PBS NewsHour; June 3, 2010 7:00pm-8:00pm EDT

Good evening, I'm Jim Lehrer. B.P. used giant shears to slice a broken pipe on its damaged oil well. And I'm Judy Woodruff. On the NewsHour tonight, officials said they would know within 24 hours if the latest efforts succeeds in capping the leak. We explain what they did today and what's next. And Jeffrey Brown has an end of the school year education update on budget cuts, layoffs and a new teachers contract in Washington, D.C. Betty Ann Bowser looks at the health implications of a shortage of fresh foods in the rural south. The Mississippi Delta has some of the richest farmland in the country, but a lot of what's grown here doesn't get eaten here. Ray Suarez wraps up his recent reporting trip to China. Spencer Michaels reports on the campaign against hepatitis B, a deadly disease afflicting millions of Asians worldwide. One in twenty people in the world are chronically infected.

One in twenty, ten times more than people in the world infected with HIV. And we close with Paul McCartney singing for the president and the first lady at the White House. That's all ahead on tonight's NewsHour. Major funding for the PBS NewsHour has been provided by... Will your savings be enough to fund your retirement? What will happen if your spouse outlives you by many years? What will happen if you outlive your savings? Pacific Life knows that tomorrow's questions require planning today. With financial solutions and strength, Pacific Life can help you and your financial professional develop a plan. Pacific Life, the power to help you succeed. Chevron, this is the power of human energy. Intel, sponsors of tomorrow. BNSF Railway.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, working to solve social and environmental problems at home and around the world. And with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. And... This program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. After six weeks, there were finally some signs of success today in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. BP's operation to cap and control the oil flow from a damaged well cleared a key hurdle. The first critical maneuver was accomplished early today.

The main pipe at the well head was severed by robotic arms, wielding heavy industrial shears. That followed halting efforts to cut the pipe with a diamond-ed circular blade. With the shearing done, the oil flow increased sharply, as predicted, in a black surge from the now straight pipe end. Video feeds then showed a containment apparatus ready to be lowered into place, a mile deep. In Houston, Texas at BP's Command Center, chief executive officer Tony Hayward called it an important milestone. The next 12 to 24 hours will give us an indication of how successful this attempt will be. But the shearing was not as clean a cut as the saw would have made. That means the cap may not fit tightly, allowing more oil to escape. Still, Hayward said BP plans to have a fully sealed containment system in place by the end of June.

All in all, it is the latest step in a six-week struggle to control the oil, if not plug the well. Initially, BP tried unsuccessfully to repair the blowout preventer on the seafloor. The huge device designed to cut off the oil flow. Its failure led to the initial explosion on April 20 aboard the deep water horizon rig. In early May, a huge dome was lowered to divert oil to the surface, but its inner workings froze in the deep cold water. After that, a hose was inserted into the leaking pipe to siphon oil. It sucked up some of the oil, but not nearly all of it. Then came top kill and junk shot. The efforts to clog the cripple blowout preventer and plug the well. For three days, they were deemed a failure this past weekend. In today's Financial Times, BP's Hayward conceded, it was an entirely fair criticism to say the oil giant had been unprepared for this disaster.

Quote, what is undoubtedly true, he said, is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool kit. Through it all, oil has continued to gush over 40 million gallons to date by some estimates, and the oil mass is moving east and could reach the tourism dependent beaches of the Florida panhandle within hours. This will probably be the last time for a very long time that I actually get to see and enjoy the beach. And a new worst case scenario from the National Center for Atmospheric Research showed where the oil could travel eventually by the four month mark after the spill began. Back in Louisiana, Coast Guard liaison Pat Hanley is helping supervise BP's cleaning of a beach at Port Fourchon. He spoke with the NewsHour's Spencer Michaels. What's the report card? Well, I don't think I can give a report card per se. I think this is a dynamic situation. But certainly, if we see that anything is not occurring, we feel we need more resources.

As a Coast Guard, we feel we need to bring things to bear that aren't here. We are going to push back on that issue, we're going to identify those things, we're going to bring them to BP and say these are the things we must have to do this job right. The BP boss, Tony Hayward, insisted today, his company will stay on the job. BP will be here for a very long time. We recognize that this is just the beginning. But some local officials have already lost faith. John Young is the council chairman of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, which stretches south from New Orleans. I mean, initially, I advocated that BP should have been concentrating on stopping the flow of oil. And after a week, the federal government should have come in and taken control of protecting the shores, the coast, and the wetlands. Now I think the federal government ought to come in and take control of the entire operation because BP has shown it's not up to the task. As the crisis continues, President Obama will be back in Louisiana tomorrow. His third trip there since the spill began.

