummy?

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: All it takes is just reading the label.

And then you also have to consider that what it reads on the label is assuming that you are properly storing that supplement.

So if you are storing it in your medicine cabinet, in your bathroom, for example, that is a very moisture filled environment versus if you store it in like a dark cabinet that's in your room.

So the efficacy of those vitamins may be reduced because they're just more easily degraded in those environments that they're not suited for, like moisture.

ALI ROGIN: So how does that work?

If the vitamin, if the gummy is around more moist environments, how does that degrade the nutrition value that you get from one?

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: It's because the gummies, how they are encapsulated, so how they're actually put in and create it together makes it overall just more susceptible to external influences, whether it's light, whether it's moisture versus a pill that's harder, it's not going to be as susceptible because of how they're just made differently.

ALI ROGIN: And plus there's the added sugar that gets into a gummy.

So tell us about that.

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: Yes.

So the main components of a gummy vitamin are going to be gelatin, sugar, usually also corn syrup, which is an additional form of sugar.

And then the vitamin pre mix and then they just concoct it all together and then you get a vitamin gummy, you mold it, all that fun stuff.

And so the added sugar is definitely a component to think about and one of the biggest, I would say the biggest thing to consider as your overall intake.

Because vitamins and gummy vitamins definitely have different amounts.

ALI ROGIN: And a lot of these gummies seem to be particularly marketed towards children.

Tell us about that.

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: Yeah, so kids, they don't really want to take their vitamins.

That's like a task that's not very fun and manufacturers know that.

And so gummy vitamins, they look and often taste like candy.

So marketing to children, it's just an easy go.

Parents see it as something that's going to attract their children.

They know their children's probably going to eat something that tastes like cherry versus taking a pill and swallowing it, which isn't even fun, not even for a lot of adults.

So I think that's why marketing is really high for children especially.

ALI ROGIN: And when it comes to pediatric nutrition though, should they be taking vitamins or is that something that should be worked out on a case by case basis with a pediatrician?

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: It's definitely on a case by case basis, especially for children.

A lot of supplements and you know, the amounts of them, they aren't always tailored to kids.

So the supplements that are marketed more towards children, manufacturers will be mindful to not fill those supplements with too much of anything because of the small bodies.

But because they're children, it's really especially important to work with a pediatrician so that you know that you're not giving your child something they don't need or too much of something that they're already getting.

ALI ROGIN: How much regulation or lack thereof is there of this industry?

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: Very little.

The FDA doesn't regulate supplementation.

So it's up to the companies to be transparent to engage in third party testing, to, you know, put things on their labels.

Whether it's NSF International certification or US Pharmacopoeia USP certification.

Those are just examples of two reliable third party programs that companies can send their product to and get robust testing done.

ALI ROGIN: You are a nutritionist doing one one consulting with lots of different patients.

Are there ever situations where you would recommend gummies yourself?

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: It depends if there's a patient that has tried everything.

Supplements don't work, chewables don't work, and they are just consistently inconsistent in taking a vitamin that they need because they're deficient.

Gummy vitamins often are attractive to clients.

They find it as something that's like not a task but just an extra little taste of orange after their dinner.

And if that gets them to get that vitamin that they're deficient in, it's a net positive to me.

ALI ROGIN: Shyla Davis-Cadogan with Culina Health, thank you so much for joining us.

SHYLA DAVIS-CADOGAN: Thank you so much.

JOHN YANG: What can centuries old whaling ship logs tell us about today's extreme weather?

According to scientists, quite a lot.

They're using the information recorded by mariners going back hundreds of years to push the frontier of modern day climate science.

Special correspondent Pamela Watts with Rhode Island PBS has our story.

PAMELA WATTS (voice-over): Observations of winds that once buffeted this 1800s whaling ship are offering up some critical clues to climate change.

The Charles W. Morgan is an attraction at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut.

It's the last of an American fleet that once numbered close to 3,000 and the oldest wooden commercial whaling vessel still afloat.

Ship logbooks of its many whale hunting voyages, along with hundreds of others from New England, may provide a treasure island for researchers trying to learn more about extreme weather challenges.

TIMOTHY WALKER, Marine Historina: Oh, wow.

PAMELA WATTS (voice-over): The idea to take a deep dive into weather data from centuries old logbooks was launched by Timothy Walker, sailor, marine historian and professor at UMass Dartmouth.

TIMOTHY WALKER: These logbooks hold a lot of information about weather because the whalers were taking daily and multiple times a day they're writing down the winds and the temperatures and the wind direction and wind speed and so on.

And so we wanted to know if we could extract that weather data to inform climate science.

And it turns out that you can.

PAMELA WATTS (voice-over): Walker came to New Bedford, Massachusetts to crew on the historic schooner Ernestina.

One of his shipmates happened to be working on his PhD in Climate Ocean Science.

