The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

GWEN IFILL: Good evening. I`m Gwen Ifill.

On the NewsHour tonight: the news of this Christmas Day; then, a year of highs and lows in Iraq, as reported by Tina Susman, Baghdad bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times; Democratic candidates lay out their prescriptions for fixing health care; an encore report on faster, better computer chips powering their way to a laptop near you; a Paul Solman look at globalization`s winners and losers; and a Ray Suarez conversation with the Reverend Peter Gomes about his new book "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus."

(BREAK)

GWEN IFILL: Christians the world over celebrated Christmas today in places of war and places of peace. In Bethlehem, the ancient Church of the Nativity was packed with hundreds of pilgrims. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas attended midnight mass.

At the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI appealed for peace in his traditional speech at St. Peter`s Basilica. He urged an end to conflicts in Iraq, Darfur, and elsewhere.

POPE BENEDICT XVI, Vatican City (through translator): May the child Jesus bring relief to those who are suffering, and may he bestow upon political leaders the wisdom and courage to seek and find humane, just and lasting solutions.

GWEN IFILL: Back in this country, President Bush spent the day at Camp David with his extended family. Many Americans attended Christmas Day services, including this midnight mass at St. Patrick`s Cathedral in New York. Others volunteered time and helped serve meals to the homeless.

Astronauts also marked the day on the International Space Station, their Santa hats floating in weightless conditions. Presents arrive tomorrow on a Russian cargo craft.

In Iraq, U.S. troops observed their fifth Christmas since the beginning of the war there. Soldiers celebrated today with holiday dinners and small services. They also received care packages from home.

Elsewhere in Iraq, two suicide bombings killed at least 34 Iraqis and wounded scores more. A truck bomber attacked in Beiji, outside a state-run oil company. That blast left at least 25 dead.

And in Baquba, at least nine others died when a man blew himself up in a funeral procession. We`ll have more on security in Iraq right after this news summary.

Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish rebels along the border with Iraq again today. The Turkish military said air strikes in the region this month have destroyed more than 200 targets. It said up to 175 rebels were killed on December 16th alone. Kurdish leaders disputed the claim.

That`s it for the news summary tonight. Now: an update from Iraq; health care and the Democrats; super computer chips; going global; and "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus."

(BREAK)

GWEN IFILL: Now for our update from Iraq. We get that from Tina Susman, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. She`s been in Iraq since January. I spoke with her earlier today.

Tina Susman, welcome.

After having heard so much about the decline in violence in Iraq, today we hear of two new bombings north of Iraq, I believe. What can you tell us about it?

TINA SUSMAN, Los Angeles Times: One of the bombings took place in a city called Beiji. It`s an oil hub about 125 miles northwest of Baghdad, in Salahadeen province. That one killed about 25 people. It`s the latest report we`ve got.

The second bombing occurred in Baquba, which is about 35 miles north of Baghdad. That`s the capital of Diyala province. And that one actually targeted a funeral for two men who had been killed just 24 hours earlier.

GWEN IFILL: We have heard earlier this month that December was the least deadly month since February of `04. You`ve been there for almost a year now in Baghdad as bureau chief. How has it changed to your eye?

TINA SUSMAN: It`s changed in the sense that you get the impression that people do feel more secure, but I think what`s really changed is that, while you don`t, you know, physically see so much violence, you don`t literally hear so much violence -- you know, when I first got here, it wasn`t unusual to hear gunshots on a regular basis and large booms -- what you do see now though is what we call the balkanization of Baghdad.

You know, there`s just blast barriers everywhere. And people seem to feel a lot more secure, especially in the last couple of months, in their own neighborhoods. What`s still missing, though, is that sense of normalcy that you have in a major city, where people can kind of go out at any time, go to visit friends and relatives in different neighborhoods in the evening.

You still don`t see an economic boom going, which has always, you know, been said is just a crucial element of bringing stability not just to Baghdad, but to the entire country.

Having said that, though, there`s no doubt that the death toll is drastically down. In fact, this month, if things continue the way they are, this will be the least deadly month for U.S. troops since the beginning of the war.

GWEN IFILL: General Ray Odierno said that this is more of a communal struggle that`s going on, intra-Shiite, intra-Sunni. Is that what you`re seeing, as well?

TINA SUSMAN: I think it really depends on which part of the country you`re in. There`s no question that, down in southern Iraq, it certainly is considered intra-Shia, but, you know, a lot of the attacks, a lot of the violence that you see in northern Iraq now, it`s a lot of different elements.

The military has said that a lot of the violence going on in the north is a result of the Sunni insurgents, particularly al-Qaida in Iraq, having been pushed up to the north from Anbar province and Baghdad and Diyala province. They are in, in turn, attacking other Sunnis, but they`re also attacking Shiites.

One of their biggest targets has become these concerned local citizens, who are these security volunteers, who basically have agreed for a sum of about $10 a day to kind of work alongside U.S. and Iraqi forces with the hope that, in the future, they`ll be given permanent, full-time jobs in either the Iraqi security forces or in another form of state employment.

GWEN IFILL: Is there any plan yet to absorb those people, 70,000 of those volunteers yet?

TINA SUSMAN: Well, this is one of the biggest questions. In fact, the U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker, a couple days ago met with some journalists. And he made clear that, in 2008, as he put it, this has to happen.

