The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

MARGARET WARNER: Good evening. I'm Margaret Warner. Jim Lehrer is off today. On the NewsHour tonight, Phil Ponce reports on last night's fatal crash landing in Arkansas. The South African ambassador and three analysts look at that country's likely new president and the problems he'll face. Susan Dentzer reports on binge drinking on college campuses. And Elizabeth Farnsworth examines the brave new world of online investing. It all follows our summary of the news this Wednesday.

NEWS SUMMARY

MARGARET WARNER: An American Airlines jet skidded off a runway in Little Rock, Arkansas, last night, then split open and erupted in flames. Eight passengers and the pilot were killed; 83 people were injured; and 13 others remain unaccounted for. It was the first fatal crash involving a major U.S. airline in 18 months. We'll have more on the crash right after the News Summary. President Clinton announced today the U.S. would contribute 7,000 troops to a NATO peacekeeping force for Kosovo. In Belgrade, Russian and European envoys met with Yugoslav President Milosevic to present a peace plan for ending the conflict. There were contradictory reports on whether NATO and Russia had resolved their own differences over the plan. Kwame Holman has our summary report.

KWAME HOLMAN: President Clinton focused his entire commencement speech at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on the Kosovo conflict. He told the 944 graduating cadets their fellow service members will have a role in Kosovo peacekeeping just as they do in the ongoing air campaign.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Yesterday, NATO approved the outlines of KFOR, the force that will deploy to Kosovo once the conditions are met. Approximately 50,000 troops will take part in this effort. Our European allies will provide the vast bulk of them, but American will also contribute, and we should. Today, I am announcing my decision to provide about 7,000 of these troops for Kosovo, about 15 percent of the total force. The leading elements and headquarters are already in Albania and Macedonia, ready to deploy to Kosovo within a few hours to oversee the safe return of the refugees. This strategy will enable us to put in place a plan for lasting peace and stability in the Balkans when Mr. Milosevic is stopped and the ethnic cleansing is reversed.

KWAME HOLMAN: The principal figures seeking that peace arrived on separate planes in Belgrade today with a NATO-backed proposal to end the conflict. Finland's President Martti Ahtisaari and Russian Envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin met late into the day with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and will continue their meetings tomorrow. Reportedly, Chernomyrdin wants Russian peacekeepers to comprise a force separate from the rest of the planned NATO peacekeepers. In Brussels, NATO Spokesman Jamie Shea said this:

JAMIE SHEA: As far as NATO is concerned, we're talking about a single force, not a number of different forces; a single force with unity of command, robust rules of engagement, and a common approach throughout Kosovo.

KWAME HOLMAN: Meanwhile, as flows of refugees into Macedonia slowed to a trickle, the private International Rescue Committee went ahead with plans for a high-risk airdrop of food and supplies for refugees displaced within Kosovo. United Nations officials say such Kosovars face growing risk of starvation.

MARGARET WARNER: South Africans voted in the country's second all-race elections today. The ruling African National Congress is expected to sweep the parliamentary balloting and to replace President Nelson Mandela with his hand-picked successor, the current Deputy President Thabo Mbeki. The voting today was peaceful, unlike the first all-race elections that ended apartheid in 1994. We'll have more on the story later in the program. Also ahead, a crash landing in Arkansas, binge drinking, and online investing.

FOCUS - ARKANSAS AIR CRASH

MARGARET WARNER: Phil Ponce reports on last night's crash landing in Arkansas.

PHIL PONCE: It was just before midnight Tuesday when the American Airlines jetliner skidded off a rain-slickened runway, broke apart, and burst into flames. The flight, which originated in Dallas, Texas, was delayed for more than two hours. It arrived in Little Rock amid a severe storm. Survivors described what happened next.

SURVIVOR: I knew something was wrong because we kept circling the airport and coming down and going up and coming down and going up. I just said -- I just started praying, and the plane hit. And I thought it was going to be all right - you know -- because we were on the runway. And then we just started -- I knew something was wrong because we kept going and it got real bumpy. And then all of a sudden the whole front of the plane -- the front section of the plane started shaking back and forth, like moving like we were separated. We were coming down the runway just too fast. We slid off the end. The stewardess started screaming, "Brace yourself."

PHIL PONCE: As flames engulfed the aircraft, many passengers made their way through an emergency exit, while others made their way through openings made by the plane's damaged fuselage.

SURVIVOR: Everybody was just goofing out, just going crazy. The door wouldn't open, the emergency door wouldn't. So, we turned around and came back to the emergency door in the back of the plane. We tried to open it, but it wouldn't open. It was barely cracked like this. And we started pushing people over the top and sliding out.

PHIL PONCE: Federal investigators arrived on the scene this morning. Today, American Airlines representatives had this to say

AMERICAN AIRLINES REPRESENTATIVE: The airplane was delayed upline. We actually switched equipment from the original routing, the original aircraft had been delayed downline for two hours and 40 minutes because of the weather in the DFW area. We then switched aircraft from an aircraft inbound from Denver. And it too took a weather delay on departure here -- a combination of switching equipment and weather. There were lots of thunderstorm situations, both here in North Texas and in the Little Rock area, during the operation. And as he left here, it was kind of a typical thunderstorm/shower kind of an environment. And they were generally in the Little Rock area on arrival. But the key, of course, is what exactly were the winds on the runway at the time of the approach. And that's what we really have to try to focus on.