Now a closer look at efforts to cap the well. And at that computer model, we just saw showing how far the oil may flow. Donald Van Nieuwenhuise is professor of petroleum geoscience at the University of Houston. He spent 20 years in the oil business. And we hope to be joined by Nancy Kinner. She's an environmental engineer and co-director of the Coastal Response Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. First of all, Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, first of all, tell us how difficult is this latest cut and cap effort? Well, the overall effort, of course, the cutting part of this effort, they had some difficulty and thank goodness they were able to shear off and slightly plane down part of the rough cut so that they can get a good seal. But this particular effort should work much better than the containment effort did because they're going to be able to actually get a slight seal onto the lower marine riser package.

And in the past, they just had a containment dome that was open up to the sea. And in this case, they will actually have at least a bit of a seal to try to keep most of the water out and the biggest issue that they have to worry about right now are the ice crystals that could clog up the pipe. So what determines whether this works or not? What's the key here? The key will be if they're able to successfully position it over top the blowout. As you might imagine, there's a significant amount of pressure and flow coming out of that wellhead and they'll need to position this capping device on top of that lower marine riser package and they'll need to stabilize it and clamp it down onto it. And I think it's an advantage that they can clamp onto this lower marine riser package because it'll help hold the, if you will, it's kind of like an upside down teacup. It'll help hold that teacup upside down and in place so that it can capture most of the oil.

So at this point, Professor, how confident are you that this looks like it's going to work? Well, they did have a bit of luck by being able to cut the pipe and I'm hopeful that they'll be able to do it. This has never been done at this step before. So every step is another experiment, essentially. And I think it's important to realize that they're trying to do everything that they can do and that this particular effort because they'll be able to handle some of the issues that cause the ice to form in this particular instance, that they're going to have a lot better shot at it. And once they get the flow rising through the production pipe, they should be able to produce somewhere between 70 and 80 percent initially and my gut feeling is that they ought to be able to engineer it to more like 95 percent of the flow. So Don Van Nieuwenhuise, you're saying maybe as much as 95 percent? That wouldn't be the initial and that would be my top-end guess on it. Actually they're going to have some flow coming out of the cap and the reason that's actually

a good thing is that if, for example, they were producing 105 percent of the oil, they would also be drawing water into the system which could then cause the risk of having ice formation from the gas clathrates that they call them. If this works, can this hold for the two months or however long it takes until the relief wells are finished? I think there's a good chance that it will and one of the problems they could have is because the pressure is extremely great down at the reservoir and I know they've been producing some sand. You could have sand that could actually abrade the pipe itself but based on what we've seen so far, it did not abrade the liner or the, excuse me, the riser, where that was crimped and consequently I don't think they're producing that much sand so this should hold out for the two months that they need. All right, I want to turn now to Nancy Kinner at the University of New Hampshire. I want to ask you, Professor Kinner, about this new model we showed a few minutes ago

from the Center for Atmospheric, National Center for Atmospheric Research essentially showing how a liquid in the Gulf of Mexico with these currents could reach, go around Florida and reach the Atlantic Ocean by the summer. How realistic is that scenario? Well, I think you have to look at the model itself and understand a couple of caveats, a couple of things about it. One thing as you pointed out, this is just a model looking at if we put a dye, something that actually just moves with the water and doesn't degrade at all where it would go over time and that's not really how the oil will behave. So what this model does is it looks at the oil in the top about 60 feet or so of the water column and it basically looks at a set of scenarios about where that water might move. Now over those kinds of time periods, many, many days, the oil actually, what we call

weathers, which means that the oil changes in character, so some of it evaporates, some of it actually breaks down in the light, some of it actually biodegrades, bacteria over the longer term like that over many days to weeks actually start breaking the oil down. And what happens is that's very different from what was modeled is that the oil actually becomes stickier and starts to form what we call tarballs. And you've seen some of those in the pictures of the Gulf. There are anywhere from very, very tiny small balls that you could barely see up to about the size of your thumbnail. And so they will travel very differently as you can imagine than would just the water itself. So that's one thing that we have to keep in mind. And the second thing is that when you looked at the visual of the model, remember that

the color tells you something about the dilution of what's happening. And so this model is basically when you see those yellowish hues or colors, those are fairly low concentrations of the oil. So those are two very important things to keep in mind. And I just want to say, for one, just to look at that picture, it could be fairly alarming. And we should say that the people who put this out at the National Center for Atmospheric Research were careful of themselves to say that this is just a scenario, that they're not saying necessarily that this is what would happen to the oil. But based on what you said, could the oil end up doing anything like what you see in that form or that scenario they put together? Well I think that one has to understand that there's a lot of oil coming out of the well

and that it is quite likely that some small amount of that oil will get out into the Atlantic Ocean. I mean I think most scientists think that that is going to happen. However, it probably isn't going to be large quantities of oil. And it certainly isn't going to be large slicks of oil. In fact, the oil, as it keeps moving, which is in the surface water, that oil starts to as I mentioned, kind of break up and become what we call streamers and then ultimately these tarballs. So I think it is quite likely that some small percentage of the oil will get out into the Atlantic. If the oil flow stops, can be stopped down, then I think it will be less and less oil going out there. Well, we will have many more days to think about that, but it's helpful to take a look at it right now.

