The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Good evening. I'm Elizabeth Farnsworth. Jim Lehrer is on vacation. On the NewsHour tonight fallouts from the embassy bombing, we have a Newsmaker interview with Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, also Phil Ponce on the Yangtze flood, Spencer Michels on junk E-mail, and a David Gergen dialogue about money and morality in America. It all follows our summary of the news this Wednesday.% ? NEWS SUMMARY

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The president of Kenya announced arrests today in the U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi. Daniel Arap Moi provided few details in a short written statement. He said a number of people were detained. At the bomb site the search for survivors ended. We have more in this report from Paul Davies of Independent Television News.

PAUL DAVIES, ITN: Refusing to give up until all hope had gone, the rescue teams finally reached the woman who'd become a focus for their whole operation. Tiny cameras peered beneath the rubble where the woman known as "Rose" had been heard alive only yesterday. But rescue had arrived too late.

MAJOR AVI SHACHAR, Israeli Army Rescue Worker: We really tried to save her, but, unfortunately, we didn't make it.

PAUL DAVIES: The Rose became the 244th victim of Friday's Nairobi bombing. Her husband was escorted through the security cordon to be told her courageous fight for life had been lost. This morning they uncovered a large safe, which it's believed protected Rose from the initial collapse of the building. Emergency workers freely admit her death has left them despondent. With no hope now of finding more survivors, the international rescue teams are packing up, emphasis switching to the hunt for the bombers. What is left of the truck that carried the explosives has been taken away. Forensic scientists hope even in this state it could contain clues that will identify those responsible.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Also at the embassy site today there was a ceremony in honor of the victims. U.S. Ambassador Prudence Bushnell attended. She was slightly injured in Friday's blast. Red roses were laid on a mound of broken concrete adorned with wreaths-a makeshift memorial. In Germany, Secretary of State Albright prepared to escort home the bodies of ten of the twelve Americans killed. And in Washington, seven of the injured arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, where they were welcomed by Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering. We'll get an update on the bombings from him right after the News Summary. On Wall Street today stocks fought back from yesterday's loss. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 90 points at 8552.96. It had fallen Tuesday, after markets in Japan and Russia tumbled. They were off again today, as were indexes in Hong Kong and Singapore. Earthquakes shook Northern California today. Two tremors werecentered 90 miles South of San Francisco near the town of Hollister. The first measured 3.0 on the Richter Scale. The second followed a few minutes later, measuring 5.4. In downtown San Francisco buildings swayed, items fell off store shelves, and at least three new cracks appeared in Highway 101, the major North-South artery in the state. No injuries or major damage were reported. There was a failed launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida, today. An unmanned Air Force rocket carrying a spy satellite blew up about 40 seconds after liftoff, showering debris over the Atlantic Ocean. No one was hurt. The military said rocket fuel released by the explosion was not dangerous, but pieces of the wreckage should be considered hazardous and should not be handled by the public. The surveillance device on board, reportedly, was worth $1 billion. An Air Force official spoke at a news conference.

GEN. RANDY STARBUCK, United States Air Force: I can tell you that we will do everything we can to recover as much information, whatever way it is, so that the mishap board will have that to analyze during their investigation.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Salvage experts are scheduled to begin tomorrow. Officials said that may turn up clues to the cause of the failure. Overseas today Serb forces continued to tighten their grip on Kosovo. They retook rebel strongholds in the western part of the province. Serbs and ethnic Albanians said the combat was some of the fiercest they've seen. Fighting was house-to-house in Glodjane, with Serb troops backed by heavy artillery. There was no official tally of dead and wounded. Media reports say anywhere from a few to a dozen combatants were killed. Serbs also attacked the key Albanian town of Junik, trapping about 2,000 people, fighters and civilians. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had told foreign diplomats that village would be spared. In Iraq today a government-run newspaper said lifting United Nations sanctions is the only way to end the ongoing dispute over weapons inspections. The statement appeared in the newspaper run by President Saddam Hussein's son. It is often used to issue official proclamations. The statement also said Iraq will not agree to any more compromises or partial settlements. In New York, Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector Richard Butler said Iraq's refusal to cooperate has now brought disarmament work to a halt. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the latest on the embassy bombings, the Yangtze floods, the plague of junk E-mail, and a David Gergen dialogue.% ? FOCUS - AFRICA BOMBINGS

NEWSMAKER

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: First tonight, a Newsmaker interview with Thomas Pickering, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. I spoke with him earlier today.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Thank you very much for being with us, Mr. Ambassador.