PHIL PONCE: And late this afternoon, the National Transportation Safety Board added:

NTSB SPOKESMAN: We retrieved the recorders earlier this morning. They went back to Washington; that's a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder. We are told from Washington that the recorders had good data on them. And that data is being reduced. Another interesting thing that we're looking at to see if it had any effect one way or another, there was a power failure at the airport around the time of the accident as to whether it might have been caused by the accident from some sort of a short circuit off the end of the runway when the airplane hit the lights -- or whether it was associated with a thunderstorm we don't know. There was, as you'll recall, from a few moments ago, active thunderstorms with cloud to cloud and cloud to ground lightning in the area. So it could very well have been a normal power outage associated with the storm. We are -- have a message from the coroner's office. They have now recovered the victims who were fatally injured and transported those to the medical examiner's office. We understand that there are nine victims, fatal victims.

PHIL PONCE: Last night's fatalities were first on major U.S. airline in over one-and-a-half years.

MARGARET WARNER: And at last report, 13 passengers were still unaccounted for.

FOCUS - PASSING THE TORCH

MARGARET WARNER: The turnout was heavy, and the voting was peaceful in South Africa's elections today. We start with a report on the presumptive winner. From special correspondent Judy Aslett in Johannesburg.

JUDY ASLETT: Thabo Mbeki, diplomat soldier and as a result of today's election the next president of South Africa. He spent his life working for the African National Congress, the anti-apartheid movement which is knew the country's dominant political party. He'll be taking over from one of the most popular world leaders, Nelson Mandela. It's a tough act to follow.

MARK GEVISSER: Whereas Mandela made something of a symbol of himself with which we could all identify. He was in jail; we were in jail. He was liberated, we were liberated. He could drink tea with his oppressors, we too could reconcile with the other side. Thabo Mbeki has a very different approach, a very different style. The way he's projecting himself as somebody who rolls up his sleeves and gets down and makes things happen. He's a back room boy.

JUDY ASLETT: Thabo Mbeki grew up in a remote, rural area of South Africa where his parents were anti-apartheid activists. They were also Communists. Mbeki's father, Governor Mbeki, ran a small store. He was later jailed with Nelson Mandela for nearly three decades.

MARK GEVISSER: Thabo Mbeki grew up in a family where his parents were in danger of being arrested and locked up any moment. And people will tell the story about how they came to see Governor Mbeki in the shop. And there was Thabo sitting behind the counter. They would say, we're here to see your father. And these would be comrades. And Thabo -- even as a little boy at age eight or nine -- would know he couldn't reveal where his parents were.

JUDY ASLETT: At Sussex University in England, Thabo Mbeki began 30 years in exile with his comrade Essop Pahad. Like many students, they went on human rights marches and campaigned for the British Labor Party in the '64 election.

MARK GEVISSER: Those of us who were lucky to be in England at that time and lucky to be students became part of that foment of development of ideas of creative approaches of a very harsh sometimes engagement with a broad spectrum of young people who didn't agree with us, and we didn't agree with them.

JUDY ASLETT: It's that debate of freedom of speech unheard of in South Africa that shaped the young Thabo Mbeki. But he also paid a price. By the time his father came to the Zambian capital Usaka to meet the ANC in exile in 1990, Thabo Mbeki had become more of a comrade than a son. While other families hugged and kissed, Mbeki Senior shook his son's hand in private.

MARK GEVISSER: Of course there was a distance. I mean, once we were in exile, we were all distant from that. Once his father was in prison, and his father had been very active, I mean, that distance was inevitablegiven the situation, but the difference was that there wasn't a political distance.

JUDY ASLETT: It was Oliver Tambo, the ANC leader in exile, who had become a mentor and surrogate father to Thabo Mbeki. When Tambo returned home to become president of the ANC in South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, who had been his deputy, moved over to make way for Nelson Mandela.

MARK GEVISSER: But if one really wants to understand Thabo Mbeki, one has to see that his father is Oliver Tambo as well as Governor Mbeki. One has to see his sister is much more the minister of health - Azuma -- than it is his biological sister who is a businesswoman in the transfer. One has to see that comrades with who he really grew up are his brothers as much as his biological brothers.

JUDY ASLETT: When he became Nelson Mandela's deputy, Thabo Mbeki traveled the world meeting international leaders. He's clearly at ease in their company, carrying the promise that under his leadership, South Africa will move forward politically and economically.

THABO MBEKI: At times we did not know that we are burying people who had died from AIDS.

JUDY ASLETT: But back home, Thabo Mbeki's style has been criticized. When he addressed the nation last year on the problem of AIDS, he looked stiff and awkward. The children looked bored. It didn't work. But despite this, his supporters say he won't change.

ESSOP PAHAD: I for example have told public relations companies and in the course of discussions, listen, we are not a package of soap, our conflicts, and this person of ours isn't either. So you are not going to package this person in that way. You might want to do that in European politics, but not here.

JUDY ASLETT: Analysts say there's no doubt South Africa needed a charismatic leader like Nelson Mandela as its first black president, but now the country needs more. The stark economic inequalities between black and white still divide this nation. And the challenge for Thabo Mbeki is to bring about real change. Nine million blacks in South Africa still have no clean water supply nor electricity to their homes. Thabo Mbeki says he will speed up his economic program to provide them with jobs and better services; that's been the message of his election campaign. And in the last three weeks, South Africa has seen another side of its new leader. In a packed stadium containing 90,000 people, he danced next to Nelson Mandela. He may not be a natural mover, but those who have watched him over the years say he will become more a man of the people.