Nancy Kinner, we thank you and Don Van Nieuwenhuise. We thank you both for talking with us. Thanks very much. Thank you. So to come on the NewsHour tonight, an education update, the shortage of healthy foods in Mississippi, a China debrief from Ray Suarez, a campaign against hepatitis B and Paul McCartney at the White House. But first, the other news of the day, here's Kwame Holman in our newsroom. There were services in Turkey today for those killed in that Israeli sea raid off Gaza on Monday. And the Israelis were said to be considering changes in their blockade of Gaza. Thousands of people flooded the streets of Istanbul, Turkey today, to mourn eight Turkish activists, including one who had U.S. citizenship. A ninth victim had a separate service. They were killed Monday when Israeli commando's raided six ships trying to break a blockade and ferry aid to Gaza. The Israeli military says its video proves people on one of the ships attacked the soldiers, the head of the Islamic charity that organized the flotilla and assisted today.

The activists actually were fighting back after the Israelis opened fire. The raid sparked calls in Turkey to re-evaluate its formerly close ties to Israel. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke today. Israeli government has to reconsider its attitude. They have to ask themselves what they are doing. Up until now, we have been trying to preserve this friendship. But unfortunately, the Israeli government has not recognized our effort. Israel has made an historic mistake. 100 people were detained in the Israeli raid, including some 450 Turks. They returned to Ankara yesterday and were greeted with cheers. Meanwhile, the Israeli government rejected a UN call for an international investigation, but promised to do its own. It is our standard practice that after all military operations and especially operations where there have been fatalities, that we conduct a thorough, professional, independent

investigation. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also addressed the issue after meeting with the Indian foreign minister in Washington. We are open to different ways of assuring that it is a credible investigation, including urging appropriate international participation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Cabinet ministers today on ways to enforce an arms embargo on Gaza while allowing in civilian goods. In Afghanistan, delegates at a conference in Kabul, the Peace Jirga, moved toward endorsing a plan to reach out to the Taliban, but it was unclear which leaders the government could work with. Meanwhile, eight Afghan civilians died in violence in the south, and U.S. officials announced an American soldier was killed on Tuesday. Jury selection began today in the federal corruption trial of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. He allegedly tried to profit from his power to fill President Obama's former Senate seat. Blagojevich arrived this morning at the Chicago courthouse with his wife Patty.

They stopped briefly before a [inaudible] of cameras. Defense attorney Sheldon Sorosky said he will call White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, among others, as witnesses. I don't know if they're all going to testify. I don't know who the government is going to call. They certainly haven't told us yet, but they would all acknowledge the governor didn't do anything wrong. Blagojevich faces 24 counts, including racketeering and bribery. Jury selection is expected to take up to four days. Maytag is recalling more than a million and a half dishwashers because of a fire hazard. The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced the recall today. It said there have been 12 reports of fires caused by electrical failures in the dishwasher heating elements. The recall includes dishwashers with the Maytag, [inaudible], Admiral, Magic Chef, Performa, and Crossly nametags. Wall Street had a relatively quiet day, a day ahead of the latest report on unemployed employment. The Dow Jones industrial average gained more than five points. To close at 10,255, the Nasdaq rose nearly 22 points.

To close at 2303. The Commissioner of Major League Baseball will not reverse a call that cost Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game. The announcement came today. Galarraga hadn't allowed a man to reach base last night until two outs in the ninth inning. That's when umpire Jim Joyce ruled Cleveland Indian Jason Donald was safe at first. He later admitted the call was wrong and he apologized to Galarraga. Today the pitcher accepted the apology and said he's moving on. Nobody's perfect. Nobody's perfect. Everybody stay. And I'm sure he don't want to make a call that safe. I'm sure. You see that guy last night, he feels really bad. Tigers manager Jim Leland argued the call at the time, but later he had only praise for umpire Joyce. This is one of the best umpires in the game without question, one of the great guys. Yeah, I think how Jim Joyce handled it was also a big key. I think if he would have been defiant, say no, I didn't miss it and been arrogant about

it. The guy was in shambles. I mean tears, you know, I just, my heart aches for the guy. The Tigers played the Indians again today and Joyce shook hands with Galarraga before the game began. Those are some of the day's major stories. Now back to Jim. Last night, tough times ahead for teachers and school districts. Jeffrey Brown has our story. As the school year comes to an end across the country and with state budgets facing tens of billions of dollars in shortfalls, cuts in the classroom are looming. Education Secretary Arnie Duncan has said 100 to 300,000 public school employees are at risk of losing their jobs. Americans put the number of potential teacher layoffs at 160,000 with the biggest cuts projected to common states like New York, up to 16,000 and California, as many as 36,000. A year ago, states were confronted with the possibility of making similar cuts, but federal stimulus funds helped avoid them.