There are plans, I think, depending on who you speak to, those plans are further along, according to some than others. The U.S. military has really tried to make clear that the plans are, you know, really taking shape and that there`s a very firm idea.

They plan to create a civilian job corps program to absorb the volunteers who cannot be absorbed into the security forces. And that`s about 75 percent to 80 percent of them. There`s simply not enough space in the security forces to take 70,000 of these people.

They say that the Iraqi government has agreed to this. However, when you ask people what the timeline is, there really is no timeline. And so, essentially at this point, it sounds like more of a promise, maybe a verbal promise, with some money committed by both sides, but we have not yet seen any of this actual recruitment into this civilian job corps starting.

GWEN IFILL: Let`s talk about what`s happening with the U.S. troops. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said not long ago that he expected 10 brigades to be withdrawn from Iraq by December of `08. Has that already begun to happen, or is it likely to happen?

TINA SUSMAN: It`s begun to happen. One brigade has been pulled out. The number-two commander here on the ground, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, met with journalists a few days ago.

And he said that, basically by the fall of 2008, the number of U.S. troops here, which currently is at about 154,000, will be down to about 135,000. Now, at the peak, the number was over 160,000.

What they`re aiming for by the end of `08, essentially, is to bring the number of American troops down to what they call pre-surge levels. This is the number that was here in Iraq before the security plan kicked off in February, which sent an additional almost 30,000 American troops into Iraq.

The concern, of course, with the pullout is making sure that there are no, you know, pockets of the country that go uncovered, and also everybody realizes that the more American troops you pull out, the more dependent you`re going to become on the Iraqi security forces to maintain whatever security gains have been made.

And so nobody makes a secret of the fact that, you know, they`re going to be watching this very closely.

GWEN IFILL: Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times, thank you very much.

TINA SUSMAN: Thank you.

(BREAK)

GWEN IFILL: In nine days, voters in Iowa begin choosing a presidential nominee. NewsHour correspondent Susan Dentzer participated in discussions with many of the candidates about one of the year`s biggest issues, health care. Tonight, we listen in.

The Health Unit is a partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

SUSAN DENTZER, NewsHour Health Correspondent: Health care is now the top domestic issue for Democrats, and that includes those running for president in 2008, so candidates were invited to discuss the topic in a recent series of forums at the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington, D.C.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D), New York: All Americans should have quality, affordable health care.

FORMER SEN. JOHN EDWARDS (D), Presidential Candidate: We must have a universal health care system.

GOV. BILL RICHARDSON (D), New Mexico: Doesn`t matter who you are, whether you`re a ditch digger or a CEO. We have to make sure everybody is insured.

SUSAN DENTZER: The forums were organized by the left-leaning Families USA, an advocacy group, and the right-leaning Federation of American Hospitals, which represents for-profit investor-owned hospital chains.

Five Democrats agreed to participate: New York Senator Hillary Clinton; former North Carolina Senator John Edwards; New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson; Delaware Senator Joe Biden; and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

A panel of journalists, including me, probed the candidates for roughly an hour a piece on a range of health issues, but most of the discussion centered on two key ones: expanding health insurance coverage for those who don`t have it, and reining in health costs for everybody.

The candidates were unanimous in responding to our first question.

Do you believe all Americans should have health insurance coverage?

JOHN EDWARDS: The answer is yes to the question. I`m proud of the fact that I was the first presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, to come out with a comprehensive, truly universal health care plan.

GOV. BILL RICHARDSON: We have a federal government that hasn`t made a serious effort on health care reform in over a decade.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: We have a health care crisis in America, 47 million Americans uninsured. We have to act. And it appears as though there`s a growing consensus to do that.

SUSAN DENTZER: But after that note of agreement, the candidates diverged. Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich favored the most extreme change: moving from America`s blended system of private and public health coverage to a completely government-financed health care system.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH (D), Ohio: I`m the only candidate running who`s talking about a single-payer, not-for-profit health care system, Medicare for all. We`re already paying for it. We`re just not getting it.

Sixteen percent of our gross domestic product is spent for health care. That`s about $2.3 trillion a year. If we took all that money for health care, we`d have enough to cover everyone.

SUSAN DENTZER: Kucinich was the lone Democrat to say his plan would also cover an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants, and he added his plan would put the private health insurance industry out of business and require all for-profit entities engaged in health care to convert to nonprofit status.

Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal asked him about that.

LAURA MECKLER, Wall Street Journal: How would you compensate the shareholders who have invested in these for-profit companies and which are now going to just go away?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: There would be a market-value computation that would be involved to the company.

LAURA MECKLER: Who will be paying that? I`m an investor who has invested in this hospital.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: The national health care plan repays them.

LAURA MECKLER: So the government is going to be paying all of those people?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: The government pays that; that`s right.

LAURA MECKLER: How could the government possibly afford that? It`s got to be in the billions.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: By amortizing the cost with treasury bonds over a period of time, just like you pay for a lot of other capital expenses, period.

SUSAN DENTZER: By contrast, other Democrats emphasized that they would not replace the current health insurance system, but would instead build on it. They offered plans to expand both public health coverage, like Medicare, and to facilitate access to private health insurance plans.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: I have proposed the American Health Choices Plan. Here`s how it would work: If you have private insurance, nothing changes. You keep that insurance. If you like your doctor you have, you keep him.

But if you don`t have health insurance or if you don`t like the insurance you have, you can choose from the same wide variety of private plans that members of Congress get to choose from.

