JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, hours before a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas is to go into effect, the Israeli prime minister says a last minute snag could delay the pause in the deadly 15 month war.

Then, nearly 75 years after Ethel Rosenberg was executed for espionage, a recently declassified document has her sons pressing President Biden for an apology.

And how a once popular therapy to treat menopause got a bad name decades ago and still hasn't recovered.

WOMAN: They've been miserable for so long for no good reason.

We have some great therapies for them so that people can lead totally normal lives.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening.

I'm John Yang.

Just 12 hours before the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is to go into effect, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it would not go forward until Hamas made good on its agreement to provide a list of the hostages they're going to release.

Netanyahu also said that Israel could resume fighting if negotiations over future steps faltered, a position, he said, that had the support of President-elect Trump.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, Israeli Prime Minister (through translator): As soon as he was elected, President Trump engaged in the mission of freeing hostages.

He spoke with me on Wednesday evening and welcomed the agreement and rightly emphasized that the first step of the agreement is a temporary ceasefire.

We reserve the right to return to war if necessary with the backing of the United States.

JOHN YANG: Even as Netanyahu spoke, the Israeli military prepared to receive hostages and to deliver much needed aid to Gaza devastated by 15 months of war.

Anshel Pfeffer is the Israel correspondent for The Economist.

Mr. Pfeffer, Netanyahu saying he can't move forward without this list from Hamas.

Is this just a hiccup or is this something more serious?

ANSHEL PFEFFER, Israeli Correspondent, The Economist: Well, based on what we saw back in November 23, when we had the previous large release of hostages, this is the kind of perhaps technical glitch or a last minute attempt by Hamas to exert some kind of psychological warfare on the Israeli public.

But usually the lists are handed in on time.

And as we saw back then Netanyahu speak, I think once the deal has been signed, we will start seeing, hopefully tomorrow, hostages being released and the ceasefire, at least the first stage of the ceasefire taking place.

JOHN YANG: Walk us through this.

You say the first stage.

It's supposed to have several phases.

What's supposed to happen in this first phase?

That's supposed to begin tomorrow.

ANSHEL PFEFFER: So this is a six-week phase in which there'll be every week a number of Israeli hostages will be released in return.

Israel released dozens of Palestinian prisoners from its jails and on the ground in Gaza, the Israeli army will stop firing, will stop attacking Hamas targets and there will be a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces, not a total withdrawal in this phase.

And also gradually, Palestinians who are displaced by the war will be allowed to return to their homes, or what's left of their homes.

There's also supposed to be talks between Israel and Hamas over the next stage, which is a comprehensive full ceasefire.

And also for the third stage, which is a reconstruction of Gaza.

JOHN YANG: What are the challenges about this getting to that second stage, which sounds much tougher for a complete withdrawal from Gaza?

ANSHEL PFEFFER: Israel is back on the borders of Gaza.

There's a question of what kind of security guarantees, what kind of security arrangements will be in place.

From Hamas's perspective, there's a question of does it assume full control of Gaza again?

Will there be perhaps an alternative Palestinian force coming in to work on security?

There are other partners as well.

Egypt has a border with Gaza.

What's the status going to be on the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, which currently Israel controls?

If Israel isn't there, does Hamas control it?

Does someone else?

Does the Palestinian Authority move in and control it?

All these things will continue to be the subject of the talks and there's a lot of potential there for things to go wrong.

And that move from the first to the second stage is what everybody's looking now that's really fraught with difficulty.

JOHN YANG: And what are the Israeli pledges on aid for Gaza?

ANSHEL PFEFFER: According to the deal, 600 trucks a day are to bring aid into Gaza.

So that's basically returning to the pre-October 7th levels even a bit higher because some of the capacity food in Gaza isn't there anymore and therefore there's a higher need of aid.

But once again, this is something very temporary.

We're talking here about 42 days in which there will be, there is a guarantee of the aid going in.

The question is what happens next.

JOHN YANG: Anshel Pfeffer, The Economist in Israel, thank you very much.

ANSHEL PFEFFER: Thanks for having me.

JOHN YANG: In other news, the popular social media app TikTok says it will go dark for its 170 million users tomorrow, but it may only be for a day.

President-elect Trump said he will most likely give the app a 90-day reprieve from a law banning it once he takes office on Monday.

That came in a phone interview with NBC News.