This year, no apparent relief is in sight. The threat of layoffs comes as school systems from coast to coast seek to implement major education reforms, including the often contentious issue of how to weigh teacher experience against teacher performance. That includes Washington, D.C., a reform effort we've been chronicling for the past few years, where just yesterday the teacher's union ratified a new contract. It gives school superintendent Michelle Reed greater authority to remove educators deemed ineffective. The agreement also sets a new standard for teacher pay, one based on classroom results instead of seniority. It also allows principals to use performance, rather than longevity, as a key determinant when reducing staff. But D.C. teachers will also see a 21 percent increase in base pay over five years, at a time when other districts are freezing salaries to avoid layoffs. And we fill in the picture more now with Jennifer Cohen, an education policy analyst

at the New America Foundation. And Jay Matthews, education columnist for the Washington Post, welcome to both of you. Thank you. Jay Matthews, how big a potential impact are schools facing right now? There's a great deal of disagreement about this. My view is it has almost no impact on the kind of reform issues we're talking about. That most school districts will either free salaries or race class sizes, and that historically doesn't have much effect on student achievement. Before we get to the reform effort, just in the classroom and in terms of the numbers, the numbers are pretty big. You'll have one, two, maybe three more kids in a class. Data we've got shows that that kind of change in class size has no effect on achievement, no real effect on what goes on in the classroom. It's a fairly trivial effect. What do you see? There are of course a varying estimates as to the impact on the number of teachers that are likely to lose their job in this year. Some people are saying 100,000 across the country. There was another study that came out with 300,000 across the country, which does seem overwhelming

to be honest, but it does seem that there are some alternatives to just firing teachers that a lot of districts have yet to really consider. But before you get to the alternatives, though, I want to hit a little bit what the actual impact is. I mean, where do you see the impact that we do see? Are they in particular states, are they in particular types of school districts? Sure. Generally, unfortunately, teacher layoffs do tend to affect lower income schools a little more. A lot of that has to do with the fact that low income schools tend to have more inexperienced teachers. And as you've discussed here on this program before, there's something called blast-hired, first-fired. So the least experienced teachers are the teachers who most recently started working at that school or in that school district are going to lose their jobs first because of teacher seniority laws or contracts, I should say. And because those inexperienced teachers tend to work in low income schools because they don't have the seniority to work in the more desirable, generally, higher income schools,

those are the schools that are hurt first. And so across the country, if a lot of these teacher layoffs do end up happening, we're going to see that happening in the lower income schools across the board more so than in the higher income schools. Does that sound right to you in terms of the schools that are most impacted? Absolutely. The wealthier the area, the less affect. In some cases, parents don't have enough money to pay the teacher if they don't want to lose Miss Jones who's been the favorite art teacher for 30 years. Well, and that leads me to another question, because a lot of people wonder this, when budget cuts come? Is it programs hit first? Is it like after school programs, you just mentioned, the art teacher, the arts music, is it sports, or is it personnel, or both? Some sports will be trimmed, you know, if you have a club team in golf, you might take that off. Often they will cut after school and particularly summer school. Summer school is being cut in a lot of places, and that's a real problem, particularly in inner-city schools, where we know that that summer learning loss is a huge factor in student achievements.

So that's a real blow if they do that. But most of the time, I think the smartest districts just raise class size slightly, and that doesn't appear to affect achievement very much. In a place like California, which we mentioned as particularly bad, is it more than just raising a few kids, the class size a bit, or what are they looking at? That seems to vary by districts to a certain extent. They are talking about class sizes, which is actually complicated in California because they have a categorical budget piece that goes particularly for keeping class sizes small in kindergarten through third grade, and then also in freshman English classes in high school. So theoretically, if those districts choose to raise their class sizes for those particular grades, they could be losing some of that categorical funding, which they may be unwilling to do because of the additional funding loss that will mean for them. And in those places, they're going to be looking at more service cuts, like Jay was talking about, teacher layoffs as well. So it really depends on the grade levels, sort of how much leeway they have. And then also, as we were talking before about inexperienced teachers usually get fired first,

those are also the least expensive teachers because teachers are traditionally paid based on their years of experience and on their scene and on their, whether or not they have master's degrees. And so that means that if you have an inexperienced teacher that's making $40,000 and a very experienced teacher that's making $80,000, you'll have to fire two inexperienced teachers to make up for the salary for that one very experienced teacher. So we're going to see places where if they have lots of experienced teachers, they're going to actually have to fire more teachers to make up for that budget deficit. Now Jay, this question of experience versus proficiency plays to the Washington DC story. I wonder if we've covered a lot as we said on this program. The contract yesterday, how significant is it? Where are we in this story? It's extraordinary. Part of it is unprecedented. The idea of paying teachers $30,000, $40,000 more up to $140,000 a year if they agree to be judged by their effectiveness in the classroom, including test scores, just hasn't happened