SUSAN DENTZER: Clinton said the new menu of options that people could pick from would include a public plan like Medicare. We asked her about that.

A lot of your critics say including a public plan in that approach is really single-payer through the back door, that it would create a new federal bureaucracy, it would saddle taxpayers with huge new costs, and probably produce overwhelming pressure to clamp down on health care prices.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: Well, that`s a either misunderstanding or misrepresentation of what I`ve proposed. I`ve included the public plan option because a lot of Americans want it. I believe in choice and competition. You know, let`s see what happens.

For all those people who believe that, you know, the private system is by far the best, they`re going to have more than 250 options to choose from. And for those people who like the fact that Medicare, which ensures private choice, only has a 3 percent administrative cost, they`ll get to make that choice.

SUSAN DENTZER: Responding to David Muir of ABC News, Edwards said he had proposed an almost identical plan several months before Clinton proposed hers.

DAVID MUIR, ABC News: Even your wife said, "It`s John Edwards` plan as presented by Hillary Clinton," or along those lines. Can you help the people at home who are watching this know what the key differences are then between your plan and Senator Clinton`s plan?

JOHN EDWARDS: Yes, they`re in the weeds. There are some differences, but they`re not significant. I should be flattered, I guess. But I think for America this is a good thing, that we`re having a debate about health care and universal health care. And the differences between the major candidates are fairly nuanced.

SUSAN DENTZER: One of those nuanced differences was over who would be compelled to contribute to coverage, in other words, mandates. These could include requirements on employers to contribute a certain percentage of payroll to workers health coverage and a mandate on individuals that they purchase health insurance.

Edwards, Clinton and Richardson agreed that both types of mandates were needed. They all said the individual mandate would be coupled with subsidies for people who could not otherwise afford coverage.

JOHN EDWARDS: In the weeds that a mandate is necessary is because you cannot have universal health care without it. It does not exist, and anyone who pretends it is, is not being straight.

SUSAN DENTZER: Taking a different tack, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware said he had deliberately omitted any mandates from his plan.

SEN. JOE BIDEN (D), Delaware: One word the Americans don`t like, "mandate." I don`t want to make this hard. I want to make this simple and not susceptible to what some of the insurance companies and the right wing will argue this is: a mandated socialistic system.

SUSAN DENTZER: Instead, Biden proposed having government pay all health care bills for any individual that top $50,000 a year, a so-called reinsurance program. He said that would make coverage cheaper and more attractive to both employers and individuals alike.

SEN. JOE BIDEN: So that`s the incentive to keep them in. And I do not believe that it is instinctive instinct of American people that, given affordable access to health care, they`re going to deny it. If it turns out I`m wrong and it becomes a problem -- and I don`t believe it is -- then I would adjust it.

SUSAN DENTZER: Senator Barack Obama of Illinois turned down our invitation to participate in the forum, but on the campaign trail in New Hampshire he defended his decision to omit an individual mandate from his plan, even though he would impose a mandate on large employers and would also require parents to obtain coverage for their children.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D), Illinois: In terms of this debate about the mandate, look, this is a manufactured issue. I have committed that I will make sure that every single American in this country has health care they can count on.

I think the problem -- and the reason people don`t have health care is not because they`re running away to avoid getting health care. It`s because they can`t afford it. If we make it affordable, which my plan does more effectively than any other plan out there, then I`m confident that people will buy it.

SUSAN DENTZER: With the exception of Kucinich who`d replace private health coverage with a public system, all the Democrats said that private insurance companies would have to operate under new national rules.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: Whatever you choose, you will have the following guarantees. First, you will never be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions or risk factors. Second, your coverage will be guaranteed. Third, your coverage will be affordable. Fourth, you will always have an option that is fully portable.

SUSAN DENTZER: The Democrats also said their plans would all require $80 billion to $110 billion a year in additional federal spending and proposed similar ways to come up with the money.

Julie Rovner of National Public Radio pressed Senator Clinton on that.

JULIE ROVNER, National Public Radio: Can you give us some more clear idea of how much more in federal outlays you`d be willing to put on the table for this?

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: I have put forth a list of savings and spendings that add up to about $110 billion. And about half of that would come from not continuing the high-end tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans, returning to a pre-Bush administration level, back in the 1990s. And the other half comes from savings that every expert I have talked to believes we can realize.

SUSAN DENTZER: As for savings, the candidates agreed that there were real ways to cut health costs or at least to get better value for the dollars spent, especially for chronic disease.

GOV. BILL RICHARDSON: Chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes and cancer account for at least 75 percent of our health care costs. We have got to start taking better care of ourselves as a nation.

JOHN EDWARDS: Our chronic care is a mess, because there`s no medical home that is responsible for the coordination of chronic care, so that you don`t have overlapping care, that you don`t have unnecessary care.

But if you are 75 years old and you have a serious chronic health care condition, a serious heart ailment or diabetes, you have one health care provider that you know you can go to who will coordinate your care among other health care providers.

SUSAN DENTZER: All said they were looking forward to debating the Republican presidential candidates on health reform and, if elected, would steel themselves for a long battle ahead.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: I`m looking forward to debating whomever they nominate on health care. We can continue with the dysfunctional, expensive, unequal system that lacks quality, or we can begin to say, "Look, we are a smart country, and we can figure this out." And I`m betting that`s what we`ll do.

