captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for saturday, june 11, donald trump looks to expand the electoral map, campaigning in battleground states that usually favor democrats; new york city eases away from car culture and makes more room for bikes and pedestrians; and, a lifetime achievement award for one of the men behind "fiddler on the roof." >> we recognized that there was something universal about these stories and we tried to make this a show that would appeal to people of all faiths. >> sreenivasan: next, on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: lewis b. and louise hirschfeld cullman. bernard and irene schwartz. judy and josh weston. the cheryl and philip milstein family. the citi foundation. supporting innovation and enabling urban progress.

the john and helen glessner family trust. supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. 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 has been 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 at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thanks for joining us. this first weekend after hillary clinton clinched the democratic party presidential nomination, her likely opponent is testing his fall election strategy. republican businessman donald trump campaigned in the swing state of florida today-- the battleground with the most electoral votes at stake, and won twice by president obama.

from there, trump went on to pennsylvania, which democratic nominees have won every november since 1992. in tampa today, trump said, in his view, the former secretary of state, senator, and first lady, is unqualified to be president. >> look at the mess she got us into with syria, everything she touches. and you're going to have four more years of that? we won't have a country left, folks, believe me. >> sreenivasan: in his remarks today, trump repeatedly called massachusetts senator elizabeth warren, who endorsed clinton this week and claims native american heritage, "pocahontas"" as he has done before. hillary clinton took to twitter today to criticize donald trump's defunct trump university, releasing a satirical infomercial saying," pad donald's pockets and put your own finances at risk-- all for the low price of $35,000!" the final presidential primary occurs tuesday, when washington d.c. democrats vote. vermont senator bernie sanders is competing for delegates

there, despite clinton having secured both the majority needed to win the nomination and president obama's endorsement. the president will start campaigning with clinton on wednesday in wisconsin. in syria, islamic state militants claimed responsibility for three suicide and car bombings today in a predominantly shiite suburb of damascus, the war-torn nation's capital. the syrian observatory for human rights says the attacks killed at least 20 people and wounded dozens more. in northern syria, american- backed kurdish fighters are said to be advancing on isis-held positions in the aleppo province. they have reportedly encircled the town of manbij, which is an isis stronghold, but the fighting has trapped thousands of civilians. in bangladesh, isis is claiming responsibility for yesterday's stabbing murder of a hindu monastery worker, the latest in a wave of similar attacks. people took to the streets in the capital of dhaka, today to protest the execution-style killings of religious minorities in the sunni-muslim majority country. officials say islamic radicals

have killed at least 18 people in the past two years, including aid workers, professors, gay rights activists, and members of the hindu, christian, and shiite muslim minorities. under pressure to stop the killings, bangladesh police have detained 1,600 suspects in the past few days, but officials said only a few dozen are suspected islamic militants. train, trash, and now airline strikes are plaguing france. when air france pilots went on strike today to protest a pay cut, the airline cancelled 20% of its flights. pilots say they won't fly for four days. the strike comes just as france is hosting two million visitors attending the european soccer championships. metro train drivers have already been on strike for days, oil refinery workers have walked off the job, and a strike by sanitation workers has left mounds of uncollected garbage on paris streets. california is the first state in the country seeking to offer undocumented immigrants health insurance under the affordable care act, commonly referred to as obamacare. governor jerry brown signed a

bill yesterday that could allow those immigrants to buy health insurance-- without any government subsidies-- from the state's health exchange. the state must first obtain a waiver from the federal law that bars undocumented immigrants from obtaining insurance through exchanges set up under obamacare. if the state gets the waiver, it expects 400,000 of its estimated 2.5 million undocumented immigrants would be eligible to apply. california already allows the children of undocumented immigrants get health coverage through medicaid. find out how researchers uncovered a hidden ruin buried in the ancient jordanian city of petra. visit www.pbs.org/newshour. >> sreenivasan: gawker media, which runs the gossip-driven website gawker and half a dozen other sites, is offering itself up for sale after filing for bankruptcy yesterday. the filing came three months after gawker lost an invasion of privacy lawsuit brought by the famous, one-time professional wrestler known as "hulk hogan," who had sued gawker for posting a video in 2012 of him having sex with a woman who was not his