anywhere else in the country. The other part of it, which puts having emphasis in the future on away from seniority and toward classroom effectiveness in terms of who gets fired when you have a downturn or change in programs, that's happening in some other cities. But what's really politically interesting is that this was an agreement that was signed by Randy Weingarten, who's the head of the American Federation of Teachers. She also supported a change in the law in Colorado at the same time that unions didn't like. She's actually taken her union in a very different direction from the larger teachers union, the NEA, which is mostly suburban teachers. Her union is mostly urban teachers. I think she's going in that direction because she's got a lot of very young teachers who are very gong-ho about reform, who've seen urban schools work, and they know that unions get in the way of some of the things they want to do, and she's sensitive to that. And so there are two teachers unions now becoming very different in terms of their policy toward reform. So what we see in Washington does have some emanations or implications for other localities and states?

Absolutely. As well as big constituencies like the unions. Absolutely. And there are things that seem to be more popular as well in urban areas, as Jay was saying. Denver Public Schools is another great example where they have a pay for performance or a merit pay system as well. So as we see urban areas sort of move in this direction, it'll be interesting to see if some of the suburban areas follow suit. And beyond that, even the rural areas, because that's also where we see students with great learning deficits who really need some extra support. And just briefly Jay, because the Washington is able to do this pay teachers more, but at a time we start the conversation by talking about belt tightening, which is what most places are facing. So that they've been able to change the way they handle money, they've cut back severely on office personnel, because they have a superintendent, a chancellor who has almost absolute power and doesn't answer to school board, only answers to the mayor. So she's been very, had a lot of leeway to do things. And also she's gotten a lot of money for this amazing increase in salaries for people who want to go totally toward classroom effectiveness from foundations who are willing to

bankroll this. It's unusual. Jay Matthews and Jennifer Cohen, thanks very much. Thank you. You're welcome, Jay. Now the connections between obesity and geography, health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser reports on the prevalence of so-called food deserts in the south. It's the second of her two-part report on America's obesity epidemic. The Health Unit is a partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The small towns of the Mississippi Delta have a tempo of life all their own. The landscape is dotted with rural enclaves like Lambert, here in the northwest part of the state, population 1700. It's the kind of place where everybody knows each other. Like Sunday morning, the good book rules supreme.

So people here have no trouble getting their souls nourished. The problem is getting nourishment for their bodies. Lambert is what's known as a food desert, because finding a place that sells good fresh food is like looking for a needle in a haystack. If you live in Lambert and you need groceries, your only option is this convenience store. On the day we were here, there were no fresh fruits or vegetables, a few cold cuts, and the prices were high. The Department of Agriculture says 23.5 million Americans, including six and a half million children, live in low-income areas more than a mile from a supermarket. Lifelong resident Jennifer Hoskins says it's not easy to find healthy food for her family. It's really hard, because when I was coming up, we had greens and gardens and all... now and do you have to buy produce.

So it's really hard for the kids, I mean, and the majority of them, they eat like pieces, and that's obesity. Like so many Delta towns, Lambert was once the heart of a thriving farming community in Quitman County. Most of its residents are African-American and descendants of sharecroppers. As farm workers were replaced by machines, many found work in nearby textile mills. But over the past decade, those jobs have also dried up. Today, nearly half the town lives below the federal poverty line. First, it was growing up a girl here in the town, everything we even had, dry goods store, we had a grocery store, we had a pharmacy, we had our little doctor's office. But now there's nothing here. Except in a few cases, the food that's grown here is rarely eaten here. That's because the rich farmland is used to grow commodity crops that are shipped out. The closest grocery store is over three miles away, and even their produce is pricey, and locals say, often, the pickings are slim.

We were permitted inside with our cameras. It's more than a 20-mile drive to get to a store with better and less expensive selections. And in this part of Mississippi, there is no public transportation, no taxis. In American food deserts, gas stations, convenience stores, and fast food restaurants are the only places to buy something to eat. And when money is tight, the dollar menu at the local fast food joint is tempting. At the only McDonald's in Quitman County, the salad menu isn't served. So it's burgers, McNuggets, and the like. The variety of foods that are available are poor quality nutrients. Dr. Al Rouser is the District Health Officer for 18 counties in Northwest Mississippi. He's been working as a public health official in the Delta for 40 years. I had a malnutrition problem when I arrived.