JOHN EDWARDS: There will be millions and millions of dollars spent on television and newspapers, on radio, to try to defeat health care reform. And it will never change unless we as a nation join together and stand up to them.

SUSAN DENTZER: Videos of all the forums and full transcripts are available online at www.Health08.org. All Republican candidates were also invited to participate in the forums, but so far only one, Arizona Senator John McCain, has done so.

(BREAK)

GWEN IFILL: Now, faster, more powerful computers are on their way. NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels has our Science Unit encore report.

JERRY BAUTISTA, Director of Technology Management, Intel: Well, this is a simple game of your hands sort of...

SPENCER MICHELS, NewsHour Correspondent: Human interaction between the real world -- in this case, me -- and the virtual world -- in this case, the bouncing ball stored on the computer -- is possible today using a standard personal computer.

JERRY BAUTISTA: It`s imaging the movement of your hand. It`s watching for surfaces that move along. It`s tracking the position of each ball. It`s also tracking the rotation. We`ve imposed gravity on these balls. You notice they sink.

SPENCER MICHELS: Technology manager Jerry Bautista runs an experimental lab at Intel, the world`s largest maker of computer chips. Those chips are the brains of a computer. And the more powerful they are, the more they can do.

Bautista considers this display, although impressive, relatively elementary. A more complicated task, like recognizing faces in a crowd, is what he`s working on.

This is a simulation of a program that recognizes facial characteristics of actors in a Korean soap opera. More than 20 computers were used to make it. Eventually, the company expects to use a single computer to achieve this effect. Nice for soap opera fans, but Intel`s Bautista says there are more serious applications on the horizon.

JERRY BAUTISTA: Now, think about security. So you`re in an airport. You have an Interpol database of people you`re trying to find. You have a sea of people walking around you, so you want to find a person.

Then you want to assess what they`re doing. What is their intent? Do they look agitated? And that level of artificial intelligence is much more sophisticated and requires a lot more computer horsepower than we have today.

SPENCER MICHELS: That kind of power is currently only available from so-called supercomputers that are so large they can fill an entire room. But thanks to some recent advances in chip technology, ever smaller computers will soon be able to do that high-level work.

Do you feel the big changes, I mean, and how important this place is?

PAUL OTELLINI, CEO, Intel: Oh, yes.

SPENCER MICHELS: Intel was the first to announce such a breakthrough. We caught up with CEO Paul Otellini in the company`s computer museum in Silicon Valley, named for the material most chips have been made from since 1959. Otellini said Intel is replacing most of the silicon used in both the chip base and in its transistors.

PAUL OTELLINI: We`ve gone from silicon to hafnium. We`ve also put in some other secret sauce that we`re not talking about yet that allow us to do this.

SPENCER MICHELS: The silicon used to insulate chips had to be replaced because, as chips got smaller and thinner, the silicon started to overheat, leak electricity, and waste power, so much so that scientists feared they had reached a limit in making faster chips.

But thin layers of hafnium, a metal used to cool nuclear reactors, don`t overheat or leak, so researchers are now able to nearly double the number of microscopic transistors, or gates, on a chip. They`re called gates because the flow of electric current opens and closes the gate, representing the zeroes and ones that make up basic computer language.

Intel`s Otellini says the implications are enormous.

PAUL OTELLINI: Our entire economy, not just the Western world, but the entire world, is increasingly built around information. Information flows through transistors. The transistor is the seminal invention of our generation. And I think being able to continue to make them, you know, better and cheaper and faster is something which is, you know, very, very forward-looking, in terms of where the world is going.

SPENCER MICHELS: The new chips due out later this year are designed for computers, but the breakthrough could also eventually impact consumer devices, like cell phones and music players, now a large part of the very competitive chip market. Officials at Intel`s main rivals, AMD and IBM, said they, too, were working to develop an equivalent chip.

BERNARD MEYERSON, Technology Officer, IBM: Imagine the 747`s engine. If you stuck a big bag over the front end of it and created a vacuum with it, that`s what`s going on in there.

SPENCER MICHELS: IBM`s leading technologist, Bernard Meyerson, said his company is constantly innovating to make its chips faster and more durable, with equipment such as this spintronic machine, which lays down a super thin layer of metal for use in chips.

BERNARD MEYERSON: The challenge of it is, is that when you`re working with things like a single atom, the purity of what you`ve got to do is unimaginable.

SPENCER MICHELS: In late march, IBM`s Meyerson unveiled a prototype chip that can transmit huge volumes of data by beaming light pulses through plastic fibers, an approach that uses far less energy than traditional copper wire. The chip will eventually make it possible to download a high- definition feature-length movie in a single second.

However, Meyerson said, just improving the chip as Intel has done won`t make a big difference in improving the computer. What IBM does, he says, is improve the whole computing package.

BERNARD MEYERSON: There`s a lot more to a computer than its chip. It`s a bit like saying, "I can drive down the road if I have gas." True, you also probably need a car. You see, trying to pretend that you can get away with just optimizing one aspect of an enormous problem, that misses the point.

SPENCER MICHELS: But officials at Intel insist their inventions will advance the entire industry. Otellini recently showed off a wafer, on which are etched the prototypes of several hundred newly designed chips, with 80 separate computing units, or cores, on each chip.