KHEHLE SHUBANE, Political Analyst: People seem to want a president like Mandela, a president who is at ease with people rather than with the elite. And I think that there's a huge push on Thabo to change in that direction. But I don't think he'll ever equal Mandela. I don't think hi he'll ever be as available and as easy with people as Mandela has been.

JUDY ASLETT: His style may be different, but in the next five years, he'll be judged on his results.

MARK GEVISSER: He's very much a persuader. I think that's Mbeki's way in the world. He doesn't fight and he doesn't walk away. He sits and he persuades. He seduces.

JUDY ASLETT: Thabo Mbeki will have to persuade black and white South Africans, as well as international investors, that he is the man to replace Nelson Mandela. His country is already the most powerful in Africa. His challenge is to maintain that and improve the economic life of its people.

MARGARET WARNER: For perspective on today's elections, we turn to Ambassador Sheila Sisulu, South Africa's new ambassador to the United States; Rich Mkhondo, the U.S. Correspondent for Independent Newspapers of South Africa; John Chettle, an international trade lawyer in Washington, D.C., and a former director of the South Africa Foundation, a business group; and David Goodman, a freelance journalist and author of the newly-released book "Fault Lines: Journeys into the New South Africa." Welcome all. Madame Ambassador, what is the latest on the election? We understand that the polling is taking longer than expected.

SHEILA SISULU: Yes. It seems that people left it too late in some places, and in other places, there were more people voting than anticipated. So on the one hand, there was underestimation, even if there had been an indication that people come out in large numbers, but it has happened now is that the law does allow for people who are at the polling station by the time of closing to continue to vote until all the people who were there -- by the time they close -- have voted.

MARGARET WARNER: And when do you expect final results?

SHEILA SISULU: The final results should be out by Friday, which would probably be Thursday night here. We are expecting that tomorrow morning in the U.S. there should be 75 percent of the results out.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, Rich Mkhondo, even though there were close to a dozen parties competing, it's almost a foregone conclusion that the ANC is going to be the big winner. Why is that? Why aren't the elections more competitive?

RICH MKHONDO: I think the elections are competitive. It's just that we South Africans are still in some kind of liberation mode. I was speaking to a friend of mine yesterday about the very same question. And I said to him, "why don't you vote for the other party in case of the other one in" and he says to me, look, when I was struggling in the 60's when I was arrested and I was targeted by the police, it was the ANC which supported me. No one else supported me. I don't have a job now. I employ three people because I'm self-employed and he's started a car wash company. But I'm happy with the ANC. I'm going to vote for them for the next four election, which means it will take about 20 years for him to change his life. So I think that's one of the reasons. But there are many other reasons -- one of them being the fact that I think South Africans expected a lot from the ANC and they still expect a lot from the ANC. When people say to them, "why don't you vote for the national party or the democratic movement, which is the new party formed by Banta Luse and others" they will say, what have they done for them? That's what my friend said yesterday. So it will take a long time for people to change. So opposition parties have to actually maybe start off fresh. I hear there's going to be some kind of a summit of all opposition party after this election. Maybe from there will be a major another party. I don't know.

MARGARET WARNER: What's your view, John Chettle, on why the ANC is so dominant?

JOHN CHETTLE: I think Rich has got it right. I mean, they made the huge contribution to getting freedom and democracy in South Africa. And they've not done a bad job. They've actually delivered a lot of things that people needed -- water connections, electricity connections, some housing, not as much as everybody wanted, but as much as perhaps could be legitimately expected.

MARGARET WARNER: David Goodman, the voting is also, however, expected to break down along racial lines is. That right?

DAVID GOODMAN: Right. And the ANC's greatest support base obviously is still black South Africans.

MARGARET WARNER: Which we should say are I think 77 percent or so of the population?

DAVID GOODMAN: That's right. In the era of Mandela, you know, one of the greatest accomplishments has been bridging the racial divide and bringing reconciliation across the racial divide. However, it's really going to be -- the test of Mbeki will really be whether he can bring that same reconciliation and bridging across the vast economic divide that still splits South Africa, the divide between rich and poor and unfortunately it is still the rich and poor divide is still one that is largely a white and black divide at once.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, now, I think his campaign slogan was a better life for all. How hard is it going to be to deliver on that?

DAVID GOODMAN: It's been very mixed results at this point. Certainly change can be measured in the number of water taps and electricity and telephones that have been brought to the poorer areas of South Africa. It has certainly alleviated the hardships of poverty. Whether there can actually be opportunity created, and that is jobs, which really most black South Africans will tell you is their number one concern, that is what really remains as a challenge. In fact, South Africa has lost a half million jobs in the last five years, and Mbeki has really got turn that around to create opportunity to break out of poverty.

MARGARET WARNER: What do you see as the big obstacle, the biggest obstacle, Madame Ambassador, to delivering on this better life for all?

SHEILA SISULU: Well, to start with our macroeconomic policy, we've decided through it that we would deliver a better life for all on the basis of growth in the economy.

MARGARET WARNER: You mean rather than redistribution of wealth.

