The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

GWEN IFILL: Good evening. I'm Gwen Ifill. Jim Lehrer is on vacation. On the NewsHour tonight, our summary of the news. Reports from Iran on the deadly earthquake in Bam. A look at a very unusual school for inner-city teenagers. Tracking down the source of the latest Mad Cow Disease outbreak. A conversation with author John Updike about a collection of his early stories and a Richard Rodriguez essay about the photographs of Diane Arbus.

NEWS SUMMARY

GWEN IFILL: The death toll from Iran's devastating earthquake climbed past 25,000 today. Officials said it could reach 40,000. Friday's quake leveled much of the ancient city of Bam. Two aftershocks today crumbled some of its remaining walls. Rescuers did find a 12-year-old girl and a six-month-old baby alive today, but the chance of finding additional survivors is fading. We'll have more on all this in just a moment. The United States has ordered foreign airlines to post armed marshals on selected flights using American air space. The Homeland Security Department made the announcement today. It said the goal is to prevent another 9/11-style attack. Later, Secretary Tom Ridge said the U.S. is prepared to bar airlines from nations that don't cooperate.

TOM RIDGE: Ultimately the denial of access is the leverage that you have but I must say with the spirit of cooperation evidenced by our discussions with French and British officials and the like it's pretty clear that it is understood by our international aviation partners that the threat to passenger aircraft is an international challenge, and all of us must work as closely together as possible to share information and act upon it.

GWEN IFILL: The order on air marshals will apply only to certain flights, based on "specific information" about a possible threat. It takes effect immediately. Armed officers already fly on some domestic flights. U.S. troops killed three Iraqis today, who they said had possible links to al-Qaida. Two Americans were wounded in the fight in Mosul. The Iraqis allegedly belonged to Ansar al-Islam. The group is suspected of ties to Osama bin Laden's network. Also today, Thailand and Bulgaria said their troops would stay in Iraq. Five Bulgarian and two Thai soldiers were killed Saturday in Karbala. Insurgents staged coordinated attacks with car bombs, grenades, and mortars. Saddam Hussein has been telling U.S. interrogators about hidden money. Arabic newspapers in London reported that today. They quoted a member of Iraq's governing council. Iyad Allawi said Saddam admitted shipping stolen funds outside Iraq, and identified those who know where the money is. Allawi said the total could be $40 billion. Japan agreed today to forgive the "vast majority" of what it's owed by Iraq, nearly $8 billion. That's if other countries do the same. China said it would consider a similar move. The announcements came after U.S. Envoy James Baker met with leaders in Tokyo and Beijing. He's already won debt concessions from Russia, Germany, Italy, Britain, and France. The head of the United Nations nuclear agency reported today. Libya abandoned a nuclear weapons program in its early stages. Mohammed el-Baradei announced that finding in Tripoli. His team of experts inspected four sites over the weekend. El-Baradei said it was clear the Libyans had been years away from making a weapon. And he praised Libya's new attitude.

MOHAMED EL BARADEI: Libya has shown a good deal of cooperation, a good deal of transparency in the last couple of days. They have opened files and made people available to us for interviews. They have agreed, as you know, to conclude an additional protocol so that will go to our board of governors our member-states for approval in March. Libya will sign it shortly after.

GWEN IFILL: Earlier this month, Libyan Leader Moammar Gadhafi promised to abandon attempts to make weapons of mass destruction. Slobodan Milosevic has won a seat in the Serbian parliament, despite facing charges of war crimes. The former Yugoslav president topped a list of Socialist candidates in Sunday's elections. Milosevic is currently being tried before a United Nations Tribunal in the Netherlands. He's accused of atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. U.S. officials shed more light today on the first U.S. case of Mad Cow Disease. They said records confirm the lone infected animal was born in Canada, in April, 1997. That was just a few months before the two nations banned feed containing cattle brain and spinal cord tissue. Mad Cow Disease is transmitted mainly through consumption of that tissue. We'll have more on this later in the program. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 125 points to close at 10,450. And the NASDAQ rose 33 points to close at 2006. That's the first time since January, 2002, that the NASDAQ has closed above 2000. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to Iran's deadly earthquake; an inner-city school for success; a Mad Cow update; a book conversation with John Updike; and a Richard Rodriguez essay.

UPDATE - DEADLY TREMOR

GWEN IFILL: The Iran earthquake and its massive death toll: We begin with a report from the city of Bam. The correspondent is Neil Connery of Independent Television News.

NEIL CONNERY: It is a wasteland. House after house reduced to rubble, street after streetdemolished. This is the view from above which greeted us as we headed over Bam. We flew in on an Iranian army helicopter. The scale of the damage spread below us was difficult to comprehend. Destruction as far as the eye could see. The famous sit dell also bears the scars of the darkest chapter in Bam's history but it's the seminaries which speak of the unimaginable horror to befall this place. Each victim is given a minute's prayer. There's no time for any more when you're burying 20,000 people. This family came back later to pay their own respects. Eight members of one family killed by the earthquake, four of them children. As they mourn, the diggers carry on their work in the distance cutting fresh trenches for the dead. Outside the aid agencies the survivors wait for whatever they can get their hands on to help stay alive. Dr. Elha El Motin told me chaos and despair are spreading.