Currently, the most advanced microprocessors contain just four units. The new development will vastly increase the chip`s ability to handle complex tasks.

PAUL OTELLINI: But we think that the capability embodied by this prototype chip is going to be commercially available in a five-year window, and that allows us to do some very amazing things.

This kind of capability goes into solving some of the big problems of the world, modeling climate change. How do you deal with solving cancer? Curing cancer is not going to happen because of a miracle vaccine; it`s going to be because we have enough data, and enough markers identified, and then regress them through analysis, and find out what it takes to fix your problem or someone else`s problem, not the generic problem.

SPENCER MICHELS: The increase in speed will be exponential, according to Intel physicist and chip designer Mark Bohr, whom we met at a scientific conference.

MARK BOHR, Physicist, Intel: Now, this chip can perform about one trillion operations per second. Now, 10 years ago, Intel made a computer that could also do one trillion operations per second. That computer was the size of a room and used tens of thousands of watts of power. The chip that we reported at the conference is the size of a fingernail, and it uses less than a hundred watts of power.

SPENCER MICHELS: But AMD`s chief of technology Phillip Hester dismissed the 80-core chip as a science project with no practical use at present. And it would require the industry to develop a whole new way of writing software.

PHIL HESTER, Chief Technology Officer, AMD: Our approach is really different, in that we`re going to start with what the end customer wants and then work backwards from that to figure out what the technology needs are, not start with the technology and try to force that into a market, or a position that it really doesn`t fit.

SPENCER MICHELS: Instead, Hester says, AMD is focusing on the capability of its graphics technology that was used by Lucasfilm to create the Academy Award-winning graphics in the most recent "Pirates of the Caribbean."

Hester says AMD`s package of fast chips and specialized graphics processors can be used today for real-world problems. He pointed to this model of an Alzheimer protein which was developed with the help of an AMD chip. It helps scientists study the causes of the disease.

PHIL HESTER: So what previously may have taken, let`s say, three years to compute now can be done in a month.

SPENCER MICHELS: AMD insists it is gaining on Intel, which maintains three-quarters of the worldwide market. Intel insists it will expand its lead because of its innovations. Both agree that competition is ultimately good for consumers and is really driving the science.

But the game has moved beyond the industrial research labs. The demand for more power, thinner materials, and less heat has inspired nanotech chemists at UCLA and Caltech to search for an entirely new way to make transistors.

Dr. Fraser Stoddart, recently knighted by the queen of England, has invented molecules that can actually act as transistors. A ring of atoms on the molecule moves back and forth when electricity is applied, just like a switch.

FRASER STODDART, California Nanosystems Institute, UCLA: This is the actual molecule with the various different atoms picked out, black for carbon, red for oxygen, white for hydrogen, yellow for sulfur, and blue for nitrogen.

SPENCER MICHELS: Is it unusual to have a ring around a molecule? Or do some molecules have that?

FRASER STODDART: This is very unusual. These are relatively new molecules. There aren`t many of them in the world today yet.

SPENCER MICHELS: His molecules are just four nanometers tall, meaning 160,000 of them are the size of a single white blood cell.

FRASER STODDART: We will be generating much less energy than the present-day computers. And you put all of this together, in a situation where you want to have a device that is not big, and you don`t have to carry it onto an airplane in a bag, but rather it would be in your pocket or, in fact, may be just the size of your thumbnail.

SPENCER MICHELS: Stoddart says commercial chip makers who had first ignored his work have recently shown interest. Meanwhile, the competition over making fast chips and finding new uses for them intensifies, spurring on an industry that has already changed the way we live.

GWEN IFILL: We first aired that story in May. Intel began shipping those new chips to some computer manufacturers last month. A wider variety of computers containing the chips are expected to be released early next year.

(BREAK)

GWEN IFILL: Now, another encore conversation on the impact of globalization. NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman talked earlier this year with four graduate students at Harvard`s Kennedy School of Government.

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK, Parliament Member, Thailand: Tell me a country which closed down their border for trade and they are prosperous.

PAUL SOLMAN, NewsHour Economics Correspondent: Kriengsak Chareonwongsak, a parliament member in Thailand, one of globalization`s apparent winners.

FREDERICK SUMAYE, Former Prime Minister, Tanzania: Nobody said we will close the borders.

PAUL SOLMAN: By contrast, Frederick Sumaye, former prime minister of Tanzania, one of globalization`s losers.

FREDERICK SUMAYE: ... and we didn`t even say globalization is totally, you know, a devil. No. We just said it must be controlled.

PAUL SOLMAN: Add Argentina`s Yanina Budkin and China`s Mingyou Bao, and we had four mid-career students at Harvard`s Kennedy School of Government. They`ve spent the past year trying to understand the phenomenon and figure out what to tell their people back home.

Watching the students, two of their professors: the staunchly pro- trade economist Robert Lawrence on the right; and his more ambivalent colleague, Danny Roderick. We assembled them all to hear how globalization is playing around the world, for the winners and losers alike.

So first question: How would their fellow citizens vote if asked to give globalization a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down?

Thailand?

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: Fifteen percent on the pro, maybe 5 percent on the against, and the rest is a silent majority.

PAUL SOLMAN: Argentina?

YANINA BUDKIN, Former Communications Officer, World Bank: Sixty-five percent no, 35 percent yes.

PAUL SOLMAN: Tanzania?

FREDERICK SUMAYE: Eighty-five percent no, 15 percent yes.