SHEILA SISULU: And rather than also borrowing or even printing money. And having pledged ourselves to go that route, the economy was knocked sideways by the global crisis, and therefore our growth was slowed down. We had to readjust our growth targets. And so that's going to be the big challenge to in effect turn the economy around to growth -- on a growth trajectory so we can then from that basis deliver a better life from all.

MARGARET WARNER: And why do you, John Chettle, think it's been hard to do that so far?

JOHN CHETTLE: Well, I suppose there are a number of reasons. The first is that the level of schools is still comparatively low. And it's going to take time for that to improve. The second is of course the government faced a very difficult situation when it got into power. I mean, the economy was not doing well. Sanctions had bitten. There was large unemployment -- unemployment maybe as high as 40 percent. And when you think that at the height of the depression in the United States, unemployment was 25 percent, it's an indication of just how difficult that problem is. So it's going to take quite a long time to make the adjustments, to attract the overseas investment, although the government's been certainly trying to do its best.

MARGARET WARNER: And your view, Rich Mkhondo, on why this economic divide remains so large? I think it's 40 percent unemployment among black South Africans and, what, 4 percent among whites or mixed race.

RICH MKHONDO: Well, a combination of many factors, one of them being the leaders of apartheid, one of them being the question of education, skills, and many others. But I think to go back to what John has said, quite a lot has been achieved, although I think we still face the question that globally things are not very good. They might be very good in the U.S., but they're not very good in South Africaand other countries like Asia where South Africa needs actually to get help, even from here.

MARGARET WARNER: You mean, in other words, South Africa is competing for financial investment from all over the world with all these other countries.

RICH MKHONDO: Yeah, yeah. Yes, indeed. Let me give you an example. I gave an example the other day that -- let's take the question of what the world -- what the West is actually looking at. Whenever there is a problem, they actually go to help countries like Russia and even Kosovo at the moment. Actually, I'm very disturbed about what's going on, because the concentration on Kosovo is actually taking attention to many other problems. There are many refugees in Africa, but the attention is not the same. One quick example: When there was a problem in Russia, it took them about two weeks to give Russia about $120billion. It has taken them about three years to help Africa with about 10 percent of that money, $13 billion. Why such a discrepancy? So in other words, what I'm trying to say it's the combination of many factors, internationally, locally, and South Africans themselves.

MARGARET WARNER: Now John Chettle, you talk to a lot of international business people, you help them and try to get them to invest in South Africa. What are you hearing? Why is South Africa not say more attractive when it's competing against other places people could put their money?

JOHN CHETTLE: It's doing a lot of the right things. It has been very stringent as far as spending is concerned.

MARGARET WARNER: That's what the ambassador said.

JOHN CHETTLE: Trying to get the deficit down and so on. But the trouble is a lot of countries are also trying to do the same thing. And the United States, just to take one example, has this vast universe of countries all trying to do the same thing. And it can pick and choose. And so -- and sad though it is, a lot of people's attention is distracted elsewhere.

MARGARET WARNER: David Goodman, go back to the connection between the racial divide and the economic divide -- because you wrote a long piece about this in the "Washington Post" on Sunday. And I think you said that you didn't feel that the racial divide has really been bridged at all.

DAVID GOODMAN: Well, I do feel that there has been a great effort placed by President Mandela. One of his greatest accomplishments is certainly presiding over a peaceful transition to democracy. And without that peaceful transition, we wouldn't be talking here today about the fine points of development. We'd be talking about a country that's barely hanging together. South Africa is certainly doing much better than that. But you know, one of the people I wrote about in my book is a whom is a domestic worker and also a city councilor. And she is a councilor in the same communities where she cleans floors and homes. So here is the picture of a woman who has finally attained political power but still is poor, still lacks economic power, and this is a situation that many black South Africans find themselves in today. It's a burning contradiction. And I think that, you know, the coming together of political power and a sense that blacks now have opportunities I think will go a great deal farther to healing racial wounds because you can't simply just tell a poor person to reconcile their situation. You must give them opportunity.

MARGARET WARNER: Madame Ambassador, why do you think that as the barriers to political power have fallen, the barriers to other kinds of power in business and academia and even the media, I understand, have not fallen as fast?

SHEILA SISULU: Well, it's been five years, and we're working against backlogs of not only 50 years of apartheid, but actually 300 years of discrimination against black people. So there is that huge backlog that we're working against to start with. And I think it's important here to raise the fact that Deputy President Mbeki last year, almost six months or even eight months ago raised this very issue in parliament and said the next challenge we have is to reconcile our two nations, one rich, one poor, one black, one white. And beyond political reconciliation, emotional and social reconciliation we have to look towards economic reconciliation. Unfortunately when he raises these issues, then there is a cry about oh, he's raising the race issue again. But the truth of the matter is, unless we, in fact, bridge that gap and present to the majority of people the fact that democracy also means a better quality of life rather than just economic power, then we might lose the gains that have been put forward by President Mbeki -- I mean President Mandela. However, I think Deputy President Mbeki is astute, and I think he will be able to navigate this process in the way that he's been described as someone who is persuasive and gets people to see a particular point of view - it will be a difficult process, but I think he'll do it.

MARGARET WARNER: But the whites still basically -- it has to be a persuasion; is that right -- Rich Mkhondo, because the whites still really control, have the economic power?

RICH MKHONDO: That's right.

MARGARET WARNER: Is there a lot of resistance, I guess is the question, white resistance?