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING, Undersecretary of State: Thank you for having me.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You briefed the President today about the bombings. Could you tell us as much as possible about exactly what happened in the Nairobi bombing, beginning there, please.

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: Well, I can tell you a little bit, but, as you know, we're engaged in an investigation and I and all of my colleagues want to be careful to preserve the integrity of that process and, indeed, we believe we owe the American public a period of silence on this, so that we can get the best possible work done and bring the culprits to justice. We do know that vehicle bombs exploded in both places near a common time last Friday morning. And we do know that, of course, they wreaked great destruction, particularly in Nairobi, which was in the downtown center of the city. We have at least one story that our entrance gate in Nairobi in the back of the embassy a guard saw trucks-a truck, I'm sorry, come up, seemingly circle. Someone got out, threatened him, apparently with a hand grenade, he ran away; a hand grenade was thrown. Apparently, there may have been shots and then the vehicle exploded, and this guard survived to tell us the story. That story is being checked, but we have talked about that. In Dar Es Salaam apparently the explosion took place in the street outside the embassy, and as you have seen from the pictures, somewhere near an embassy water tanker, which was thrown into the building. We had, obviously, heavy casualties in both places among our own people and among Kenyans and Tanzanians. We are working very hard to get them support and assistance. The rescue phase is apparently now over, or almost over. And we are deeply engaged in supporting people in the region to the greatest extent we can with medical supplies, with medical teams, with blood, with antibiotics, and all the things that are obviously needed in a country like Kenya, which has suffered many thousands of casualties, some of them very, very serious, and obviously still under intensive medical care.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: On the arrests, Kenya's president announced the arrest of a number of suspects in Nairobi today. Can you say how many and who?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: I can't either. We know of the announcement. Again, our people on the ground, coordinating with the Kenyans, and they've been working very closely together, as they have with Tanzania, will be involved in that. And we understand that if people are arrested, we will all have an opportunity to speak to them. That kind of cooperation is taking place in the investigation. We think it's truly superb, and we're very grateful for it.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You're talking about cooperation between the FBI and the Kenyan authorities?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: That's correct.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So the FBI has access to them?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: And between the FBI and the Tanzanian authorities.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The FBI has access to suspects in both countries?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: We have been promised full access, and we will be working very, very closely with our colleagues in those countries.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. On the question of warnings, as you probably know, Ha'aretz, the Israeli newspaper, reported today that Israel had advised U.S. officials to treat with skepticism a warning that they had received, that the U.S. embassy in Nairobi had been threatened. Can you confirm that?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: Let me say a couple of things. In the nature of the Ha'aretz report, which I know about, is something that apparently passed in intelligence channels, along with the law enforcement issue, the intelligence is directly related to the investigation. And it's not something again that I would want to comment upon at this stage. I can tell you, as we have said a number of times, that we get 30,000 warnings, threats a year. We take them all seriously. We look into them. We evaluate them. Apparently, the Israelis, according to the press report, evaluated this one. We would, of course, if we received anything from anybody, take it very seriously, look into it, attempt to evaluate it, and attempt to take it into account immediately in our security posture. We are doing that now with warnings we're continuing to receive, as you know, all around the world.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Yes. Actually, I want to get into that, but first, did Ambassador Bushnell, our ambassador in Nairobi, ask for an upgrade of security there several months ago?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: I think she said today that she had asked for a number of things and that they were done. The one thing that obviously we were all concerned about in Nairobi and in many, many other locations around the world was our ability to pick up the embassy and move it to a site that was further from the street. This was not possible. It was something that we would have liked to have done and wish we could have done in many, many places. But again, as we have said many times, the costs involved in those kinds of reconstructions or relocations of embassy buildings in new places were not possible to obtain. The president, of course, has been asking for funds for this kind of thing, more funds from the State Department in general and for security, in particular. We haven't always gotten everything we wanted. We understand now that people on the Hill are anxious to try to be helpful, and we're obviously anxious to try to benefit from that help as quickly as we can.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But does the State Department have a specific request for Congress ready now?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: The State Department has very good ideas and has for a long period of time about what it believes is needed and is working on that and will continue to work on that.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I believe in the current budget request, there's a request for a certain amount of money, not very much money, but that will be upgraded definitely.

