captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for sunday, august 30: european leaders at odds over the growing migrant crisis. also, new research reveals trauma experienced by holocaust survivors can alter the body chemistry of their children. >> all i knew was that we were different, that i was different. i didn't exactly know why. >> sreenivasan: and, remembering oliver sacks. >> woo seize with the eyes but we see with the brain as well. pbs newshour weekend. >> sreenivasan: next on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by:

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 is 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 in lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thank you for joining us. european officials are planning an emergency meeting to address the continent's growing migrant crisis. interior ministers from france, germany, and britain are calling for a unified plan and fairer distribution of more than 300,000 migrants who have poured into europe this year. more than 100,000 have arrived in the past month. mainly from africa and the middle east, often fleeing war- torn syria and libya.

the migrants typically arrive by boat in greece and italy, and then travel overland. italy's coast guard rescued 1,600 migrants this weekend. seven migrants drowned today off the coast of libya after their boat capsized in the mediterranean sea. more than 2,500 migrants have died this year trying to make the crossing. germany today called on countries to accept more migrants. it expects to receive 800,000 asylum seekers by year's end. the french foreign minister said today it is "scandalous" that some eastern european countries are refusing to take in migrants. >> ( translated ): with regard to all those people who are politically chased out of their country and who are in war-torn countries, we have to be able to welcome them. it's called the plea for asylum, and every country has to respond to that. >> sreenivasan: hungary has now arrested a fifth suspect for the deaths of 71 smuggled migrants found dead in a truck abandoned in austria last week. the european union meeting is scheduled for september 14.

japan is seeing massive demonstrations against a plan to allow japanese troops to fight overseas for the first time since world war two. tens of thousands of protesters marched today outside the japanese parliament, which is considering legislation that would allow troops to deploy to defend an ally. the japanese constitution allows troops only to engage in self- defense, if japan itself were attacked. prime minister shinzo abe is pushing for the change, though. polls show a majority of japanese oppose it. a final vote is expected next month. dr. oliver sacks, a neurologist and author, who has been call"" the poet laureate of medicine," died today of cancer at his home in new york. >> i am a storyteller, for better and for worse. >> reporter: oliver sacks was both a path-breaking researcher and a best-selling author-- a scholar of the brain and consciousness, who had a gift for explaining how we perceive the world around us. >> we see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well.

and seeing with the brain is often called imagination. >> reporter: often drawing on his own experience with patients, sacks penned more than a dozen books that sold millions of copies." the man who mistook his wife for a hat" was one of his best sellers. he explored autism, color blindness, deafness, tourette's, asperger's, and parkinson's." awakenings," his book about encephalitis patients who miraculously, but briefly, regained their mental acuity, was made into a movie. robin williams played sacks. sacks spoke to the newshour in 1989. >> i'm addicted to patients. i can't do without them. i need to have the feeling of these other lives which become part of my own. >> reporter: born in london to parents who were doctors, he went to medical school in england, interned in california, and practiced in new york. six months ago, he revealed he was in the late stages of terminal melanoma. his final book, the memoir "on the move," was published earlier

this year. >> over a lifetime, i have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh and as much fun as when i started it nearly 70 years ago. >> reporter: oliver sacks was 82. >> sreenivasan: now online, a look back at the moment oliver sacks learned he had terminal cancer, and what he taught us about coming face-to-face with death. visit pbs.org/newshour. >> sreenivasan: lebanon has seen mass protests again this weekend. thousands gathered in the capital city of beirut yesterday to demand changes in the government, and have the garbage picked up, something that hasn't happened in a month. protesters call their campaign" you stink." lebanon is a country of 4.5 million people, without a president, without legislative elections for six years, and with a government many describe as dysfunctional. joining me now via skype from beirut is "washington post" reporter liz sly.