DOCTOR: Day by day the situation is worse, I think.

NEIL CONNERY: What hope can you give these people then? What can you do for these people at the gate?

DOCTOR: Nothing. Nothing.

NEIL CONNERY: Rescuers from around the world including this British team have been busy in Bam, but hope of finding any more survivors has effectively vanished. The British will start to head home tomorrow.

JAMES BROWN: The window of opportunity of finding people alive is now coming to a close. It's time for our professional team to go home and for new people to come in and start the relief efforts and try and save thousands of people from harsh environment they're trying to live in at the moment.

NEIL CONNERY: The clearing up has started to get underway, but the challenge faced will be immense. Very little has been left unscathed here by the earthquake.

This is what remains of part of the center of Bam. Whenever you go in this city, these are the scenes that will greet you. In an instant thousands of lives and homes have been ripped apart. All that is left is devastation. In the past 24 hours, there have been more aftershocks. Survivors now face a fourth night in freezing temperatures out on the streets. Bewildered and battered by a force of nature.

GWEN IFILL: Terence Smith takes the story from there.

TERENCE SMITH: Joining us by phone from Bam is Halvor Lauritzsen of the International Federation of the Red Cross Red Crescent. He's the team leader in Bam.

Mr. Lauritzsen, thank you very much for joining us. Can you tell me from your perspective on the ground here what the most urgent needs are right now in Bam?

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: First of all I will have to say that the search-and-rescue phase is slowly coming to an end here. The hope of finding people alive in the rubble is fading from hour to hour and even more from day to day but still it's a challenge to give all the families the most basic needs in terms of tents, foods, warmth clothes, clean water and the most medical services.

TERENCE SMITH: You say the hope of finding more survivors is fading fast. But somewhere were found today, were they not?

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: That's correct. It was found three people alive but at the same time it was found 1100 people dead. The nights are getting quite cold here. Three nights ago it was minus nine degrees here. It is quite clear that you cannot survive very long here without water and the fact that the cold out in the rubble.

TERENCE SMITH: Mr. Lauritzsen, is there a great effort now to bury the dead and is that in part because of concern about disease?

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: Absolutely. So far the authorities have buried 20,000 people. That's the official number of deaths now. But in addition families and private persons have buried about 5,000 so I believe that number is now 25,000.

TERENCE SMITH: Do you expect it to grow even further?

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: Well, not very much. I would guess it may reach 30,000, may reach 30,000.

TERENCE SMITH: Mr. Lauritzsen, I know that you have experience in other earthquake disasters of major proportions. How does this compare for someone such as yourself?

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: Well, this is somehow special because a 6.3 on the Richter Scale is not an extraordinary strong earthquake but it seems all the houses were constructed of mud brick with no steel. They are extremely fragile. You can see the total collapse of these houses. That's quite special for this part of the world.

TERENCE SMITH: Are you continuing to have aftershocks after the earthquake and do they pose a danger?

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: Absolutely. It's 85 percent of the buildings are completely destroyed. Those buildings still standing they have very dangerous cracks inside. You cannot go inside any building basically right now. There have been many aftershocks and the strongest we've had was 5.2 on the Richter Scale.

TERENCE SMITH: I know that there have been great numbers of relief workers coming into the Bam area. Have you been able to establish relatively good coordination among them and cooperation with the Iranian authorities?

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: Absolutely. We have very good cooperation with the Iranian authorities. And we are happy that they are now receiving this relief aid with open arms. Among each other with the U.N. and the Red Cross and Red Crescent, we also have good coordination. But there are many, many relief workers, many, many organizations and especially the small organizations may not have been properly included in this coordination. And they may have also been disappointed in their rescue work.

TERENCE SMITH: I have read that the leaders of Iran have pledged to rebuild Bam if it is possible to do so. From where you sit and what you see, is it possible?

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: I think it's possible, but that will take tremendous efforts and you have to start I mean literally on scratch with everything. But of course it's possible absolutely.

TERENCE SMITH: This construction you're talking about, the mud- brick buildings and houses, I take it that that was a major contributor to the extent of the damage?

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: Yes, absolutely. You are correct. And I hope that this construction policy will change from now on.

TERENCE SMITH: Is anything being done in that regard in other cities? Iran, after all, has had numerous earthquakes, three in the 1990s alone.

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: Yes there has been. I mean, there are restrictions now in many cities that you are not allowed to construct more than two stories and you have to have proper steel inside and you have to have the proper quality on the cement but as you know this is an old historical city so it was probably not imposed 2,000 years ago.