PAUL SOLMAN: China?

MINGYOU BAO, People`s Bank of China: The majority of the Chinese people will say yes to this question. Globalization is a win-win for China and the rest of the world.

PAUL SOLMAN: Mingyou Bao, from the People`s Bank of China, then gave the basic economic rationale.

MINGYOU BAO: I think every country could benefit from the process of globalization, because the developed countries can have better, greater access to cheap labor and markets, while the developing countries can benefit from the inflow of capital and technology.

PAUL SOLMAN: Tanzania`s Frederick Sumaye has learned the theory...

FREDERICK SUMAYE: ... but I think, in the long run, there will be more pains than gains. There will be industries in these developing countries that will be just taking off. If you curtail them at that stage, these countries, in the long run, will suffer, because they will just be markets.

PAUL SOLMAN: Argentina?

YANINA BUDKIN: Argentina is an interesting middle point, I would say. We had a very interesting case in the `90s. We opened our economy. Huge amounts of foreign direct investments came in. We privatized. And we were very much integrated into the world economy. That was very positive, increase of income for almost everybody.

Very nice until 2001, we have a massive crisis. There has to be regulation of some of these investments coming and going out. There has to be regulation of the capitals that are allowed to fly in and out, because you really get destabilized in your economy.

PAUL SOLMAN: This is one of today`s main beefs about free-market globalization: that, if foreign investors can pour money into a country and help build it, they can also pull it out quickly and make any bad situation much worse. It happened in Argentina in 2002, in Thailand in the late `90s.

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: I understand fully that the global market sometime can move its capital in a way that could be very disruptive at times. But in Thailand, we have grown 30 times in 30 years. That means we have been richer, on average. GDP per capita have grown. And we can`t deny that it`s due to our openness with trade, openness with investment.

PAUL SOLMAN: Of course, a freer market means winners and losers, acknowledges the Thai politician.

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: ... there are some industry that are sunset and who have to close down.

PAUL SOLMAN: Sunset industry, meaning it`s at the end of its lifecycle?

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: There were the textile industry, the shoes industry.

PAUL SOLMAN: So in Thailand, that`s not what you`re selling any more?

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: It`s going down quickly, and almost gone.

PAUL SOLMAN: Who did you lose the business to?

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: We lose to China. We lose to some other cheap labor countries.

MINGYOU BAO: Cambodia.

PAUL SOLMAN: Vietnam and Cambodia?

MINGYOU BAO: Yes, they are catching up very fast. Even we are starting losing business to these two.

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: But that`s normal.

PAUL SOLMAN: So Thailand`s losing the textile business to China, and China`s losing it...

MINGYOU BAO: Yes.

PAUL SOLMAN: ... to Vietnam and Cambodia?

MINGYOU BAO: Yes.

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: And, eventually, they`ll lose to Africa.

PAUL SOLMAN: The guy from Tanzania`s laughing. He doesn`t know where he fits, if that`s the case.

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: Eventually, Latin America and Africa will get all the cheap labor industry eventually.

PAUL SOLMAN: So the good news is, for you guys, that you`ll get the cheap labor jobs soon enough.

FREDERICK SUMAYE: No, I don`t agree to that. They will probably come up with a technology that will be cheaper to run, and cost per piece of cloth will probably be lower.

PAUL SOLMAN: So there will be no textile jobs?

FREDERICK SUMAYE: It can happen. Cheap labor, yes, might not be that important when we get to that point.

PAUL SOLMAN: So Sumaye wants to protect what industries Tanzania now has.

FREDERICK SUMAYE: When China opened its doors to the outside world, they still had a lot of control, OK?

PAUL SOLMAN: He just said that China managed its globalization. You didn`t just open yourself up to the world. You had mainly state-owned enterprises. You had very clear policies as to who could invest, and who couldn`t, and how you had to have a Chinese partner, and so forth. This was not textbook "let`s just open everything up to the world."

MINGYOU BAO: Yes, Paul, I agree. If you open the door to the outside world without, you know, preparing the necessary, fundamental capacities for protecting the weak industries, the people, the vulnerable groups in the society, then you are likely to suffer more in the process.

PAUL SOLMAN: So you agree with him completely?

MINGYOU BAO: When you open the window, you know, you have fresh air. And also, you have, you know, coming of the flies and mosquitoes. So what do you do? What the government needs to do is to install, build a filtering, right?

PAUL SOLMAN: A filter?

MINGYOU BAO: A filter, filter.

PAUL SOLMAN: Oh, to keep the flies out?

MINGYOU BAO: Yes. So you have the fresh air, but it keeps the flies out.

PAUL SOLMAN: Now even China is agreeing with this. So you`re on your own here.

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: Basically, you have to feel the hurt of the people. Maybe some gradualism may help in easing the pain.

PAUL SOLMAN: Well, what would gradualism mean?

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: That means you do not abruptly change a lifestyle. There have been generations of growing leek and cumber, garlic, whatever. They don`t know anything else. Therefore, how could you expect them to shift suddenly?

PAUL SOLMAN: This is the debate going on in the United States right now, where the argument is, "Let`s compensate the losers." But how do you do it?

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: There must be mechanism. For example -- well, retrain is one way.

PAUL SOLMAN: Retrain, but you know, when I`m a journalist, and I go out and say to people who are losing their jobs, "Oh, we have retraining programs. You should retrain." They say, "Retrain for what?"