liz even setting up this interview, it's difficult, you've had power outages. but bibesides these power outages, water cuts, this all seems normal for the average leb neeselebanese citizen. >> yes, that's right. the infrastructure is breaking down and people have had enough. >> and how is this dysfunction dealing with the influx of refugees that you have coming&in from syria and other places? >> there is a tangential connection with the refugees. the refugees have swelled the population of lebanon. this is a country of 4 million people. 1.1 million refugees registered with the government. people working here coming here for whatever reason are not

registered but they are also fleeing the war. and basically you have between a quarter and a thirst of the population from syria. the dysfunction of the government and the corruption that paralyzes the government, makes it unable to make decisions that need to be taken to move the country forward to keep the services going and basically to keep this country running. sreenivasan: what happens next? they said the protests would escalate if they didn't get the trash pickup going. >> the calls aren't that enormous. they are genuine people out there demonstrating. they genuinely hope they can change the system by going on toot streets. this country is stuck in a situation of sectarian politics

quotas rivalries that give everyone a stake in the way the government is already run, which doesn't seem enough to bring the kind of impetus we saw in tahrir square in egyptia egypt that kie country into civil war, on the fringes of the wider system that most people remain locked into. sreenivasan: all right, liz sly of the washington post joining us by phone vi via skyp. thank you very much. >> sreenivasan: in our signature segment tonight, we look at this question: can trauma affecting a parent be passed on to a child? new research on holocaust survivors shows catastrophic events can alter our body chemistry and those changes can be transmitted to children. the result: children may suffer the effects of a traumatic event

they never witnessed or experienced. the newshour's stephen fee reports. >> reporter: 59-year-old karen sonneberg grew up on the north shore of long island, just an hour's drive from new york city. her parents survived the holocaust but rarely mentioned it. >> all i knew was that we were different, that i was different. i didn't exactly know why. >> reporter: her parents were jewish, born in germany, but after hitler came to power, their families fled. sonneberg's parents were just children but carried the traumas of nazi oppression throughout their lives. >> my mother from the time she was three on, for my father, from the time he was five or six-years-old, he was subjected to the painful existence in germany. >> reporter: despite her own comfortable upbringing here in the u.s., sonneberg privately struggled for years with anxiety and stress. while she couldn't prove it, she believed it was somehow linked to her parents' traumatic childhoods.

>> having discussed this with many of my friends who come from similar backgrounds, it seems to be consistent in most of us, or there were definitely challenges that "american" kids didn't seem to have experienced. >> reporter: even though you weren't there. >> exactly. that's the amazing part of it. >> reporter: now, a new study published this month in the scientific journal "biological psychiatry," bolsters sonneberg's belief that she experienced the after effects of her parents' trauma. dr. rachel yehuda, director of mount sinai's traumatic stress studies division led the study. her team interviewed and drew blood from 32 sets of survivors and their children, focusing on a gene called fkbp5 >> we already know that this is a gene that contributes to risk for depression and post- traumatic stress disorder. >> reporter: yehuda noticed a

pattern among the holocaust survivors called an epigenetic change-- not a change in the gene itself, but rather a change in a chemical marker attached to it. >> when we looked at their own children, their children also had an epigenetic change in the same spot on a stress-related gene. >> reporter: what does that suggest? >> well, in the first generation, in the holocaust survivor, it suggests that there has been an adaptation or a response to a horrendous environmental event, and in the second generation it suggests that there has also been a response of the offspring to this parental trauma. >> reporter: which means children of holocaust survivors like sonneberg could be more likely to develop stress or anxiety disorders. though their study was small, yehuda and her team controlled for any early trauma the survivors' children may have experienced themselves. how is it that a parent who was

subjected to the trauma of the holocaust is able to somehow transmit that to a child who wasn't there? >> that's a really good question, and this study that we did doesn't address the how. the study that we did just provides a proof of concept that we might be able to identify the how if we do more research. >> reporter: d.n.a. is passed from parents to children. but research like yehuda's suggests parental life experiences can modify their body chemistry, and those modifications can be transmitted to children as well. scientists have examined this idea before. after a famine in holland during 1944 and 1945, children were born with the effects of malnutrition two generations after the food shortage ended. previously, yehuda herself studied stress hormone levels in children born to women who survived the september 11 terrorist attacks. she's been examining the link between trauma experienced by