TERENCE SMITH: Halvor Lauritzsen, thank you so much for describing the situation to us.

HALVOR LAURITZSEN: Okay. You're welcome. Bye-bye.

FOCUS - SCHOOL FOR SUCCESS

GWEN IFILL: Now, an inner-city school dedicated to turning problem teenagers into academic successes. Ray Suarez reports.

RAY SUAREZ: This place wasn't built to be a school. It was an abandoned and sagging men's lodge, on a sagging block in a sagging neighborhood in the District of Columbia. This area, with too much crime and too little work, is now home to a public charter school named for the poet Maya Angelou, and 100 students are getting what might be their last shot at success in school. Alisha Woods is 17. Like many young women in her neighborhood, she's dropped in and dropped out of school since the eighth grade.

ALISHA WOODS: It was a decision I made that I would have to pay the consequences for.

SPOKESMAN: Why don't we pull them out, and let's get them ready.

RAY SUAREZ: Last year, Allandrew Shepparson attended a large public high school where he had failing grades, was late, or never even got there.

ALLANDREW SHEPPARDSON: If you're in a school where you have too much freedom and you don't want to learn, you don't have to. They're not going to force you to learn.

RAY SUAREZ: In Washington, D.C., Capital of the richest nation in the world, stories like Allandrew's and Alisha's are common. 35 percent of children live below the poverty line. 50 percent of teenagers quit school before earning a diploma. The death rate for teenagers by accident, homicide, or suicide is three times the national average. So how do you throw a lifeline to a kid you might otherwise lose to underemployment, drug abuse, and crime? In the mid-'90s, two Washington lawyers, James Foreman, Jr., and David Domenici, got involved in an after-school jobs program, a pizza parlor. Domenici was a corporate lawyer interested in education, Foreman a public defender who saw too many kids lost in the criminal justice system. The jobs program did good work, but both realized it couldn't do enough to address the problems of the mostly juvenile offenders they served.

JAMES FOREMAN, JR.: Given how far some of them were behind in school, and given how bad the schools that they were forced to go to were, and given how few supports they had, often, outside of school, they needed more than an after-school program. They needed the smallest classes, they needed the best teachers, they needed the best job training, and they were getting the worst of all of those things.

RAY SUAREZ: The pair didn't exactly start at square one. Domenici's father is U.S. Senator Pete Domenici, and foreman's father is the civil rights activist James Foreman. The duo got to work raising money for the transition from jobs program to school, a school designed to answer the needs of kids headed for trouble with a ten-hour day, and a school year 11 months long.

TEACHER: C plus s is the total number of...

RAY SUAREZ: This is, first and foremost, a school. The design is simple: Stress academics to quickly make up for lost time and lost progress. Many of the students at Maya Angelou arrive significantly behind grade in math and reading. Junior Damien Owens knows it's a big jump from the very basic math offered in his previous school.

DAMIEN OWENS: They make me look silly because I'm sitting here, still doing sixth- or seventh-grade work. In here, it's like math is dangerous.

STUDENT: If you learn how to do it, learn the formulas and stuff, it'll be kind of easy.

TEACHER: Push, push, push, push, push!

RAY SUAREZ: Next, hire good, committed teachers, ready to provide personalized attention in small classes. Ilham Askia teaches English.

ILHAM ASKIA: They've just been passed through the system, and when I say, "oh, why don't you come and meet with me" or "I'll come and sit with you during lunchtime, and we can go over this assignment," their first look is, like, shocked, like "is she serious?"

SPOKESPERSON: A lot of people don't love a lot about their life.

RAY SUAREZ: Kimberly Perry urges students to find their own voice in her poetry class, and that's a big deal forteens who feel ignored and voiceless.

JOE BLYTHER, Tenth Grade: I'm from where the sun don't shine and Dr. Seuss don't rhyme. Kids make mud pies just to pass time. I'm from where gunfights keep going and don't stop. If you get locked, you'll get more time than a Rolex watch. I'm from government cheese and Murray's chicken strips. I'm from dirty alleys infested with crack heads. I'm from dirty money stashed in my bunk bed. Where I'm from, you always have to think twice, but I'd just like to tell the people that this is my life.

VOICE: Go! ( Applause )

STUDENT: Words can't express that poem. It was good. He told it how it is.

RAY SUAREZ: And while you've got them in school for ten hours, make the most of it. The school keeps students out of danger by keeping them there, using the extra hours to teach skills and work habits, giving the students a chance to earn money by working in one of the school's two businesses: Untouchable Taste Catering serves private clients and feeds students and staff three meals a day; and the technology center tries to close the digital divide.

ALISHA WOODS: We have classes here for the community, teaching people how to do basic things on the computer.

RAY SUAREZ: Technology literacy is viewed as a basic necessity, and students are expected to save their work and submit their papers electronically. After their core courses and electives such as drama, photography, or fitness training, each day ends with a personal tutoring session.