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: Retrain for something better for you.

PAUL SOLMAN: Ah.

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: That you`ll be even richer, even. After you get retrained, you move to a better industry, a better kind of thing you can do. You can compete. You`ll be better off.

FREDERICK SUMAYE: What is this "something else" which will not be affected by globalization? Because globalization is just like a flooding river. It`s going to fill every room.

KRIENGSAK CHAREONWONGSAK: When we`re in our country or hot, we don`t wear thick clothes. We come to Boston, we wear thick clothes. We adjust. I would say, as a good government, you would empower them with skills, prepare them ahead of time, and ease their pain by compensate for some of the things that`s not their fault.

PAUL SOLMAN: But suppose that most of the people of the world are competing against each other for the same jobs that increasingly machines are able to do more cheaply anyway. It`s at least conceivable, isn`t it, that people will not have anything to sell?

FREDERICK SUMAYE: That`s why we are saying, initially, you don`t want to kill everything in these developing countries. You must allow some things to grow.

PAUL SOLMAN: So you mean, right now in Tanzania, 30 million people, how many of those people don`t have something to sell in the world economy?

FREDERICK SUMAYE: Oh, many of them. There are those who produce coffee. There are those who produce cotton. The prices are so bad. And, of course, these farmers are not making -- in fact, most of the times they make losses.

PAUL SOLMAN: The kind of industries that you want to nurture in Tanzania, what are those industries?

FREDERICK SUMAYE: Industries that process the agricultural commodities. I would want to process my cotton, I`d want to process my coffee, I would want to process my tea so that I can get the advantage of value addition.

YANINA BUDKIN: It`s true that countries can benefit, but also countries can have a strategic decision to integrate to the world economy with products that will allow them to go further than the cacao, the coffee, or the soybean. And it happens. It`s more than a dream. It happened in Chile with the salmon industry.

PAUL SOLMAN: The salmon industry, yes.

YANINA BUDKIN: Salmon and wine, also. But I think the key here for my country, at least, is agriculture. And the key debate with the developing world is, what is happening with agricultural subsidies, and what is the story with being asked to have our open economies, but then having to face very closed economies, when we want to export our products?

PAUL SOLMAN: Because we`re still supporting our farmers, for example, so that your farmers can`t compete?

YANINA BUDKIN: Exactly. If some countries are going to be better, maybe others need to be a little bit less well-off.

PAUL SOLMAN: Well, but you can see why that would be an unappealing argument to an American.

YANINA BUDKIN: Yes, but the problem is, are we talking about being global, having one world for everybody, or are we talking for the U.S. defining how globalization works?

PAUL SOLMAN: For the last word, we turned to the professors. At the end of the day, what did free-trader Robert Lawrence hear? A common theme.

ROBERT LAWRENCE, Harvard University: It was the need to somehow manage the process in some way. Nobody believes that it should just be unleashed and left without a very strong role for government in some way.

PAUL SOLMAN: What did the more skeptical Danny Roderick hear?

DANNY RODERICK, Harvard University: Markets will not work on their own. You need all the institutions that regulate markets, that stabilize markets, that compensate to losers and provide the safety nets, without which markets can neither be legitimate or, for that matter, efficient, if you don`t have the appropriate regulatory frameworks.

PAUL SOLMAN: You`re from Turkey. What would the vote be in Turkey, pro-, anti-globalization?

DANNY RODERICK: Globalization`s a dirty word, without any doubt, so I think we would get 60 percent of the people say that it`s a bad thing.

PAUL SOLMAN: And you`re from South Africa originally.

ROBERT LAWRENCE: And I think probably 70 percent against.

PAUL SOLMAN: And what do you think in America, if you just asked that question?

DANNY RODERICK: We know the answer. We take those polls all the time, and it`s, again, between 55 percent and 60 percent.

PAUL SOLMAN: Against?

DANNY RODERICK: Against.

PAUL SOLMAN: Against globalization, the dirty word on so many people`s tongues these days.

(BREAK)

GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight, this seemed a fitting day for a book conversation about the Bible. Ray Suarez handles that.

RAY SUAREZ: As millions of Americans celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth this holiday season, an old debate continues over how literally to read the Bible and how to incorporate 1st-century teachings into a 21st- century life.

In his new book, "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus," the Reverend Peter Gomes proposes a re-acquaintance with a message as challenging as it is comforting. Peter Gomes is an American Baptist minister, a professor of Christian morals, and minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University.

And welcome to the program.

REV. PETER GOMES, Author, "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus": Thank you.

RAY SUAREZ: Why "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus"? This is a person who`s held up as a moral yardstick. What`s so scandalous about that?

PETER GOMES: Well, I`m afraid my publicist thought that the word "scandal" would attract attention, which clearly it has. The scandal is the fact that we seem to pay so little attention to the content of Jesus` teaching and a great deal of attention to Jesus.

So I am proposing here that we might, in fact, look at what Jesus says, rather than who it is that says it, and that might be exciting, and we might find something, by our modern standards, which is rather scandalous.

RAY SUAREZ: In several passages in the book, you take what is in the gospels and compare it to the way we popularly talk about Jesus in the 21st century, and find this is a much more radical person, a much less comfortable person than we seem to remember today, all these years later.