wife. a jury awarded hogan $140 million in damages, and the trial judge upheld the verdict, though gawker is appealing. it turns out hogan's suit was bankrolled by billionaire businessman peter thiel, an early employee of paypal and on the board of facebook. thiel had his own grievance with gawker for outing him as gay in an article years before. the case raises questions-- about the journalistic judgement of news organizations as well as freedom of the press. joining me here in the studio to discuss this is edmund lee. he's the managing editor of recode, a news site that specializes in covering the tech industry. so, for people who haven't been following this thing chapter by verse, this is hulk hogan, former wrestler, we have a sex tape. we have racist comments here. and we've got this scrappy little web site that doesn't care and wants to publish all this. but it goes to the core of the freedom of the press, where the freedom of the press extends to even press you don't find favorable. >> exactly. and i think that's what the

first amendment protection has been about, is to protect the speech you don't like, or don't agree with, and to have the diversity of voice out there is what ultimately levels out in terms of having that freedom. it's important to our democracy, absolutely. i think the other thing that's happening here, what thiel is doing is effectively acting like a regulator. he's deciding what is and isn't journalism. he said that he felt this was one of his better philanthropic causes, which is to put gawker out of business. and it looks like he might end up getting his way there >> sreenivasan: considering he's not the only billionaire in town, any billionary could decide to pick on any publication, especially the smaller, digital ones. >> exactly, and thiel showed us a model for how that could happen and sheds light on the economics of web publishing. walker is a successful web publisher. it has grown and grown and has profit but it does not have enough profit to fend off these legal challenges. that also spells potentially difficulties for all kinds of web publishing, which is now the model for publishing, period. i mean, the big companies like

time inc, conde newscast, and even the "new york times," they're having to strip down and have smaller profits and go after people on the web, and i think publishing is not what it once was, and i think that's one of the real dangers here >> sreenivasan: one of the first bid has been by a company called ziff davis, more traditional in the tech media world. >> niche >> sreenivasan: not going against the grain as gawker did in covering the technol industry. silicon valley, culture there has been a bit abrasive to the idea of gawker because they don't listen to the press release, they don't obey the press embargoes. they write what they want to write. >> if ziff davis is successful in making this acquisition, ziff days of daifs say more toned-down publication, or company with publications. no matter what happens, i think the gawker of old, or the gawker we know today will cease to exist. i think it will be a shelf its

former self. i think the content will ultimately have to be toned down, and, again, that's clearly the chilling effect of these suits and what thiel really set out to do in the first place >> sreenivasan: very briefly, the possible outcomees, let's say they win the appeal nape don't have to pay the $140 million, and they get this buyer to pay them $100 million-- or whatever it is. the other possibility is they lose the appeal, they have to buy this, and then no one wants to touch gawk wer a 10-foot pole knowing you have to pay someone 140 million bucks. >> i do think gawker has a really strong legal argument to make and i think there's a very good chance they will win on appeal. but even if that were the case, i think it still doesn't matter because, you know, again gawker won't be what it once was. and i think that's the bigger effect here. and that's really the sort of victory that thiel is going to claim here, if it turns out that way, is that he basically cut gawker down, you know >> sreenivasan: edmund lee of "recode," thanks for joining us publius.

>> sreenivasan: the city streets we walk, ride, or drive on every day are usually an afterthought for most of us, but not for janette sadik-khan, who is credited with re-thinking the streets of new york city-- how they work and who they serve. she was the city's transportation commissioner under former mayor michael bloomberg, and she has authored a book about how cities around the country can make their streets less car-focused. as part of our series, "urban ideas," about innovative ways cities govern and solve problems, i recently sat down with sadik-khan in the heart of one of her biggest projects-- times square. >> sreenivasan: how is it possible that we're sitting in times square? what happened here that you made you think you could build this? >> well, times square had been a tangle of traffic for almost 200 years, since it was first created, and people had tried for years to fix it. they tried slip lanes and signal changes, and nothing worked.