RICH MKHONDO: No, there's not a lot of resistance. But I would actually just add by saying, let's take an example of the U.S.. The question of racial divide and economic divide is very difficult to bridge. And also, let's take quickly the question of racial divide. There's still racial divide in the U.S. There's still economic divide in the U.S. How many years has there -- actually the U.S. been free and -

MARGARET WARNER: Nearly 150. That's right, yes.

RICH MKHONDO: Now, my feeling is that during my travels here during the past three years is that it really actually depends on the people themselves to embrace this question of togetherness. In South Africa I think it will be the same thing. White South Africans and black South Africans, particularly white South Africans have to realize that we have to live together. The same thing as you can -- you can hear the same story if you go anywhere in the U.S..

MARGARET WARNER: And David Goodman, what in all your reporting, and I know you've traveled a lot there, what are you seeing in white attitudes?

DAVID GOODMAN: Well, I think there's still unfortunately a lot of denial about responsibility for what took place under apartheid. You know, whites were the beneficiaries of apartheid, and as tough as it may be to accept that, I think it really -- you know, President Mandela and Deputy President Mbeki have often gone to the white community to say, it is time to give back. There has also been talk in many quarters of South Africa of having some kind of reparations tax of really forcing something that would return some of the benefits that the big companies had gained from apartheid. I think it's appropriate, and I think whites really need to see themselves much more as part of the rebuilding process of South Africa and not just on the sidelines.

MARGARET WARNER: What do you think prospects are of that, John?

JOHN CHETTLE: I would have thought that the idea of reparations would be very badly received by whites. But the general idea that whites have got to contribute to a greater degree of equity among the population as a whole, that's undoubtedly true. And exactly how that should be done is going to require more leadership than I think the whites have shown up to now.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thank you, Madame ambassador. Gentlemen, thank you very much.

FOCUS - BINGE DRINKING

MARGARET WARNER: Still to come on the NewsHour, binge drinking on campus and the growth of online investing.

MARGARET WARNER: The college drinking story is reported by Susan Dentzer of our health unit, a partnership with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

SPOKESMAN: I hereby confer your degrees and declare you fully entitled to all of the rights, honors, privileges, and responsibilities.

SUSAN DENTZER: With mortarboards heading skyward, college commencements are underway, those annual rites of spring. [Screaming] But just a few weeks short weeks ago in Florida, another annual ritual of college life took place: Spring Break. On the beach in Panama City, as in other warm places, the good times rolled, and as always, the alcohol flowed.

YOUNG MAN: I don't remember anything at all.

YOUNG WOMAN: You bonged over, I would say, over 15 beers, and then you did -

YOUNG MAN: Like four shots of tequila, and probably like a few shots of Jager.

YOUNG WOMAN: Yeah, like a lot of double shots of Jager, a lot of all that other stuff. He was shaking so bad yesterday that I had to take him to the hospital.

YOUNG MAN: I was doing the kickin' chicken all over the place.

YOUNG WOMAN: Yeah. He was -- he was, like, going almost in convulsions.

YOUNG MAN: Yeah.

SUSAN DENTZER: As alarming as that sounds, for these and other students on spring break, only the beach- front setting was out of the ordinary. Many told the News Hour of equally serious drinking back on campus.

SPRING BREAKER IN BAR: I mean, you got to have your priorities straight. During the week, it's all classes and that's what you got to concentrate on; but when it gets to the weekend, it's time to cut loose, it's time to relax.

SUSAN DENTZER: For years, cutting loose with alcohol has been considered a classic rite of passage en route to a more sober adulthood. But now that laissez-faire attitude is changing, in part because many experts believe that the problem of excessive drinking on campus is actually getting worse. William DeJoung heads the federally funded Higher Education Center for Alcohol Prevention, which advises colleges universities on reducing excessive drinking. He says today's big drinkers on campus are different from yesteryear's.

WILLIAM DEJOUNG: It isn't that students drink and then get drunk almost as a side product; that the purpose is to get drunk. It's almost an industrial strength drinking ritual that they go through. There are funnels and tubes and intense drinking games. It's an intensity of drinking that we know is very dangerous.

SUSAN DENTZER: The practice is commonly called "binge drinking;" for a man that means five or more drinks at one sitting, for a woman four or more drinks. That's the level of alcohol consumption known to lead to problems, including fights, car accidents, property damage, and sexual assaults. Over the past several years, those issues have increasingly grabbed the attention of Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University.

GRAHAM SPANIER: It seems to have swept America. It's a problem in virtually every college and university. It's something that presidents of universities talk about all the time, and a lot of the negative things that we see in the culture of universities today can be traced to excessive alcohol consumption.

SUSAN DENTZER: It's estimated that at least 30 students a year are estimated to die in drinking-related incidents -- in recent years, at such campuses as Louisiana State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And last March came the death of a young alumnus of a still another Pennsylvania institution, the University of Pennsylvania. Returning to campus for a weekend reunion, 24-year-old Michael Tobin died after drinking too much and falling down outside his former fraternity house. The death led the university to impose a temporary ban on alcohol at undergraduate parties. The ban sparked a protest by more than a thousand students. Back at Penn State, Spanier has had his own share of alcohol-related disasters to contend with. Two years ago, 20-year-old junior Leigh Prevatte died in an alcohol-related accident.

GRAHAM SPANIER: By all accounts, she had had too much to drink. There was a party where alcohol was being served, and she leaned out too far on the balcony and fell several stories to her death. It captured a lot of attention on campus and in the community.