Despite that, TikTok says it wants further assurances from the Biden administration since it will be in charge tomorrow when the ban is to take effect.

Work is underway to move President-elect Trump's inauguration into the Capitol Rotunda because of sub-freezing temperatures.

It's the first time the ceremony will be held indoors since 1985.

As screw prepare the Capitol, Mr. Trump left his Mar-a-Lago resort headed for Washington.

He's to watch a fireworks show at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia this evening.

He'll spend tonight and tomorrow night at Blair House across from the White House.

Meanwhile, thousands brave cold and wet conditions in downtown D.C. to express their anger and disappointment about the incoming administration.

Russian drones and missiles attack the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, overnight as the future of U.S. aid to the country under the new administration remains uncertain.

At least three people were killed and three more injured.

A metro station and a water pipeline were among the targets hit.

Other regions of the country were also targeted with missiles and drones, some of which the Ukrainian army said it shot down.

The deadly fires in Los Angeles are far from over, despite improving conditions.

The larger of the two remaining blazes, the Palisades Fire, is only 43 percent contained.

This as new reporting shows evacuation orders didn't reach Palisades residents until 40 minutes after homes were already on fire.

That's according to an Associated Press analysis of emergency communications.

And artists in this city known for creativity and entertainment say they've lost their livelihoods, too.

ARIEL PITTMAN, Art Gallery Director: Our primary goal is getting people like triage money for just whatever the most emergent need is.

I don't have any clothes anymore.

I left with two pairs of socks.

My credit card needs to be replaced, and I need to set up a P.O.

Box to receive mail while I'm kind of bopping around temporary housing.

JOHN YANG: The Palisades and Eaton fires have burned more than 40,000 acres.

In all, they're blamed for at least 27 deaths, a number that's expected to go up.

Still to come on PBS News Weekend, the new reason why the family of Ethel Rosenberg is pushing the White House to exonerate her more than 70 years after her execution and how a decades old study continues to cast a shadow on hormone therapy treatment for women experiencing menopause.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: As President Biden leaves office, he's been exercising his presidential clemency powers.

Just this week, he commuted nearly 2,500 nonviolent drug offenders sentences.

It was, he said, an important step toward righting historic wrongs.

He's also being asked to right what some people see as another historic wrong and exonerate Ethel Rosenberg.

She and her husband, Julius, were executed in 1953 after being convicted as Soviet spies in a sensational atomic espionage case at the height of the Cold War Red Scare.

While historians regard Julius Rosenberg as a Soviet spy, his wife's role has been debated for years.

And a document declassified last year is seen as the strongest evidence yet of her innocence.

Robert Meeropol is the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

He and his brother Michael have been working for decades to clear their mother's name.

Mr. Meeropol, first of all, can you tell us about this document?

What is it and what does it say?

ROBERT MEEROPOL, Son of Ethel Rosenberg: Well, what's remarkable about this document is, first of all, who wrote it?

That is Meredith Gardner, who was the chief decryptor, considered to be the heroic spy catcher who broke the Soviet codes, which led to the arrest of certain people.

Now, what he said in this memo about my mother was that she knew about her husband's work, but due to ill health, did not engage in the work itself.

And earlier in the memo, he described her husband's work that my father, Julius Rosenberg, as spying.

So what we have here is a definitive pronouncement by the chief decryptor at the time of my mother's arrest that she was not a spy.

And what's remarkable about this document is it dovetails with earlier work that Meredith Gardner did in decrypting what are called the Venona transcriptions of Soviet spy cables in which it was noted that the KGB gave all of its agents code names, but Ethel had no code name.

JOHN YANG: Armed with this new evidence, what do you want President Biden to do, and where does that process stand as he is about to leave office?

ROBERT MEEROPOL: Well, ideally, we would like President Biden to apologize for the wrongful conviction and execution of my mother.

But the reality is whether you're going to call it an exoneration or a pardon or an apology, any step, major step, that he takes to show that my mother was wrongfully executed would be a remarkable step in the right direction.

And we know that the pardon office has our material, that it is under consideration.

So we're kind of sitting on edge in the last few days of Biden's administration, knowing that we might not hear anything until almost the last minute, but we remain hopeful.

JOHN YANG: I should note that there have been historians who read that document in other ways.

Mark Kramer directs Harvard's "Cold War Studies Project."