holocaust survivors and their children for more than 20 years. >> a trauma is an event that changes you. it doesn't have to change you for the negative. trauma changes you in lots of different ways, but most people who experience extreme trauma learn a great deal from that experience, and some of those lessons may be lessons that are transmitted to the child, and that's not a bad thing. >> reporter: yehuda says the implications aren't limited to holocaust survivors. but this dwindling population provides insight into how clinicians understand and treat stress disorders. >> if you're at risk for heart disease, a lot of times the doctor can separate out well this is your weight, that's not good, this is your diet, these are you genetic risks, and things like that. and it would be very nice if we could develop a similar risk profile in the mental health arena where we would be able to understand where the risk factors come from for depression and anxiety. >> reporter: we're on the 10th

anniversary of hurricane katrina. there were children who were born after that trauma. there are children born in the trauma of a war in syria and other crises around the world. if you're the child of a parent who experienced trauma, are you doomed to be depressed or stressed for the rest of your life? >> i don't think you're doomed. but i think that many children of traumatized parents have struggled with depression and anxiety. and i can tell you that many of them have felt relieved that there might be a contributing factor that has been based on how they're responding to their parental trauma. i think that it's helped people work through a lot of that depression and anxiety. >> reporter: relief is exactly what karen sonneberg, the child of holocaust survivors, felt after she participated in one of dr. yehuda's trauma survivor studies. she lost her mother 30 years ago but looks forward to her father's 90th birthday next year. >> i learned to cope in my life. i've learned to move on and get

over all of this. had i known at the time how my reactions could impact future children, my children's reactions, i might've dealt with things differently or gotten them some sort of treatment that maybe would help them in the future. >> sreenivasan: our next story is about a provocative photographer from south africa, where human rights groups say, every week there are as many as 10 attacks on gays and lesbians because of their sexual orientation. photographer zanele muholi, a self-proclaimed visual activist, is trying to raise awareness of the problem. her work is now on display in an exhibit at the brooklyn museum that runs through november. the newshour's tracy wholf has the story. >> reporter: zanele muholi's work focuses primarily on the black lesbian experience: from moments of celebration and joy,

to intimate portraits and stories that depict the violence many gay south africans experience. everything from corrective rape, where lesbian are sexually assaulted by men who want to, "turn them straight," to murder. are you concerned about repercussions against your own family for the work that you do? >> unfortunately, a lot of innocent souls have been killed without even doing anything at all. but then if anything happens to me, at least i'll die, you know, peacefully, because i'll know that i've acted to challenge any phobias that still persist. >> reporter: catherine morris is the curator of muholi's exhibit at the brooklyn museum. >> zanele's engagement with her community is coupled with her extraordinary photographic talent. she is simultaneously documenting her community, but at the same time speaking very eloquently about the history of photography and history of

portraiture. and these black and white photographs resonate on so many levels because of that push-pull between the history that she's capturing and the community she's committed to. >> reporter: muholi struggled with her own identity as a black lesbian and even had thoughts of suicide when she was younger, but someone gave her a point- and-shoot camera, and she began taking self-portraits and found it to be therapeutic. >> i'm one of those people who really doesn't mind to photograph the self, you know? and i think it's the right thing to do. it's very, very important for us to look at us before we look at what is happening in the neighborhood. >> reporter: muholi's portrait series called "faces and phase"" is a collection of intimate photos she's taken of friends and acquaintances, people she refers to as collaborators. what are you looking for when you're setting up a shot, and you're working with a collaborator? >> i'm looking for me. you know, when some people say, "you look at someone, and you see yourself in them," i'm

looking for me that i never was. so i'm looking for the person, that person who lies in each and every one of us no matter what. >> reporter: despite gay rights being protected by law in south africa, attacks against black lesbians are often overlooked and under investigated by authorities, according to human rights groups. >> it's much harder to be a black lesbian in south africa than it is to be a white lesbian. >> reporter: rosalind morris is a professor of anthropology at columbia university. >> violence against women is not uncommon. so, one finds a kind of intensification of that violence directed against black women for not conforming to ideals of femininity, on one hand, and for appearing to betray a black cultural or a black national cause. >> reporter: while muholi's work has been celebrated and embraced by art critics around the world, some of her more explicit and revealing photographs have led conservative politicians in south africa to criticize her work, calling it immoral and offensive.