SUSAN DENTZER: Then, in a separate incident, a boozy riot broke out last summer amid an annual arts festival in Penn State's hometown, State College. As this home video captured the scene, more than a thousand students and townspeople left behind thousands of dollars in damage.

CAROLINE CASAGRANDE: It was just mob mentality, it was a crowd out of control.

SUSAN DENTZER: Penn State Senior Caroline Casagrande is the outgoing president of the student government.

CAROLINE CASAGRANDE: They broke down telephone poles, and lit couches on fire, and you know, just yelled and worked -- the crowd worked itself into a frenzy. I took one look at it and I started crying because I couldn't believe that my fellow students were doing this.

SUSAN DENTZER: Riots and student deaths are clearly extreme examples of what can happen when drinking gets out of hand. But college officials worry that these incidents could become even more frequent, given the severity of the campus drinking problem. An ongoing study at the Harvard School of Public Health has found that an estimated two out of five students nationwide qualify as "binge" drinkers. Even worse, about half of those students engage in binge drinking more than once a week. Henry Wechsler oversees the study.

HENRY WECHSLER: This group, which was about one out of five students, consumed 68 percent of all the alcohol that college students consumed. They drank far more than the five drinks.

SUSAN DENTZER: How many more drinks, ten, twelve, fourteen drinks?"

HENRY WECHSLER: At least.

SUSAN DENTZER: Routine as this heavy drinking is, students don't always understand the

implications for their health. Dr. Booker Bush is a Boston internist who specializes in patients with alcohol problems. As he does in frequent lectures to college students, he showed us that heavy doses of any type of alcohol can wreak havoc in the body.

DR. BOOKER BUSH: Alcohol affects all the parts of the brain. If you keep going past those five or six drinks, you're going to start having impact on the brain stem. That's where your brain tells you things like breathe, tells your heart to beat, things like that. And you sedate that area until you're basically saying don't breathe, and you can die from it.

SUSAN DENTZER: And if that process doesn't kill you, Bush says another one might.

DR. BOOKER BUSH: If I can draw another illustration, this is your swallowing tube, and this is your stomach. If you drink a lot of alcohol, and there's alcohol in your bloodstream, if there's more alcohol sitting in the stomach, your stomach says, "let's stop this," and there's a valve right here; it's called the pylorus. If that spasms close, so alcohol can't go out this way, well, alcohol is sitting in here, upsetting your stomach -- what you'll do is you'll throw up. Your stomach will just send everything back up. Well, if you're a little sedated because your cortex isn't working, and you throw up, instead of vomiting outwards, you might vomit and have everything sit in the back part of your throat and then breathe it down into your lungs, so then you drown in your own vomit. So you don't have to die from this; you can also die from this.

SUSAN DENTZER: But such lessons about health dangers are frequently lost amid a culture that says college and drinking go hand in hand.

WILLIAM DEJONG: We've gotten that message from alcohol advertising, we've gotten that message from, in many cases, our parents who recount their own stories from college. We got that message

from local bar owners who run these low price promotions and make it seem that this kind of drinking is really the answer to all the stress that you're feeling about being in college and about growing up.

SUSAN DENTZER: To counter those messages, Penn State President Spanier has launched an

attack on excessive drinking on all 23 of the university's campuses. Here at the main State College campus with its roughly 40,000 students, he's created a task force of university officials, students and community representatives to combat the problem.

GRAHAM SPANIER: We need to get real about what the problem is. There is a population that most certainly should not be drinking, but we're talking about college students here.

SUSAN DENTZER: Spanier has also forged a partnership with Pennsylvania's State Liquor Control Board to devise ways to prevent students from binge-drinking. The effort represents an all-out attempt to change the culture at Penn State -- to discourage alcohol abuse and to afford students more social options that don't involve drinking. To date, no research has been undertaken to show whether such comprehensive strategies are effective. As a result, Penn State's experience is likely to be closely watched by specialists in promoting healthy behavior to see whether it can succeed. The strategy starts with an effort to change students' perceptions about alcohol well before they arrive on a Penn State campus.

GRAHAM SPANIER: From the moment a student is accepted to the university, they receive a letter from me We talk about the excessive consumption of alcohol in that letter and we tell them that if you're coming to Penn State principally for that reason, don't come. We'll refund your deposit.

SUSAN DENTZER: Other changes have come about because of research conducted by Penn State students themselves. Freshman Justin Zartman studied campus drinking as part of a political science course.

JUSTIN ZARTMAN: If students were to drink more at Penn State, or start drinking at Penn State, they started right away. They started that first weekend. So we made the suggestion to the administration, if they want to do alcohol-free activities, they should start right in the beginning and grab the students' attention.

SUSAN DENTZER: The result: Alcohol-free late-night programming every weekend at the Hub, Penn State's student center. Meanwhile, big changes are also underway atthe 88 fraternities and sororities catering to students at the State College campus. Senior Jami Totten heads the Panhellenic Council

representing 21 sororities.

JAMI TOTTEN: On a national level a lot of organizations are going to become substance free, which means they'll be moving their parties out of their fraternity houses, and moving to third party vendors. That way there will be somebody else taking on a lot of liability, somebody else will be checking ID's, putting on wristbands, there will be cash bars, there will be a lot more control of what goes on.