He told PBS News the declassified Soviet and U.S. documents make clear that the August 1951 document, that's the document we're Talking about changes nothing.

The Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiring to commit espionage, and both of them were indeed guilty of that crime.

The punishment was unjust, but the guilty verdict was fully justified.

What do you say to that?

ROBERT MEEROPOL: Well, this is a historian who's made his career claiming that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were both guilty spies.

And when you have a definitive statement that comes out like this from the chief decryptor that says, no, she wasn't a spy.

It is very difficult for them to admit, like, it's difficult for a lot of people that they were wrong, particularly when it's based on their careers.

In fact, it's kind of embarrassing because the reality is what this historian is saying is that he knows better than the KGB who is the KGB agent.

JOHN YANG: Now, this is not the first time or first evidence to suggest your mother's innocence.

Within the past decade, there have been some others.

What else has come up?

ROBERT MEEROPOL: This particular memo is kind of like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle that my brother and I have been putting together for 50 years.

We filed our first Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the mid-1970s, and one of the first set of documents we got were Justice Department and FBI documents saying the case against Ethel Rosenberg was weak, but we should arrest her so we can use her as a, quote, lever to force her husband to cooperate.

Then we find out that at the trial, the only people who testified against my mother, David and Ruth Greenglass, gave oral testimony.

There's no physical evidence, and it turns out that they swore the opposite before the grand jury.

David Greenglass said he never even talked to my mother about spying.

So we know that the only evidence presented against her was by proven perjurers.

Now that said Judge Coffman, in sentencing her to death, said she was a full-fledged participant in this crime.

And yet a mother of two young children ends up executed for something that she didn't do.

JOHN YANG: Mother of two young children.

You and your brother were quite young when your parents were arrested.

What are your memories?

ROBERT MEEROPOL: Well, you know, I was three at the time of my parents arrest, so I don't really have many specific memories of that.

Most of my memories come from visiting them in prison.

And they were kind of calm affairs.

They weren't, what, hysterical.

They wanted me to think things were normal and I wanted them to be normal.

So they fooled me and I was easy to fool.

JOHN YANG: What would a presidential apology mean to you and your brother?

ROBERT MEEROPOL: It would mean a tremendous amount.

It's not only a personal thing for us.

People could understand why the children of people convicted of this kind of crime would try to clear their names for personal reasons.

But this is more than personal.

The reason this travesty occurred and my mother was wrongfully executed was because of the politicization of the Justice Department and the American judicial system during the Great Red Scare of the early 1950s.

We now face a very similar situation where the Justice Department and the rule of law are under threat.

So this couldn't be more timely to show how the judicial process can be abused.

It will help to prevent it from happening in the future.

JOHN YANG: Robert Meeropol, one of the sons of Ethel Rosenberg.

Thank you very much.

ROBERT MEEROPOL: Thank you.

JOHN YANG: Menopause is a chapter in women's lives that brings a myriad of what can be debilitating medical issues that can last for more than a decade.

It's an area of medicine that for years has been overlooked and underfunded.

Isabella Jibilian of Rhode Island PBS Weekly has our story we which is part of our ongoing series Unequal Treatment.

TANYA GLOVER, Artist: It was rage for no reason.

The only one I wasn't mad at was the dog.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): Artist Tanya Glover was 45 years old when she started noticing symptoms that she couldn't explain.

TANYA GLOVER: The anxiety big time.

That was the worst one.

The night sweats, the irregular periods, the heavy periods.

I just felt like I was kind of losing it a little bit.

And a friend of mine said something about perimenopause.

I'm like, what is that?

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): It's a familiar story for Dr. Mary Jane Mincken, a gynecologist with Yale School of Medicine.

DR. MARY JANE MINKIN, Gynecologist: Menopausal symptoms Perimenopausal symptoms can be extraordinarily disruptive to women.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): Those symptoms can include increased anxiety, hot flashes, migraines, insomnia, vaginal dryness and changes in sexual desire.

And Dr. Minkin says all too often they aren't taken seriously.

MARY JANE MINKIN: I just feel horrible for so many of these women who come in and they've been miserable for so long for no good reason.

We have some great therapies for them so that people can lead totally normal lives.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): But those therapies are going underused because the traditional treatment, hormone replacement therapy, developed a bad reputation in 2002.

That's when Dr. Minkin says a prominent study called the Women's Health Initiative, or WHI, changed everything.