I have a malnutrition problem now. Back then, it was the absence of food or the unavailability of food that was the problem. And now I've got this abundance of food. The problem now, Rouser says, is that the food people eat is loaded with calories and fat and they're leading more sedentary lives. Medical studies show that people who live in these food deserts have higher rates of obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes than those in areas served by mainstream grocers. We can't tell people to buy fresh food if there's no place to buy it, right? First Lady Michelle Obama has zeroed in on food deserts as part of her signature campaign to end childhood obesity. And the Obama administration pledged $400 million to help underserved areas. Last month, she visited the state's capital, Jackson. If you've seen it, you know how hard it is.

So we got to make it easier. We got to eliminate food deserts and make sure that there are more grocery stores and farmers markets and communities. But it's not all bleak. A group of local growers and community organizers is trying to expand farmers markets in the Delta and get their produce into local school cafeterias. Farmer Cornelius Tool is part of an effort to help students grow their own vegetables. We just got to teach our kids about health eating and teaching where food come from and teaching what they need to know about it. And at the New Mountain Zion Baptist Church in Lambert, Pastor Michael Jossel and his wife Evelyn do their part. We don't just grow vegetables for ourselves because our children are grown basically. We grow enough vegetables to feed the entire congregation, especially the elderly. We have a healthier congregation initiative. We partner with other congregations in the community where we are growing a community garden. That's on a larger scale.

I'm not going to change it overnight, but I think if we are consistent and we do it collectively and collaboratively, then I think we can make a difference. While locals pray government incentives will encourage mainstream grocers to come to their communities, they know the solutions to changing the food landscape of the Delta won't come easy and won't come from Washington alone. Obesity, of course, is not just an American problem. China, the world's rising superpower, is dealing with the rise of weight as well. Ray Suarez reported on it this week from China for our global health unit. Ray, did you come away with an impression of the state of the population's health in China? Well, I'm not a doctor and I don't even play one on TV, but you can see that people are better fed than they were at an earlier time in Chinese history. It was common to see adults who were of larger stature than their own parents, who they accompanied on the street, and had children who looked like they were on their way to be being larger

than they are. China gets a better-than-average diet, better than the one set by the UN as the base point for being properly nourished. So you're watching a country that's getting richer and has the chance of getting healthier at the same time. You did. One of your pieces, of course, was about smoking. What about, has there been any connection between the rise in smoking or the prevalence of smoking and cancer? Well, yeah. Chinese smoke more than they did 20 and 30 years ago. They have more money to smoke, and smoking products are more available. About a million people die of smoking-related disease in China now, and public health officials are looking for that doubling and tripling in the decades to come, and they're pretty worried about it. How about heart disease? Heart disease. The diseases of affluent, more affluent, and industrialized societies. So in urban China, you're seeing more lung circulatory system and heart disease because

there are very heavily polluted environments in those places, and you're starting to see more urban, more affluent, more automobile-dependent China, you're going to see a growth in those diseases. But you reported, or you made a comment in one of your stories, that the healthcare system is not growing with the need as other things are. Well, this reporting trip came as China is in the midst of a massive transformation from a basically government-provided system with tremendous gaps in availability of care between urban and rural, and something that looks more like a privatized system. However, those gaps between urban and rural are still there. Terrible, terrible access to care as China sets up a new rural healthcare system, but the demand so heavily outstrips the supply in the urban areas that people line up for hours before hospitals even open.

There are no clinics, there are no private doctors, there are enough doctors in China. So when those places open in the morning, they have to handle, and we were there one day to see this, a rush of thousands of people through the front door of a health facility, and overburden triage personnel trying to figure out, okay, you go here, you go there, you will take care of right now. And your failing was, it's going to get worse before it gets better. Now, the Chinese government has committed itself to really rapidly raising the spending per person in China on healthcare, but right now it's a fraction of what's spent in wealthy industrial societies. More generally, Ray, what was your impression of the, a lot of talk you've mentioned at, of course, in your pieces as well, the kind of the energy, the economic energy, the lifestyle energy, give us a feel for that. And compare it with prior times, and what do you expect to have? You're dropping to be in a place where everything is going to be new. Everywhere you go, there's new stuff, new highways, new rail lines, new train stations,

new bus barns, new office high-rise buildings, and clusters of apartment buildings that would be a showpiece or just a remarkable feat of building in a city anywhere else in the world, but right behind that one that you're looking at is another one, and then another one and then another one, sometimes clusters of 30 and 40, 20-story apartment buildings, the scale, the numbers can be bewildering, really, because everything's a superlative in a country of 1.3 billion people that's getting rich fast. And it is all superlatives? Well, no. I mean, obviously these, all of this has an underside, all of it has a dark side. Most of people are being relocated, not necessarily with their informed consent, they're just being told to clear out. A lot of neighborhoods are being torn down. A lot of buildings. But to build these new, new everything. Right.