STUDENT: Mostly... effort.

RAY SUAREZ: Natasha Hall is one of 300 volunteers who shows up one night a week, ten months a year, to work one-on-one with Damien.

NATASHA HALL, Tutor: These kids are used to people stepping in and out of their life for whatever reason. I think that if I can instill in these kids that someone cares about them, someone trusts them, and someone believes in them, then I'm helping society.

RAY SUAREZ: Like any teens, Maya Angelou students can complain about the long hours and constant attention.

STUDENT: They stay on you-- stay on you like white on rice.

RAY SUAREZ: But many also seem to be relieved to be here.

STUDENT: I'd probably be in trouble right now, locked up somewhere, or I could be, you know, dead somewhere.

DAVID DOMENICI, Co-Founder, Maya Angelou Public Charter School: It's a hard decision to be 16 and say, "I'm going to commit to being in school from 9:30 in the morning till 7:30 at night." That's not a real common... just a common idea for a lot of teenagers. It's particularly not a common idea for teenagers who maybe the year before went to school half the time, which is about the average for our students.

RAY SUAREZ: Last year, Drew Shepparson was one of those part-time students. His father, Paul Jones, says he's relieved Drew is away from the housing project where he lives with his mother and younger sister and brother.

PAUL JONES: He doesn't have any real tight structure in the home. We've got people knocking on the door, and, you know, it's like a 24-hour entertainment session at his place. So, you know, I'm sure he can't really rest, and with him being the only male there, I think he's trying to be very, very protective of his siblings.

RAY SUAREZ: The school's response is, over and over, to figure out what these kids need and provide it. Maya Angelou has created an intensive, mandatory mental health program and a residential program for kids who need a place to live. Dr. Quentin Graham leads the mental health counselors. On-site individual and group counseling is an important part of the program.

DR. QUENTIN GRAHAM: When we really come to understand students, we find that they're struggling with tremendous amounts of trauma in their life stories, that they are struggling with managing and really functioning in some ways as an independent adult would, but with limited amounts of resource, both emotional as well as material resource, to help them to, to help them to do those things.

RAY SUAREZ: Allandrew Shepparson, in his short time at Maya Angelou, is blossoming. His father still can't believe he made honorable mention on the dean's list.

PAUL JONES: Out of seven classes, he got seven "A"s. I never got seven "A"s in my life, I'm telling you!

RAY SUAREZ: After dropping in and dropping out, Alisha Woods has had a longer struggle, but this year she's on the dean's list and hopes to become a pediatrician. Turning these young lives around costs lots of money, three times as much as most districts spend per high school student. Each student costs $28,000 a year on average. 65 percent of that comes from Washington, D.C.'s public education funds, 10 percent from local and federal social service agencies, and the remaining 25 percent comes from extensive fund-raising.

DAVID DOMENICI: Our jobs, we believe, is to keep pushing institutionally against everybody on this notion that high school-age students who are behind academically aren't worth it. They are worth it, but it's expensive.

JAMES FOREMAN, JR.: We explain to people straight up that this is saving money. Your car is less likely to be busted into, and you're less likely to have to pay for prison, and you're less likely to have to have somebody who's on unemployment.

RAY SUAREZ: To raise the necessary funds, both Domenici and Foreman trade on their famous fathers' names - unapologetically.

DAVID DOMENICI: We have the opportunity to get resources to a place that they should be, and we have a unique opportunity to do that because of our backgrounds, because of our education, and because of our family names, and all the more reason why we should go do it.

TEACHER: I ask you, what does the phrase "probable cause" mean?

RAY SUAREZ: History teacher Tony Dugas is committed to this approach. He wants to move from the classroom to helping run more new schools like Maya Angelou.

TONY DUGAS: You won't save every kid, and that's hard to deal with. Even with an amazing place like the Maya Angelou with all of the support that we have-- the tutoring, the jobs, the counseling, just the small classes, everything-- that still isn't enough.

RAY SUAREZ: Still, almost everyone you see at Maya Angelou will get a high school diploma...

STUDENT: We're best friends.

RAY SUAREZ: ...And seven out of ten will head to a two-year or four-year college. Spurred ahead by the conviction that far more kids need this kind of school than can attend one, the partners will get another chance soon: They're opening another charter school in partnership with the D.C. public schools.

GWEN IFILL: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, a Mad Cow update; early Updike; and a Richard Rodriguez essay.

UPDATE - MAD COW

GWEN IFILL: Now, the latest on the Mad Cow scare. Today the Agriculture Department confirmed that meat from an infected cow slaughtered on Dec. 9 was distributed to stores in eight states and Guam. 80 percent of that meat was sold in the states of Oregon and Washington. But government officials also said the risk of eating tainted meat was "near zero," since the infected tissues of the cow had been removed prior to slaughter. They also said the cow appeared to have been born in Canada, andthat it was six and a half years old.