SUSAN DENTZER: The hope is that moving frat parties to more controlled settings will discourage excess alcohol use. In addition, under the influence of the Penn State task force, local bars are cracking down on excessive drinking and especially on underage drinking. Hal and Vince McCullough are the co-owners of Cafe 210, a popular nightspot near campus.

HAL McCULLOUGH: We will do whatever we can not to serve too much alcohol. We train our staff for many hours at a time in alcohol awareness.

VINCE McCULLOUGH: We show our staff the fake IDs and what to look for so that when they are carding individuals, they can identify which IDs are legal and which IDs are fake.

SUSAN DENTZER: But bars are in the business of making money, and kids will be kids. At a recent task force meeting, some members expressed frustration. Jerry Prater oversees emergency room admissions at nearby Centre Community Hospital.

JERRY PRATER: We've had three admissions for intensive care recently within the last couple of months for alcohol or drug use. I wish I could say the problem is better, but I don't believe that.

SUSAN DENTZER: The task force hopes that the tide will begin to turn next summer, when it plans to unveil more detailed recommendations to combat abusive drinking.

FOCUS - GETTING ONLINE

MARGARET WARNER: Finally tonight, online investing, and to Elizabeth Farnsworth in San Francisco.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The nation's largest full-service stock broker announced yesterday that it will offer a low-cost brokerage service for customers wanting to trade directly online.

SHOUTING ON FLOOR OF STOCK EXCHANGE: X-W-J!

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Merrill Lynch has long regarded the advice its more than 14,800 stockbrokers offer as the key to its success. Starting in December, Merrill Lynch customers can bypass the brokers and buy and sell online any time of day or night for $29.95 per trade. The company currently charges an average of $80 to $100 in commissions for regular trades. The new service will be available only to customers who have at least $20,000 in a Merrill account. With this move, Merrill Lynch joins discount traders like Charles Schwab and E-Trade and traditional brokerage firms like Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette and Morgan, Stanley, Dean Witter, which also offer Internet trading. Merrill Lynch's strategy reflects a boom in Internet use for financial services. More than seven million Americans already trade online and more than one-third of all individual trades take place in cyberspace.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: For more on this we turn to Joseph Nocera, editor at large at "Fortune" Magazine and author of the book "A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class;" and to John Battelle, president of the "Industry Standard," a weekly magazine that covers the business of the Internet. John Battelle, if I wanted to invest online with Merrill Lynch under this new program, how would I do it?

JOHN BATTELLE: Well, the first thing you're going to have to do is be online, which to many people is not simple. It's one of the reasons AOL got so big, because they made it easy. Once you get online, it's relatively easy to then, particularly if you're already a Merrill Lynch customer, transfer funds to the online brokerage and start trading.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But not yet, right, beginning in July?

JOHN BATTELLE: Beginning in July. And there are some restrictions on that. Then they're going to roll out in December. And this is definitely a reaction to the amazing success of some competitors that didn't exist two years ago.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And there are two programs. You can pay for it each trade, or you can pay a minimum of say $1,500 and then you get advice, right?

JOHN BATTELLE: Correct.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You can get advice from the brokers.

JOHN BATTELLE: You can get advice. They're not adding advice for the lowest cost, which in my opinion might be a mistake, because there's lots of advice for free now on the Internet.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And what's new about this? They did have program, a limited program online, right?

JOHN BATTELLE: Well, it was a very limited program where you could get access to your account and research for particular net-worthed individuals at Merrill. This is a roll-out and a real play to get to the broader market.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Joseph Nocera, what is behind this move? Why did Merrill Lynch do this?

JOSEPH NOCERA: Well, there's no question that Merrill feels pressured by the power of the Internet. And there are several events that you can think about. One is the incredible success Schwab made this move very quickly. They are a discount broker. They moved to the Internet quickly. And as of last December, they had a higher market capitalization in the stock market than Merrill Lynch. In other words, the stock market was saying Schwab is a more valuable company than Merrill Lynch. But the second reason is that Merrill Lynch has been losing customers to the Internet. Savvy customers who want to go that way, who feel that it's easy, who feel that they're flooded with information on the Internet just decide, why should I be spending $100 or $200 for trade when I this k do this trading myself cheaply. It also speaks, by the way, to the country's obsession with the market, which has played very much into the growth of the Internet. And Merrill Lynch doesn't want to lose out as Americans become, you know, just completely obsessed with the stock market.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Does this mean that brokers, John Battelle, will have much less of a role?

JOHN BATTELLE: Well, I think what it means, and certainly what Merrill Lynch has figured out with this move is that you have to disaggregate the selling process of selling stocks with the selling financial advice. And financial advice is one product. Another product is the ability to execute a stock transaction. With traditional brokerage houses, those two have been coupled. This is sort of the first step in uncoupling that and to actually leveraging for Merrill Lynch 14,000 people who know how the market works. It remains to be seen if they're actually going to be able to sell them distinct from their ability to create the transaction. That's the challenge for Merrill.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You mean sell them as advisers.

JOHN BATTELLE: As advisers, which is something that Schwab has done. And the E-trades of the world don't have a huge army of people to advise their customers. But they do have access to a lot of research, a lot of information and sort of that individualistic ability that Americans love to find out for yourself and make a decision and get the transaction done without a broker -- in the words of E-Trade -- getting in the way.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right. Joseph Nocera, what's the significance of this? This was on the front page of some of the major U.S. papers here. Why is this a big deal?