To build new everything. And people who want to escape the terrible grinding poverty of the urban areas and get a little bit of that new affluence in the cities can't do that easily as well. China is trying to forestall just a rush into already overburdened cities. There isn't enough housing, there's not enough jobs. How you're going to keep them down on the farm is not just an old punchline, it's a real question. Okay. Ray, thank you very much. Good stuff. Thanks. And to another story affecting millions of Chinese, as well as one in 10 Asian Americans. NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michaels looks at the disease called hepatitis B. Morning, Mr. Zhang, how are you? How's your appetite? Very good. Very good. 46-year-old Greg Zhang who works in California Silicon Valley is recovering from a recent operation to remove a tumor from his liver, a result of his lifelong infection with hepatitis B. It's a disease that strikes Asians 100 times more than non-Asians.

The incision is right here. Yeah. It looks good. Yeah. No problem. Yeah. The hepatitis B virus is found in blood and bodily fluids. Many people can live with the virus and never get sick, but 25% of those infected get severe liver damage or cancer. The virus can be transmitted by unsafe sex and unsterile needles, but most people who suffer from the disease, like Zhang, who was born in China, became infected at birth from their mothers. This is my brother with his two kids. His younger brother, Hai Yang, also became infected at birth. But like many of those with the disease, he had no symptoms until it was too late. Two years ago, at the age of 42, he went to see a doctor about a pain in his side.

He was told he had advanced liver cancer, and there was nothing that doctors could do. Zhang flew his brother to Shanghai to try to get a liver transplant, but he died three days after arriving here. When he passed away, my sister, you know, and his two kids were on a plane going from here to Shanghai. He didn't make it. This is a cancer which often affects people at the prime of life between 30 to 60 years of age. Dr. So has been leading efforts in the San Francisco Bay area and around the world to raise awareness about hep B. He has a research lab at Stanford, focused on finding new ways to diagnose and treat liver cancer. There's no cure for hep B, although the virus can be kept in check with antiviral medicines. Those infected need to have yearly ultrasounds and blood tests to screen for early stages of liver cancer.

Dr. So is the founder of the Asian Liver Center, dedicated to creating awareness about hep B, both in the U.S. and overseas, especially in China. A hundred million people in China are chronically infected. There's a huge burden of disease in China, every, you know, two, three minutes. Someone in China is dying from liver cancer caused by this virus, which could be prevented by a vaccine. And still, most people in the world are not vaccinated against it. It's just ridiculous. An effective vaccine for hep B has been available for almost 25 years. Newborns need a vaccination within the first day of life to prevent transmission of the virus from their mother. Two more doses are needed within the first six months for full immunity. And about half the babies in the U.S. do get vaccinated. But in many countries where hep B is endemic, like China, vaccination programs for infants are often spotty.

And there are hundreds of millions of adults worldwide born before the vaccine was developed who are infected. A recent documentary highlighted a program in China's Qinghai Province aimed at vaccinating more of the population, a campaign inspired by Dr. So. But one big hurdle in enacting reform in China has been the enormous social stigma associated with the disease. If our neighbors knew our kids have hepatitis B, they wouldn't dare let their kids do with our kids. Those who test positive for hep B in China are often denied jobs, and infected children can be rejected from schools. Along with the disease itself, that stigma has crossed the ocean with immigrants to this country. Many Asian Americans don't want to discuss it or even learn their own status. What is unsettling is that many carriers of the hepatitis B virus are unaware that they are infected, because the symptoms don't appear for many years.

But what also bothers health officials in San Francisco and other cities with large Asian populations is that many Asians don't see the need to be tested for hepatitis B. With one of the largest Asian populations in the U.S., and the nation's highest rate of liver cancer, San Francisco is now waging an aggressive campaign to bring the disease out of the shadows, at events like the Asian Heritage Festival. The city's hep B free campaign offers free testing and vaccinations. Not only does the general population lack knowledge and awareness of the disease, but so does the medical community, according to a recent report from the Institute of Medicine. That's something that concerns Janet Zola, who is heading up the campaign for San Francisco's Department of Health.

She says everyone, not just Asian Americans, should be aware of the disease. It affects everybody. People inter-marry, people have large and employee base of Asian employees who can get sick. So it isn't really just about one isolated sector of the population, even though they're at highest risk. One in 10 Asian Americans is infected with hepatitis B. A controversial ad now running on local TV stations and on billboards asks which of these 10 Asian beauty pageant contestants deserves to die. But in the Asian community, such frankness is shocking. That attitude is something that California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma from San Francisco, who is hep B positive, is working hard to change. My cousin who was born in China actually got very upset and said, please don't talk about it. People are going to think that you're sick and they're not going to vote for you. And my message was, I am a public figure. This is my responsibility. Ma says San Francisco's program is working well, but the state needs to do more.