RON DE HAVEN, U.S. Department of Agriculture: The age of the animal is especially important in that it is a likely explanation as to how this animal would have become infected. She would have been born before feed bans were implemented in North America, as the feed bans in the U.S. And Canada both went into effect in August of 1997 and as I mentioned records would now indicate that this animal was born in April of 1997.

GWEN IFILL: Those feed bans prohibit the use of cattle remains in cattle feed. For more on the investigation and its impact, I'm joined by George Gray, the executive director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and Dennis Laycraft, the executive vice president of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association. Mr. Laycraft, how significant from your point of view was this outbreak?

DENNIS LAYCRAFT: Well, we've been living, of course, with an animal that was found on May 20. It's really created quite a disaster for our industry, more from the border closures and what most Canadians believe was sort of the unfair reaction of trading partners. Of course as we came into December here and the second animal was found in the U.S., of course, that started a broader range of trade closures that have limited access to the U.S. to a number of markets. Now, as we've gone through this, there's preliminary indications. They believe the animal may have come from Canada. That, of course, is important as we take a look at things like the age of the animal and potentially the source of feed that the animal received either in Canada or in the United States.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Laycraft, there was apparently some concern in Canada about that assertion that the United States made over the weekend. Do you have reason to believe or do you believe that the cow came from Canada?

DENNIS LAYCRAFT: Well, what we found in our investigation is it's really important to do all of the work to confirm the information and obviously DNA is very important. At the end of the day what we all want to do is be certain that we know where this animal was born, where it had moved to and, of course, the most item to determine if during its life it was exposed to infected feed.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Gray your specialty is risk analysis. How much of a risk really does this single cow that we know of so far, infected cow, pose?

GEORGE GRAY: Well, this is almost exactly the question the USDA came to us in 1998 with when they said what would happen if Mad Cow Disease got into the United States? Our analysis showed that even if dozens of Mad Cows got into the United States that the spread of the disease was quite minimal. There were a few more cases over the next 20 years or so and human exposure was pretty low so what this tells me finding one case is a reason for concern but it's certainly not any kind of reason for widespread alarm about animal health or public health.

GWEN IFILL: In your learned opinion watching the reactions of countries around the world closing their borders to U.S. beef, you think that's been an overreaction?

GEORGE GRAY: Well, in some ways this has been the pattern over time as more... each new country has found the disease, their response has always been shut off the borders first, ask questions later. In many ways we're simply seeing everyone doing the same thing to us that's been done to all of the others. I think that this is a situation where in time we'll work this out and find a way to trade and to make distinctions to countries like the United States and Canada that one or two or three or four cases and countries that have a thousand cases and countries like the U.K. where there were over 100,000 cases. It will take us a little time to work out how to work with this in the trade world.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Laycraft, when the single cow was found in Canada in May, what changed after that? What action was taken in the cattle industry and with the government?

DENNIS LAYCRAFT: Well, I think first of all we went in to what is described as the most thorough investigation that had ever been done in a matter of three weeks and with it there was also described by an international panel as a model to be emulated in terms of the very open nature of the investigation, and I think that's partially changed how the world will handle this. During that period of time our consumers really were informed about what was happening and they held their confidence. In fact during July and August we actually saw an increase in consumption as our consumers responded to help our industry and really felt our industry was being unfairly treated by the bans on trade. We also during July introduced a policy which confirmed what was normal in practice, and that was to remove the risk material or referred to as specified risk material where on the various ages of animals under 30 months you remove a portion of the small intestine and over 30 months of age where you start to get into a higher probability of risk with animals, you remove all the central nervous tissue from the animal, from the food supply as well as the small portion of the small intestine.

GWEN IFILL: Is there any way of knowing whether this latest case if it indeed can be traced definitively back to Canada is linked in any way to the earlier case last May?

DENNIS LAYCRAFT: Well, again that's what a good investigation probes into. We have considerable experience in a wide range of disease investigations that we've been very successful in this country over the past 25 years of eradicating diseases. I'm very confident in the skills of our Canadian food inspection agency to do a proper analysis of this and we'll... if there are answers to be found we'll find those answers.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Gray today the Agriculture Department said that it was near zero chance that humans, that Americans, anybody, could contract this disease from eating tainted meat. Is it possible at this stage to say something that definitive about the risk here?

GEORGE GRAY: Well, this is something that's actually been looked at with some nice scientific experiments. And the best that we know is that the parts of a cow that we usually use, the meat, the milk have been tested and tested and they're not able to transmit Mad Cow Disease. As far as we know the tissues to worry about are exactly the ones we've been discussing -- a bit of the small intestine but primarily it's the central nervous system tissue the brain and the spinal cord. And if those were taken out of the human food supply as USDA says they were, the risk to people is really quite small. Our analysis showed again that even if there were dozens of Mad Cows in the United States human exposure to those tissues is pretty small because of the way in which we eat brain and spinal cords aren't large food items in the United States and because we have a variety of directions and directives in place that keep those from contaminating other parts of the food supply.