and so i brought the idea to mayor bloomberg that we should try something bigger. >> sreenivasan: in 2009, janette sadikkhan proposed closing broadway to cars from 42nd street to 47th street and turning it into a quarter-mile- long pedestrian plaza. >> and it started just with some traffic cones and some beach chairs, and it's really become a model for other cities to try things out. you can reimagine them, test it, measure it. >> sreenivasan: the permanent redesign cost $27 million, and the city measured the changing traffic flow through times square using g.p.s. devices in 13,000 taxis. >> it was much safer for both pedestrians and motorists. the traffic worked just fine. and it became an economic blockbuster. it became one of the top ten retail locations on the planet. >> sreenivasan: in her book "streetfight," sadik-khan argues, the nation needs to shift the focus of city streets away from cars. >> our streets, for so many years, have been used to move

cars as quickly as possible from point a to point b. and people have even forgotten that there are other uses for the streets-- whether to walk or to bike or to take the bus. it's not anti-car. it's really prochoice. it's about providing options to make it easier for people to get around. >> sreenivasan: by 2013, when sadik-khan's tenure in mayor bloomberg's administration ended, the city had repurposed 220 acres of space taking away lanes from cars and giving them to pedestrians, bikes, and buses. sadik-khan says dedicated car turn lanes, restricted bus lanes, and adjusting traffic light signals based on real-time traffic conditions helped increase average driving speeds in central manhattan by nearly 7%. at the same time, traffic and pedestrian fatalities in the city have declined. >> our streets have never been safer. in fact, with more and more cyclists on our streets, we've seen a one-third reduction in cyclist injuries and fatalities, while we've seen a quadrupling

of people biking around. >> sreenivasan: much of the increase in biking is from citi bike, the bike share program funded in part by citibank and mastercard that's been used more than 26 million times since launching three years ago. the citi foundation is one of the underwriters of this program. >> it was the first new transportation system in new york city in 60 years and at almost no cost to taxpayers. so i think it's a model, particularly in an era where we don't have a lot of federal funding and state funding and local funding is hard to come by. >> sreenivasan: sadik-khan says the huge number of riders actually makes biking safer. >> you're not going to ride the tour de france on this bike-- they're, like, heavy! right? >> sreenivasan: right. >> and i think that also goes a long way to calm down the streets. >> sreenivasan: new york city streets now have 400 miles of bike lanes, with more than 30 miles separated from vehicle traffic by a lane of parked cars, an idea sadik-khan copied after seeing it in copenhagen, denmark.

but with the new lanes came a backlash, including from drivers who complained bike lanes caused more traffic congestion. a 1.8 mile lane bordering brooklyn's prospect park is still mired in litigation, six years after being installed. what do you think it is that creates that initial resistance to change, whether it's city people get pretty comfortable with how a space looks and how a space is used, until they try something else, right? >> it's a really good question, because people are really attached to the status quo. and when you change the status quo, we find the status quo pushes back hard, right? and people have expectations that our streets are for cars. and they don't really have any other expectations that they can be anything else. so that was one of the innovations that we did in new york city. we moved fast to show that you could have change on your street, that it would be better. that you can build in other ways to get around just really by narrowing the traffic lanes and opening up that space for other

uses. >> sreenivasan: with more than half the world's population living in cities expected to become two-thirds by 2050, sadik-khan hopes new york sets an example for a more person-centric view of transportation. >> i think it's really critical that we build in really good choices for people to get around, making it safe for people to bike, making it fast for people to ride the bus, making it easy for people to walk around. those are the kind of really secret sauces for 21st century cities. and really, we get what we design, and when we design our streets to make them wide and as runways for cars, you know, that's what we get. and when we design our streets for people, and make it easier to walk and bus and bike, we get a much different result.

>> sreenivasan: at tomorrow night's tony awards recognizing the best work on broadway, the blockbuster musical "hamilton" will be center stage with its record 16 nominations. but there will also be a spotlight on sheldon harnick, who will receive a lifetime achievement award. harnick co-wrote the classic" fiddler on the roof," which premiered on broadway in 1964 and is nominated this year for best musical revival. a second harnick musical, "she loves me," is also nominated for best revival. the newshour's zachary green has this profile. ♪ tradition! tradition! ♪ tradition! >> reporter: a half century after its premiere, the songs "" fiddler on the roof" are known around the world. it tells the story of tevye, a poor jewish dairyman, and his family, facing oppression in rural russia at the turn of the 20th century. this production at the broadway theater marks the fifth time" fiddler" has been revived on

broadway. >> this is one of the finest casts we've ever had. so revisiting the show has been a thrill. >> reporter: even at 92 years old, lyricist sheldon harnick has been directly involved in this revival, helping choose the director and attending rehearsals. we spoke with him at sardi's restaurant, famous for its caricatures of broadway stars; amongst them, harnick's own likeness. harnick says the inspiration f"" fiddler" came when he received a book by humorist sholem aleichem. >> the stories were riveting. and what was astonishing about them was that some of them were actually tragic, and yet there was a great deal of humor in them. and by the time you got to the end of the story, you might be crying, but you were laughing along the way. so i sent it to jerry bock, and i said, "this is our next musical." >> reporter: composer jerry bock and harnick had already written hit musicals like "she loves me," also a current broadway revival, and "fiorello", about