TIMOTHY WALKER: And he and I had talked about a way to do something with both of our skill sets.

PAMELA WATTS (voice-over): That discussion led to Walker fishing for weather information from the logs of local whaling ships and comparing it to the meteorology in the same coordinates today.

TIMOTHY WALKER: They're going to places where other ships don't go because merchant and military ships by the 1650s or so, they're following seaborne highways that they know is the most efficient way to get from place to place.

The whalers are following the whales who go to some of the most remote parts of the world's oceans.

And so they're recording weather data in places where we simply don't have any other way of knowing what the weather was like on a particular day at a particular place 150, 200, 250 years ago.

And this kind of information for climate scientists is absolutely priceless.

CAROLINE UMMENHOFER, Climate Scientist: These are the areas where we can pick up the different high pressure systems and how they are changing.

PAMELA WATTS (voice-over): Walker's voyage of discovery resulted in a collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod.

Scientist Caroline Ummenhofer says she was all aboard.

CAROLINE UMMENHOFER: when Tim reached out to me six years ago about this project, that there's maritime weather data contained in ship logbooks that seemed a real boon to trying to understand how wind patterns, how pressure patterns are shifting out over the oceans.

PAMELA WATTS (voice-over): Ummenhofer says her research is probing the ocean's role in climate variability and its effect on rainfall, droughts, flood and extreme weather events.

PAMELA WATTS: And how does this help us in dealing with climate change?

CAROLINE UMMENHOFER: We've analyzed 170 log books and we have over 100,000 daily weather entries, which is amazing, covering the period 1790 to 1910, with most of the data from the 1840s to 60s, which was the heyday of the New England whaling era.

We can compare that to modern day observations that we get from satellites or metrological stations.

It helps us put recent trends into a long term context.

For example, one area that we know has experienced large wind changes is the Southern Ocean.

PAMELA WATTS (voice-over): Ummenhofer says there is a strong belt of westerly winds which can carry storm systems that are churning around Antarctica.

The whalers called them the Roaring Forties.

They've shifted further south in recent decades and she says it's now more like the Furious 50s.

CAROLINE UMMENHOFER: It might sound strange, like what do we care about the winds over the Southern Ocean?

It's actually pretty important because rain bearing weather systems travel on these westerly winds.

And as these winds have shifted further south, they have left regions like southern Australia and southern Africa high and dry.

And they are experiencing much more frequent drought in recent decades than they have had in the past.

PAMELA WATTS: The Providence Public Library in Rhode Island has some 800 whaling ship log books in its special collections.

Second only to New Bedford, these were considered legal documents in their day.

Sailor carved ink stamps indicate how many whales were caught on a particular date and where.

The ledgers are filled with remarkable folk art illustrations of life on the years, long journeys, eyewitness accounts of mutinies, shipwrecks, mayhem and murder.

Walker says it's easy to become distracted by the drama.

While collecting the data, he notes, whalers harpooning the mammoth creatures were often pulled out to sea on what's known as a Nantucket sleigh ride.

There are also reports of tragedies in the treacherous waters as he read, in one gripping encounter.

TIMOTHY WALKER: Each whaling boat has five men.

So three boats went out to hunt whales.

A storm brewed up.

They lost those boats and they lost those men.

So they lost about a third of the entire crew in one storm.

PAMELA WATTS (voice-over): Yet the risk didn't deter the mariners.

Whale oil was profitable and essential for lamps and refueling machinery of the Industrial Revolution.

TIMOTHY WALKER: This is nice.

It says bound around Cape Horn, which sounds like a sea shanty.

And it is.

PAMELA WATTS (voice-over): While the whaling logs, usually written by the first or second mate, are often digitized, archival researchers have to go online to decipher the old cursive handwriting detailing weather observations and locations.

While Walker says he enjoys the history captured in the logbooks, he now has his sights set on the science.

TIMOTHY WALKER: As a historian, it's rare that you get a chance to do something that's so topically important and so, you know, vital to survival as a species, to our learning to grapple with climate challenges today?

PAMELA WATTS: Is there any way that you see that this research is ultimately going to help communities prepare for extreme weather?

CAROLINE UMMENHOFER: As we have a better sense of how storms and in particular, wind patterns that are associated with extreme events, how they have changed in the past, that gives us more confidence into how they are going to change in the future.

TIMOTHY WALKER: We can point to data and we can speak to climate skeptics and say, yes, this is really happening and we have to inform ourselves so that we're in a better position to react to a changing climate.

And that's another goal of our project, is to be able to provide the tools for public policy for homeowners along the coast to be able to deal with what's coming along the path in the 21st century regarding climate change and extreme weather events.

PAMELA WATTS (voice-over): For PBS News Weekend, I'm Pamela Watts in Providence, Rhode Island.

JOHN YANG: And that is PBS News Weekend for this Saturday.

I'm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

See you tomorrow.