GWEN IFILL: Why not just to put people's minds at ease impose more stringent testing as they have in places like Japan?

GEORGE GRAY: I think it's important to think about these things. Our analysis shows that the risk is very, very low. There are things that could be done to make a low risk even lower. And I really think that we'll be seeing a lot of those evaluated other the next couple of months. I think that will range from things that look at ways to identify animals that might have the disease and what I'm most interested in and I think is potentially the most important are things to stop the spread of the disease. In some ways what's most important from a public health perspective and an animal health perspective is preventing these disease from spreading. That means enforcing the feed ban that we have, making sure people are following the rules so even if the disease is around it can't be transmitted from one cow to another.

GWEN IFILL: The Agriculture Department says there is 99 percent compliance of this feed ban. If that's true, then what you're saying is already being done.

GEORGE GRAY: It's being done but one of the things we have to do is make sure that the people who are complying are the ones that really matter. One of the concerns is that by looking at rates of compliance you're looking at numbers of facilities not the amount of feed that they make. I think this is a wake-up call. I think this will get the industry; this will get the government to focus on making sure that that feed ban works properly. If it does we don't have Mad Cow spread. If there's not Mad Cows, there's not risk to humans.

GWEN IFILL: How about that, Mr. Laycraft, do you think that this is a wake-up call and further measures need to be taken on both sides of our borders?

DENNIS LAYCRAFT: Well, any time you're dealing with food safety constant vigilance is important. And as we discover any new developments in the science around this, it's important that we constantly refine our measures but I think it's also important to realize North America, particularly Canada and the United States have been implementing these measures really as they become understood. We started with measures in the late '80s, early '90s. We added the feed ban and were two of the first countries in the world to do that in '97. And as we've moved ahead, we've progressed with each scientific development. So we remain very confident about the safety of the product and of course it's just good business and it's just the right thing to do to constantly evaluate these measures.

GWEN IFILL: The premiere of Alberta said today he believes that this is such an integrated market between Canada and the United States that we should be treating this as a North American problem not as a problem from one country to another. What's your sense of that?

DENNIS LAYCRAFT: Well, clearly we've traded millions of head of cattle back and forth hundreds of thousands of tons of products and millions of tons of feed back and forth so it really is an integrated market. We work very closely with our U.S. counterparts and our regulatory departments work very closely together. When you take a look at the robust systems in North America I think they're very strong and they're multiple hurdle systems so that as you have, a, the measures to prevent the introduction and then you have measures to prevent the spread and then you go the next step and further remove the risk by removing the materials that might provide some risk. Working together makes absolute sense.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Gray, if that's the case for Canada and the United States, how about the United States and other countries, this idea of working together?

GEORGE GRAY: Well I think that's very important. I think that following up on science is a way we're going to do this. We had proposed at the end of October in fact to open the border to Canadian beef based on steps that they had taken and the scientific assessment of what the risks were. I think that that's the kind of thinking that we're going to have to see around the world as we deal with this disease and we try to make trade work while also still protecting the food supply and protecting human health.

GWEN IFILL: George Gray and Dennis Laycraft, thank you both very much.

DENNIS LAYCRAFT: You're very welcome.

FOCUS - THE EARLY STORIES

GWEN IFILL: Now, one of America's leading writers looks back on his early career. Arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports.

DICK GORDON: I'm Dick Gordon. This is "The Connection."

JEFFREY BROWN: These days, at age 71, John Updike is treated like a literary celebrity, with awards, media attention-- here at WBUR Radio in Boston-- and adoring fans.

DICK GORDON: Donald's joining us now from Amesbury, Massachusetts. Donald, thanks for calling.

CALLER: I wanted to thank Mr. Updike for the inspiration.

JEFFREY BROWN: All fitting an acknowledged master, author of more than 50 books-- novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and more. But in 1955 issue, when the New Yorker Magazine published his first story, "Ace in the Hole," Updike was just 23 and fame was far away. He'd grown up in small-town Pennsylvania, attended Harvard, and begun his career as a freelance writer in New York. Soon, though, he left for the suburbs of Boston, where, story by story and novel by novel, he built his reputation. A new collection of work from those first years, "The Early Stories, 1953 to 1975," has just been published. We met to talk about it at one of Updike's favorite places, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

JOHN UPDIKE: This is a nice museum. Sort of cozy... cozy antiques.

JEFFREY BROWN: John Updike, welcome.

JOHN UPDIKE: Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: What did you see when you went back to look at these early stories?

JOHN UPDIKE: Well, I saw... I saw a kind of vanished world, a world of relatively simple gadgets and simple innovations, technologically, a pre- electronic world in a way, and I also... I saw a writer who was quite new to the craft, but excited by it, and sort of experimental, and there's a freshness to some of these stories that surprised me. I hadn't read them again for many years -- a kind of nearly wet-paint feeling about them that I liked. There's a shine which I enjoyed, and occasionally I tried to polish them a little bit more, but basically they're... they're bright and hopeful attempts to bottle some small portion of the truth.