new york city mayor laguardia. but "fiddler" would become their most successful collaboration and produced their best known song, based on aleichem's prose. ♪ if i were a rich man all day long i'd ♪ bitty bitty bum if i were a wealthy man! ♪ >> i find it a little embarrassing-- if somebody reads one of the stories closely, he will find the lyrics to "if i were a rich man." i practically just took them right out of the story and set them to music. that's not entirely true; i have some craft. but a lot of those images were in the stories. >> reporter: "fiddler's" main story follows the struggles of tevye and his wife, golde, as they try to marry off their five daughters. ♪ matchmaker, matchmaker make me no match ♪ i'm in no rush maybe i've learned ♪ >> reporter: the three eldest insist on marrying someone they love-- despite the wishes of their well-meaning parents to

find them wealthy suitors. that disassociation between love and marriage is illustrated in the song "do you love me", where tevye and golde admit their feelings for each other after 25 years of marriage. harnick wrote it as a late addition to the musical during its initial pre-broadway run in detroit. >> i was standing in the back of the house, and i suddenly started to sob. and i thought, "why am i weeping like this?" and then i thought, "it's because i wished that my own parents had had the relationship that golde and tevye had had." i grew up during the depression, and there were a lot of vicious, violent arguments between my parents about money. not that the relationship between tevye and golde is a simple, loving relationship, it's a complex relationship, but basically it's a loving relationship. and it just affected me, and i

started to cry. so there was much more in the song than i knew when i wrote it. >> reporter: "fiddler" opened on broadway to rave reviews and went on to sweep the 1965 tony awards. the original production ran for eight years-- at the time, the longest run in broadway history. the 1971 movie version brought the show to a wider audience. although the story focuses on the plight of russian jews, harnick says the prejudice in the film and stage productions is familiar to many different people. >> we saw a remarkable production of it in a black and puerto rican neighborhood, where the cast was all black and puerto rican. and the young black man, he was 15 years old, who played tevye, was superb. they understood the show. they understood what it was about, and that kind of race hatred. >> reporter: and harnick says the musical's end, when tevye's family and fellow villagers leave with only the belongings they can carry, can still be seen in real life even today.

>> the syrian problem and people leaving syria and having nowhere to go, it resonates even more. it says something terrible about the human race that in 50 years, that image has always been current. there's always been some place in the world where something horrible is going on. ♪ to us and our good fortune! be happy! ♪ be healthy! long life! ♪ >> reporter: but despite the timeless quality of "fiddler on the roof", harnick says the musical's enduring legacy is still remarkable to him. >> that we would run eight years, and that the show would become what it was, was a surprise to us. it's kind of still a surprise. i must say it's a very pleasant surprise. we recognized when we read the stories, that they were not just about a jewish family, that there was something universal about these stories. and we tried to realize the universality of what was in

those stories, and to make this a show that would appeal to people of all faiths and all beliefs. ♪ drink l'chaim to life! ♪ >> sreenivasan: finally, italy's coast guard said today it rescued more than 1300 migrants and refugees trying to cross the mediterranean sea from north africa to italy. that brings the three-day total of people rescued past 3,000. 50,000 people have come ashore in italy during this third year of massive migrant crossings. the traffic along the africa-to-italy route has increased since the european union cracked down on the route between greece and turkey in march. on tomorrow's program, jeff greenfield on the politics of the outsider candidate. that's it for this edition of newshour weekend. i'm hari sreenivasan. have a good night.

captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: lewis b. and louise hirschfeld cullman. bernard and irene schwartz. judy and josh weston. the cheryl and philip milstein family. the citi foundation. supporting innovation and enabling urban progress. the john and helen glessner family trust. supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. 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 has been provided by: and by the corporation for

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♪ man: it is extremely rare to have a planet where there is soil. as this living crust that is smeared over the surface of our planet. most of the planet is not living. it's mineral. it's never known life, it's just this rock. and yet soil starts forming on it and creates this crust, this very thin layer where life is possible. ♪ [footsteps crackling on ice]