She sponsored a bill to get the state to pay for hep B vaccinations and treatment, but was unsuccessful. We should be trying to cover hepatitis B folks earlier in the process instead of later. In California, MediCal only covers you if you're in your last stages of liver cancer or require a liver transplant. Clearly, that's too late and it costs too much. Hep B is slowly starting to get more attention on a national level. He's at a recent rally on Capitol Hill called for more federal funding for the disease. But Stanford's doctor, so whose mother-in-law died from liver cancer, believes there's still not enough being done by the global health community or in the US. He says other diseases get more public attention and therefore more money. One in twenty people in the world are chronically infected. One in twenty.

Ten times more than people in the world infected with HIV. There's huge advocacy for the HIV community and you have very few advocates for hepatitis B. For now, the battle against hepatitis B is concentrated in communities with large Asian populations. Philadelphia and Los Angeles are among a handful of cities planning to replicate San Francisco's efforts. Spencer's story was part of a partnership with NPR. Their report will air on morning edition tomorrow. Finally tonight, a beetle comes to the White House. Last night, President Obama honored Paul McCartney with the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song and Award Presented by the Library of Congress, recognizing lifetime achievement. Here's a sample from McCartney's performance in the East Room. The next song we like to do is a song I have been itching to do at the White House.

And I hope the President will forgive me if I sing this one. One, two, three. Here's a sample from McCartney's performance in the East Room. Here's a sample from McCartney's performance in the East Room. Here's a sample from McCartney's performance in the East Room. Here's a sample from McCartney's performance in the West Room. Here's a sample from McCartney's performance in the East Room.

Here's a sample from McCartney's performance in the East Room. Here's a sample from McCartney's performance in the East Room. Here's a sample from McCartney's performance in the East Room. The entire concert will air July 28th on most PBS stations, it's part of the in performance at the White House series Again, the major developments of the day BP managed to cut the pipes spewing oil deep in the Gulf of Mexico

The next step was containing the flow and pumping the oil to ships and thousands of Turks mourned those killed when Israel raided six aid ships off Gaza The Israelis rejected an international investigation of the incident The news hours always online, Kwame Holman and our newsroom previews what's there, Kwame On those so-called food deserts in the rural south, watch a story about teaching students to grow their own vegetables and read Betty Ann's blog Find out who's watching online video and why we get an update on from a Pew Research Center study Learn about the Mars 500 project in Moscow, six people will be isolated in a simulated spaceship for 520 days And a reminder our live video feed of the Gulf oil leak is on our web page All that and more is on our website newshour.pbs.org Judy. And that's the NewsHour for tonight, I'm Judy Woodruff. And I'm Jim Lehrer, we'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening with Mark Shields and David Brooks among others Thank you and good night.

Pacific Life. The power to help you succeed. BNSF Railway. And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Supporting science, technology, and improved economic performance and financial literacy in the 21st century. And with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. And this program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you. You're watching PBS. Up next, can Holmes and Watson crack a case of foul play in a country estate? Find out on the adventures of Sherlock Holmes next on WETA Do you collect treasures? Now is your chance to get them out when Antiques Roadshow comes to Washington DC Watch a special edition of Antiques Roadshow on Monday night For your chance to get tickets and have two of your items appraised Your treasure could appear on an episode of Antiques Roadshow Find out how Monday at 8 on WETA Tuesday night, the pivotal episode from the landmark television event Ken Burns, the Civil War, dramatic tales of average people Caught up in the bloodiest conflict in our nation's history

Revisit the Civil War, Tuesday night on WETA Hello, I'm inviting you to my idea of a perfect evening in a magical setting Playing music I love with my friends in Lincoln Center's spectacular pet house Next time on live from Lincoln Center Wednesday night at 8 right here on WETA This is an unjust ban that must end It's an ethical obligation to look for hope There's always the possibility of finding a place where action can change The course of things Stories of courage, hope, and the fight for change WETA recognizes gay and lesbian pride month with special programs For more information, visit WETA.org On the next life on Mars When the team loses a prisoner, they bring in a heavy hitter

It's got my lone finger prints all over it But when Sam suspects the superintendent, Gene intervenes Life on Mars That's tonight on WETA He's back Moss, everyone just calls me Moss And when he's not sharpening his wit, he's on the case How can you think of mixed up with a murder case? I just want to know what's going on Next time The apparently committed suicide and no one knows why I don't wish like you're involved in this, Moss If you know something I don't, I want to hear about this Inspector Morse, tonight at 9 Today's programming is presented by WETA members and the following The green mob, cleaning residential and commercial properties using eco-friendly products Without bleach or ammonia, specializing in clients with allergies, babies, and pets Available in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C

Information at thegreenmop.com Tonight on WETA Catch the adventures of Sherlock Holmes at 8 Then the mystery continues with the return of Inspector Morse And Sam discovers just how dangerous the 70s can be Life on Mars tonight on WETA