JOSEPH NOCERA: Well, for a lot of reasons. One is it's just the further proof that individual investors -- the world has changed over the last 20 years, and individual investors have taken more and more control over their financial life. And as that's happened, even though full-service brokerages have done extremely well, they can feel that their world is changing. It's changing partly because of the Internet and partly because of the attitude about individual investors towards buying and selling stocks. But the second reason is, Merrill -- this is a big company. This is a company that has almost a trillion dollars in assets of America's. It moves slowly. And it has for the last 50 years before a company that has been driven by one desire, which is we need to keep our brokers happy. This is a move that will infuriate and already has infuriated the 14,000 Merrill Lynch brokers. It's taking money of out of their pocket. And to me the real significance is, is that it shows the power of the Internet to force major profitable companies to change their ways to adapt, because you know in their hearts of hearts, Merrill really doesn't want to do this if it doesn't have to because it doesn't want to have to anger its own sales force. That to me is the real significance.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: John Battelle, you're nodding your head. Do you agree?

JOHN BATTELLE: Absolutely. I think that Merrill Lynch in many ways was a canary, and by that I mean that people were waiting for this to happen. They've been waiting for two years. Two years ago the vice chairman of Merrill Lynch got up before a industry conference and said bad idea; online trading is a bad idea; you're going to lose your shirts; you need an adviser; you need to be coupled to large, secure company like Merrill Lynch. We're never going to do this. This is a bad idea. Now, you know, they've come around. And I think for two years the industry -- the Internet industry has been waiting for that to happen. And when you see a big company like Merrill Lynch reacting this way, you've got to think, well, what's happening with the Mercks of the world, the Johnson & Johnson's, the Fords, you know, the big Fortune 50 companies and what their strategies are for success in a economy that is defined by the Internet opportunity as opposed to an economy defined by an industrial revolution. So there's that kind of a shift going on.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So you see this as going way beyond the securities industry?

JOHN BATTELLE: Absolutely. Every industry sector is being affected by the potential, the opportunity, and the threat of what the Internet represents and reacting to that is really on the minds of all corporate CEO's right now.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Joseph Nocera, you've written a lot about the history of this. And you said the way people invest individually has changed. Why? And how does it relate to this?

JOSEPH NOCERA: Well, one reason it's changed is because we've been in a bull market since 1982. And you know, people who didn't care much about the stock market in the 1970's and even in the early 80's have gradually become more and more interested in the stock market. And I think what you've seen in the last four or five years is an obsession with the stock market that borders on the unhealthy. I mean, I know in my little town that live in, you know, I can't walk down the street without having a conversation with somebody about the stock market. I think that is part of it. There are, you know, in terms of history, I mean, basically, in the old days, you had no choice. You had to go to your broker. It was a controlled world. And the broker had the power. And the only way you could buy stocks was to go to a broker, to pay a full-service commission to get his "advice." In fact, there were -- federal securities law says that a broker is not allowed to make a trade for you unless he understands your needs. The rise of discount brokering in the 70's is a hugely important event because it was the first time individual investors could break away from the broker and do it themselves. And Schwab has built on the whole idea of do it yourself. Along comes the Internet. And it gives you a new way, an easier way, and actually a more private way even when you think about it to do it yourself. And what it's enabled people to do is roll out of bed, watch CNBC, you know, squawk box, trade - you know -- start putting in their trades at 9:30. Lunchtime comes, you know, make a few more trades. At the end of the day, make a few trades. And we've even gotten to the point, which I think is a little insane, that the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ are now going to open for evening sessions so they that people can trade stocks at night. And you start to think of yourself, well, you start to think to yourself, when are people going to have time to live their lives if all they're going to do is spend their time trading stocks. But that's the point where we are right now.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. Other than that, not having time to live our lives, what's the downside to this? There's always the worry about the online trading adding to the volatility of the stock market, right? What else?

JOHN BATTELLE: Well, I don't think there's any question it's added to the volatility. I think overall that's a good thing, in the overall scheme of things. However, you know, the fact is, you can come in with a lot of money and lose a lot of money very quickly now, as easily as you can gain a lot of money. So the downside is that potentially a lot of poem can come and get into something they don't understand. That was Merrill Lynch's position two years ago. I think that fundamentally there is a sound - you know -- opinion there, which is, you don't want to get into this stuff without knowing what you're doing. You do need good sound financial advice, or you need to do your own studying and play with money that you can afford to risk. Nothing has changed in that matter. The Internet doesn't change that formula. It just makes the barrier to entry less of a hurdle.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Uh-huh. And, Mr. Nocera, just in a few seconds we have left, the down side?

JOSEPH NOCERA: Well, you know, basically, people at this point think that investing is easy, because the market has just gone up. And the Internet makes it feel even easier and makes people feel even smarter because their stocks are going up. At some point, stocks are going to go down, I don't know when. And when they do, people will realize this is a lot harder than it looks.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right. Well, thank you both very much.

JOHN BATTELLE: Thank you.

JOSEPH NOCERA: Thank you.

RECAP

MARGARET WARNER: Again, the major stories of this Wednesday: An American Airlines passenger jet crash-landed in Little Rock, killing eight passengers and the pilot.President Clinton said the U.S. would commit 7,000 troops to a NATO peacekeeping force for Kosovo, and Russian and European diplomats presented Yugoslav President Milosevic with a plan for ending the conflict there. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Margaret Warner. Thank you, and good night.