JEFFREY BROWN: Is it easy for you to put yourself back to that time and remember what it was like?

JOHN UPDIKE: Fairly easy, although, of course, there's a lot you forget. But, yes, I can see myself. First, I had a little room in the house, and the children kept rattling at the door, wanting to get in and see what daddy was doing, and then I rented an office which I filled with cigarette smoke, and then when I gave up cigarettes, I filled it with cigar smoke, and in that way the years went by.

JEFFREY BROWN: In the forward, when you're describing writing short stories, you write, "My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me, to give the mundane its beautiful due." What does that mean, to give the mundane its beautiful due?

JOHN UPDIKE: You know, I worked hard at that sentence 'cause I was trying, you know, having challenged myself to say, "what did I think I was doing?", I then had to find the phrases for it. But I'vealways had, I think, even before I began to publish, this notion that the ordinary middle-class life was enough to write about, that there was enough drama, interest, relevance, importance, poetry in it.

JEFFREY BROWN: You didn't need grand, epic...

JOHN UPDIKE: I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality. I also read a lot of mystery novels, and my few attempts to begin a mystery novel fell apart. So I was stuck from my own limits, really, with middle- class... middle-class life, or the mundane, let's call it, and so I was just trying to, story by story, encapsulate some aspect of life as I was experiencing it or observing it. This was a time when the American way of life was coming in for a lot of hard knocks, some of them deserved, but nevertheless I thought that somebody should be bearing witness to the kind of ordinary life that was going on. Under the revolution, under the talk of the revolution, people were living out their lives in families, by and large, growing up with their children, all that kind of thing.

JEFFREY BROWN: But how do you take the mundane, the small things, and make them into something that outsiders, we want to read about, to give them that kind of life?

JOHN UPDIKE: You try to make them entertaining, verbally entertaining for one thing. I try to write with some precision and surprisingness about details that your readers have presumably observed themselves. And with any short story you try to write first sentences that will in some way pique the readers' interest, and then a lot of middle, and then you try to write a last sentence that will in some way close the case, close the issue, resolve it all, and leave him or her with a satisfied feeling of having seen a complete picture.

JEFFREY BROWN: I like that-- a nice first sentence, a lot of middle, and a closer.

JOHN UPDIKE: Yeah.

JEFFREY BROWN: Sounds pretty simple.

JOHN UPDIKE: A lot of things sound easier than they are to do, but yes, and that's a fairly, maybe crass way to put it, but remember that I was a kind of crass young writer. I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession. So I was trying to make these curious artifacts for which there would be some market, not an enormous market, but the New Yorker was a significant market, and they paid well. They paid about top dollar for fiction, a modest amount. If I named it now, I think... I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, "hey, I'm a professional writer now."

JEFFREY BROWN: One of your most famous stories is called "A&P," and speaking of mundane moments, it takes place in an A&P, a grocery, supermarket.

JOHN UPDIKE: I remember the germination of the story, or I seem to, since it's my most... best-known story. I've talked about it more than, more than the others. I had seen several girls in bathing suits cruising the aisles, and it was sufficiently startling that it stuck in my mind because although girls in bathing suits at the beach were one thing, girls in bathing suits and bare feet-- bare feet on those well-trod tiles-- all that sort of made, seemed to make a germ of the story. And my story was simply that the girls were challenged by the manager, and the boy in the checkout slot, a 19-year-old called Sammy, witnesses this, he's offended when the manager chastises the girls for "not coming in here decent," so he says, "Iquit." The manager says, "Sammy, you don't want to do this to your mom and dad." And he says to us, "It's true I don't, but it seems to me that once you begin a gesture, it's fatal not to go through with it." So he folds up his apron and puts the bow tie down on the top of the apron, walks out the door, hoping to get some recognition for having been a knight errant. "I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel--" that's the manager-- "I could see Lengel in my place in the second slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he had just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me from here on in."

JEFFREY BROWN: "I felt how hard the world was going to be for me from here on in" -- a kind of zinger ending, in this case a young man looking at the rest of his life with new eyes.

JOHN UPDIKE: Right, and also you get a glimpse of the adult life that he has momentarily put at risk; that is, the Lengels of the world, face grimly going through the necessary task of manning the slot that he has abandoned, and then the vision of married life, of the young mother with her squalling, greedy, candy- crazed child out on the hot parking lot. So in a way he's saying hold off to all this, and he's in a kind of limbo. But he does feel, yes, that the world, the world does not forgive easily. It won't forgive a quitter. He has become a quitter, a quixotic quitter, you could say.

JEFFREY BROWN: These stories take you up to about your forties. Where are you now, to the extent that these stories reflect some of your early experience? What voice, what experience do you write with now?