PETER GOMES: Well, I think that`s true. I mean, if you look at Jesus in the New Testament, you will discover that he spends almost a disproportionate amount of time with the people who were on the fringes of his society.

And so, if he came back today, we might wonder, who are the people on the fringes of our society with whom he would be spending time? And my guess is he wouldn`t be spending time with most of us who are at church all of the time. I don`t think he`d be spending time with most of the theologians or the radio or TV evangelists.

I think he`d be spending time with those people whom we tend to marginalize. He`d still be spending time with the prostitutes. I think he`d be spending time with minorities of every kind -- racial and sexual and others -- and I think we might be surprised to discover that nothing on that point has changed, as far as Jesus is concerned.

RAY SUAREZ: So how would America be a different place, if this scandalous gospel was remembered, re-embraced, if we incorporated it into the way we run our country, which is often boasted this is a Christian nation?

PETER GOMES: Well, I think among the things we would find ourselves doing is, instead of demonizing people who are different, we would try to find out who they were, what we could learn from them, and what God`s plan for them and us is.

Demonization occurs at the basic level between religious communities, and between communities that are religious and communities that are not, and between people whom we push to the sides of our society. We tend to do that in terms of ideology and cultural differences.

But I would think that, if Jesus came today, the people he would be most interested in dealing with would be homosexuals, racial minorities, people who would be thought to be less than the most upright and righteous people in the contemporary community. If the New Testament is any model, that`s where he would hang out.

RAY SUAREZ: Why is that? Because Jesus in the parables, in many of the times where he`s quizzed by people in the gospel`s stories, he delivers what outwardly seems to be a fairly conventional model of morality: Take care of your responsibilities. Love your neighbor, a lot of words to live by that I think people of all faiths and no faith would find comforting.

PETER GOMES: Well, in theory that`s true. And the comfort level is very high because of that. But the issue becomes clear when Jesus defines or forces us to define to whom or among whom do we practice these words to live by?

Do we practice these things among people who are very much like ourselves, which tends to be what the church does? Or are we meant to practice them among everybody? And that means people who don`t vote as we do, or who don`t look as we do, or who don`t live where we do, who don`t share all of our values.

It`s Jesus who redefines who the "other" is. There is no other, as far as Jesus is concerned.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, that`s a theme you return to time and again in the book, that when people in the contemporary culture wars and political debates invoke God that this is a god, in your view, that`s almost too puny, bound up in the trivial concerns of day-to-day battles in contemporary life.

PETER GOMES: Well, someone once said to me they just didn`t see how God could be concerned with anybody other than Christian believers. And it seemed to that person a shock when I said, well, I just didn`t believe that God was just the god of the Christians.

What about all these other people? Are they sort of accidents of creation? Do they exist outside of the purview of God? Of course not.

God has an interest in everybody, if he`s created everybody, which I believe he did. He has an interest in the whole world for which he is responsible and which I have to be interested and for which I have to be responsible.

So it can`t be just my kind of person or just my neighborhood in which God has an interest.

When I said to somebody that Jesus wasn`t a Christian, well, they nearly blew a fuse. And I realized that, you know, they thought that Jesus was just a big version of whatever the most pleasant version of your own local religion is. And that`s not so.

RAY SUAREZ: You talk about preaching a sermon in which you mention some of these hard ideas about who Jesus, who God is and was in history. And you say, "Surprisingly enough, nobody walked out of church, but I did receive quite a few letters from people who were listening and didn`t like what they heard. This reaction suggested to me that I was doing my job."

Is that your job as a preacher?

PETER GOMES: My job is, to coin a phrase used in the 19th century and adopted much by my old friend, Bill Coffin, "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." So, in some sense, if the one thing the sermon does is wake you up so that you discover that you don`t agree, it`s done a good thing, in that respect.

But most people stop there. They say, "I don`t agree with that guy," and they click him off, and they`ll never turn to him again, instead of pressing the matter. Why don`t I agree? Where does this lead us? Opening rather than closing conversations.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, we`re in the weeks of the year where from every single pop cultural channel that familiar story will be retold, re-enacted, reheard. What should people be taking away from it now, the decree coming forth from Caesar Augustus and all of that?

PETER GOMES: Oh, everybody will hear all those familiar words over and over again. It will descend upon us a bit like white sound. I`m quite used to that.

No one seems to ask, OK, what are the consequences now of Jesus entering into our world and, in many ways, on our terms, being born of a woman, being born of a virgin, born in a stable, dealing with a world of unjust taxation, dealing with all of the other ideologies that are out there, what does that have to do with us?

Is there anything there that transcends into where we are now? Is it just a wonderful story locked in a couple thousand years ago?

RAY SUAREZ: And the answer, quickly?

PETER GOMES: The answer to me is that the whole point of that birth is to say that Jesus cares, God cares about this world, and is determined to help us do something about it.

RAY SUAREZ: "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus," Peter Gomes, good to talk to you.

PETER GOMES: Thank you.

GWEN IFILL: Tomorrow night, Ray gets a different view of how to read the Bible in modern times from Albert Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Seminary.

(BREAK)

GWEN IFILL: Again, the major developments of the day.

Christians the world over celebrated Christmas. Pope Benedict XVI appealed for an end to conflicts in Iraq, Darfur and elsewhere.

And two suicide bombings killed at least 34 Iraqis and wounded scores more.

We`ll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I`m Gwen Ifill. Merry Christmas, and good night.