your work has been met with criticism or controversy. how do you respond to those statements, those sentiments, that push back? >> when i'm being called a black lesbian controversial photographer, they basically say, "continue to do it, because you are doing the right thing." >> sreenivasan: about 40 million americans wear contact lenses to correct their vision, and how much the lenses cost is now the subject of a courtroom battle. a recent federal appeals court ruling temporarily allows discounters like "1-800- contacts" to charge less than the largest lens manufacturers would prefer. the lens makers don't want eye doctors who sell contacts to be undercut by discounters who go below a suggested minimum price. at stake is $4 billion americans spend on contact lenses.

yesterday, i spoke with associated press reporter lindsay whitehurst, who is covering the case. >> $4 billion is a big amount. 40 million americans using contact lenses is something we all take for granted. what happened in this specific case? >> so in this case the state of utah actually passed a law that banned minimum prices for contact lenses so told manufacturers you can no longer set minimum prices for your products. the manufacturers in their are a few big manufacturers that really dominate this industry, told resellers if you seld our products below this, we will yank our products, we won't sell to you any more. this particularly affected discount sellers like costco and 1-800-contacts which happen to be based in utah. sreenivasan: often to b optometn

actually sell you stufftoo. >> they can introduce patients to new products. they can say this product from johnson and johnson just came on the market, i think it would be great for you. discount businesses won't suggest new products. eye doctors are essential to the manufacturers, and manufacturers want to make sure eye doctors aren't losing business. >> the manufacturers and the eye doctors listen. 1-800-contacts and costco don't have the expertise i do when i sell you something. >> how to put them in yourize and it's serge a medical thing there's definitely something to that. contacts can get kind of expensive so customers are looking for ways to save a little money and they're looking

to places like 1-800-contacts. they have actually been able to capture a certain percent of this business now. sreenivasan: what is the state of pay? >> some of the manufacturers have lowered the minimums, this law only applies in utah but because 1-800-contacts is based here they can sell anywhere in the country. those transactions if you are in new york or in montana and you buy contacts online from 1-800-contacts that's considered an in-state transaction. no matter where the customer is and this is really central to the problem manufacturers are basing their appeal on or the argument they're basing their appeal on is they're saying this violates interstate commerce rule and so far this hasn't gained a lot of traction in the courts but it's really an interesting idea, interesting concept in the age where people buy a lot of things online hypothesis. sreenivasan: all right,

lindsay whitehurst joining us from the associated press. thanks so much. thank you. >> this is pbs newshour weekend, sunday. >> sreenivasan: last week, marissa muller, a 34-year-old california woman completed a solo, cross country bicycle ride covering 3,300 miles in 80 days. her custom-made bike was unusual-- powered in part by solar energy. the newshour's saskia demelker met up with muller here in new york. >> marissa muller pedaled across america with a ten pound solar panel converting sunlight to electricity. >> the purpose was to expose solar power to everybody. some have seen the benefits but i wanted to get out there and engage everybody, see how solar powers works. >> the motor provides 40% of the pedal-power which made it easier

for muller to average 17 miles an hour and cover 70 miles a day. >> it was obeautiful way to see the country. full and study and still focus on what was ahead. >> the bike was a conversation-starter and that was the point. >> i think i engaged at least five people a day. >> through her home in san francisco through national parks and across the famed route 66. she rode past the jefferson memorial and the george washington bridge into new york city. she stopped to sell the roses and took days off. >> i stopped in place he i felt connection with. >> muller has more possibility for using solar energy. >> upgrade from traditional bikes to lesser bikes and the evolution of a bike route solar docking station so you could get

to work get your bike give you a walk a charge and at the end of the day hop back on and get back home. and finally tonight for the last time a businessman has been arrested for trafficking in so-called blood diamonds and allegedly enslaving people to mine them. the vims rights group has arrested michel delere are for his actions in south africa 30 years ak. friday night's houston gas station of a schaeffer's deputy, police arrested miles yesterday, after finding gun casings that matched the crime scene. i'm hari sreenivasan. thanks for watching.

captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: 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 is provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

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