JOHN UPDIKE: Well, I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word "wisdom" has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

JEFFREY BROWN: Are you a better writer now?

JOHN UPDIKE: No, I doubt it. I think I can do a few things that I couldn't do then, but I think maybe I could do a lot of things then that I can't do now.

JEFFREY BROWN: So not a better writer, but still writing.

JOHN UPDIKE: Still trying. It's become a habit, of course, and it's... there's a kind of a bliss to writing. I was aware of that just the other day. Often it feels like a job and "why am I doing this, and who cares anymore?" There are these shelves full of Updike. I'm embarrassed to look at my own works in toto. But nevertheless there is a kind of a spiritual health in trying to express, like I said, reality. When you feel you've captured it, if only in a phrase or the correct adjective, there's something very happy-making about it, and I'd hate to give up that kind of happiness.

JEFFREY BROWN: Okay. "The Early Stories of John Updike." Mr. Updike, thank you very much.

JOHN UPDIKE: Thank you very much.

ESSAY - NO BLINKING

GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight, essayist Richard Rodriguez considers the work of photographer Diane Arbus.

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Diane Arbus is as famous as any American photographer of the last 50 years and more notorious than most because she was an unblinking witness to the grotesque. She titled her photographs thus: "The Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents," "Mexican Dwarf in his Hotel Room," "Albino Sword Swallower," "Identical Twins." Revisiting the work of Diane Arbus in this major retrospective at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, I find something oddly dated, which is to say something less than shocking about many of the images assembled here. For example, at the time Arbus photographed them, transvestites were a part of some night town tenderloin demimonde. They are not shocking today. In the 1960s, when most of these photographs were taken, Diane Arbus was drawn to subjects at the farthest edges of society, subjects who were exemplars of what she admitted was her private obsession with eccentricity, forms of loneliness, forms of ostracism and hurt and bravery. Arbus shares with Flannery O'Connor, the southern Catholic writer of her same generation, an attraction to acne-ravaged teenagers, tattooed men, religious crackpots, and circus performers. Flannery O'Connor's fictions were as resolutely unconventional, as unpleasant as any Arbus print. Her grotesques were nevertheless channels of mystery and grace and prophecy. In her forthright connoisseurship of humanity, for example, in her outlandish "Women of Fifth Avenue," Arbus's take reminds me of another delighted, forgiving eye, that of Frederico Fellini. We tend to think of the 1960s as a time of political rebellion, but artists of that era like Diane Arbus and Flannery O'Connor and Frederico Fellini Tennessee Williams proposed an aesthetic to connect us with humanity's bizarre variety. As a character in Tennessee Williams' "Night of the Iguana" says, "nothing human is abhorrent to me." Because we have so thoroughly assimilated that anthem, that aesthetic, these images are less shocking to us today than when they were taken. We tolerate on our streets and everywhere around us people of every sexual persuasion, every physical and psychological and religious and emotional eccentricity. What distinguishes Diane Arbus's sensibility from our own was the intensity of her empathy for the people she saw. I am undecided whether the saints of the world seek out troubled lives or simply do not turn from their gaze. Arbus was drawn to the loneliness of a life especially evident in company, the loneliness of that couple on the park bench, the singularity of each of these triplets, the bride's terror. Notice how powerfully her subjects gaze, with an intensity that mocks our mere curiosity. I'm undecided whether Arbus sought this unblinking eye or whether she was adept at drawing its attention. Despite the clinical uses of the photographer's camera-- and Arbus's camera is as clinical as a physician's eye or a pornographer's-- these are nevertheless showings, revelations as tawdry as sideshow tableaux, and as solemn and as clarifying as mystical visions. More than once I had a religious sense of pathos as much as awe looking at these photographs. Might this be the way God sees us? After a day spent photographing a forlorn beauty pageant, Arbus wrote in her journal, "Our only hope for Judgment Day is that God judges us for personality in an evening gown even while we are in a bathing suit." Diane Arbus was attracted to the naked, to nudist camps, whores, strippers, transvestites, body builders. Nakedness is ultimate vulnerability. I cannot show you any of her many images of nakedness, for despite the daily offenses of television against the modesty of our human souls, there is something inappropriate about photographs of the naked on the evening news. No matter. I will show you a face to represent nudity. I'm Richard Rodriguez.

RECAP

GWEN IFILL: Again, the major developments of the day: The death toll from Iran's devastating earthquake climbed past 25,000. The U.S. ordered foreign airlines to post armed marshals on selected flights in American air space. And U.S. troops killed three Iraqis said to have possible links to al-Qaida. Two Americans were wounded in the fight in Mosul.

GWEN IFILL: And again, to our honor roll of American service personnel killed in Iraq. We add them as their deaths are made official and photographs become available. Here, in silence, are six more.

GWEN IFILL: We'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Gwen Ifill. Thank you, and good night.