MARY JANE MINKIN: I remember where I was when JFK was shot.

I remember where I was at 9/11.

And I remember where I was on July 9, 2002.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): The study raised troubling questions about hormone therapies, including estrogen, which had been used as an effective menopause treatment since the 1940s.

For the study, researchers divided about 27,000 women into two groups.

Women who had hysterectomies were given estrogen or a placebo.

Women who still had their uteruses were given estrogen and a synthetic version of the hormone progesterone, or a placebo.

DR. RENEE EGER, Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island: It was supposed to go on for over 10 years.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): Dr. Renee Eger is the director of the menopause program at Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island.

She explained a worrisome finding that stopped the study dead in its tracks.

RENEE EGER: After five years, there was noted to be a statistically increased risk of breast cancer in the women who took the estrogen plus the synthetic progesterone.

That study made it onto the front page of the New York Times.

It was the topic of talk shows.

The number of prescriptions for hormone replacement therapy decreased by 85 percent.

Those numbers have not rebounded.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): Today, instead of estrogen, Tanya Glover relies on anti-anxiety medication for her menopause related depression and anxiety.

TANYA GLOVER: It's taken the edge off.

That's it though.

It's still there.

I probably couldn't do a job, a regular job.

I don't think I could handle it and that's not an option for a lot of people.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN: Did you ever consider hormone therapy?

TANYA GLOVER: I considered it.

My doctor told me most insurances don't cover it and it's pretty expensive and you know, you hear about the cancer risks and I don't know who to believe.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): What to believe about the WHI study has been the question for the last 20 plus years.

RENEE EGER: The actual increased numbers of breast cancer was only eight women out of every 10,000 women.

So from a clinical standpoint, it was questionable whether that was actually significant.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): And the findings were skewed because the study included women in their 70s.

MARY JANE MINKIN: The average age of women enrolled in the WHO was 63.

The average age of women going through menopause is 51.

So you had these women who were way post menopause.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): It has taken decades for hormone therapy's reputation to rebound.

Last May, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that hormones were safe for many women under 60.

RENEE EGER: For women who are at low risk and appropriate candidates for hormone therapy.

Hormone therapy is very safe when you look at the risks versus the potential benefits associated with it.

We no longer tell women that they absolutely are or are not candidates for hormone therapy, but rather have individualized discussions with patients and take a look at their past medical history.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): But Dr. Minkin says many doctors are not prepared to give this kind of guidance after being trained under the flawed findings of the WHI study because women.

MARY JANE MINKIN: Stopped using estrogen in droves.

Most programs training residents and OBGYN and some other specialties basically stopped teaching how to manage menopause.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN: So they didn't think they had any good treatment options and therefore they stopped teaching about menopause altogether.

MARY JANE MINKIN: Exactly.

Even as of last year, 70 percent of the OBGYN programs in the United States were not teaching menopause management.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): Even with new safer treatments, two decades after the WHI study, many patients don't believe their symptoms can be treated safely, but there are signs that change is happening.

OPRAH WINFEY: Why is such a critical part of women's health being ignored?

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): It's getting increased attention on social media.

WOMAN: Good morning, Miniverse.

Okay.

WOMAN: Do your periods just stop when you enter menopause?

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): And in the highest levels of government.

Last March, President Biden signed an executive order to expand women's health research, noting menopause as a particular area of interest.

WOMAN: This is a hot flash.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): Now a non-hormonal drug is available.

It was even advertised during last year's Super Bowl.

As for Tanya Glover, it's been a long, turbulent phase of life.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN: How many years has it been now?

TANYA GLOVER: At least 10.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN: Of perimenopause.

TANYA GLOVER: I haven't had a period since last March.

So I'm like a week or two away from full blown menopause.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN: How does that feel?

TANYA GLOVER: I don't want to jinx it, but it feels like relief is right around the corner.

I need that.

ISABELLA JIBILIAN (voice-over): For PBS News Weekend, I'm Isabella Jabilian in Providence, Rhode Island.

JOHN YANG: On the latest edition of PBS News Weekly, a look at the presidential transition from Biden to Trump and the legacy that President Biden leaves behind.

All that and more is on this week's edition of PBS News Weekly.

And that is PBS News Weekend for this Saturday.

Tomorrow, we'll look at the history of outgoing presidents leaving personal notes for their successors.

I'm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

See you tomorrow.