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: Well, I think that if we're asked, and I can certainly confirm that we are looking at it, we will have clear and cogent and prioritized ideas about the kind of things that would be necessary, yes.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Mr. Ambassador, there were recommendations made in 1985, as you know, by the Inman-Admiral Inman's commission for certain upgrades in embassies, certain embassies to be moved, embassies should be 100 meters from the street, that sort of thing. Were those upgrades not made because of lack of money, lack of congressional granting of money, or because the State Department made decisions that it wasn't really necessary after all?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: I think that we want to look at this particular question very carefully. Admiral Inman made a series of recommendations, I understand. Cost figures that have been given to me in the budgets in which those recommendations were made were somewhere between 3 1/2 and 4 billion dollars to do the whole program. The Department began that process by asking for something around 2 1/2, 2.7 billion dollars, less than I think 30 percent of that was finally obtained from the Congress, and so immediately we were handicapped in replacing the embassies, all of the embassies we wanted to replace, and so we started to replace those that we felt were of highest priority to replace, those in the highest threat areas. And we have continued that program. I think twenty or twenty-five such embassies have already been built. And it was part of an ongoing program. So we asked for money. We are trying to replace those embassies. And we of necessity had to exercise judgments about priorities when all of the money was not forthcoming immediately. And, indeed, it was not envisaged that it would all be forthcoming immediately, but it was not certainly in my humble judgment forthcoming and as rapidly as we would have liked to have seen it.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How will you make judgments about priorities now, in the future, knowing that an embassy which is not considered a high terrorist possibility is a soft target and could be hit like Nairobi was in Dar Es Salaam?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: Well, there are many ways to do it, some of the voices trying to evaluate in a consistent and constant basis what is happening in the region, what is happening in the city in which the embassy is located. Judgments about threats are constantly reviewed and reevaluated. Each year every one of our embassies in consulates around the world must submit a review of its own security, balanced against the threats that it knows about in its region. Those are reviewed in Washington and changes made. There are many, many steps that have been taken in many, many embassies around the world, whatever the level of threat, because we want them all to meet a minimum standard, if I could put it that way, of absolute necessity to defend themselves against a wide range of terrorist attacks. Bombs, unfortunately, are not the only way. There have been armed attacks on embassies and so on and so we're attempting to keep all of those in mind. We will have to exercise priorities on the conjunction, I would say it this way, between the vulnerability and exposure of the embassy and its staff and the level of threat involved in the region. As we evaluate it, we'll have to constantly keep that in mind. These things are not static, as you've said. I wish we could defend all of our embassies in consulates equally well everywhere, and we would be out of the problem of presenting a soft target. But we have to watch and we have to move our support around as much as we can and we have to be sure at the outset that everybody meets the minimum requirements.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I believe the State Department reported today that there are threats in Egypt, Malaysia, and Yemen that could include a tax on embassies, is that right?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: I think we said Egypt and Malaysia and Eritrea.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Have those embassies been closed?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: No. We're not in the business, Elizabeth, of closing embassies. Closure of embassies implies that we down tools and walk away, and that only of course hands our adversaries in this war against terrorism a victory, and we're not interested in that, and it means that the U.S. role in a leadership of foreign policy around the world and so many areas would be amputated, decapitated, cut off. What we have done and what we will continue to do is to tune the working rhythm of our embassies to meet the threat. If areas are threatened, we can move people. If we have to slow down service to the public, we will do that, but we will not close and we will remain always there and ready and able to do the emergency services that have to be performed, unless the threat of war were to drive us out, as it has, unfortunately, in a few places, in Africa in recent months. But our work, our funding, our security preparations are designed to permit us to continue to play the role. And our people out there are our first line of America, and we believe that they're there to do a job; they should stay on the job; and they should receive the maximum protection we can give them to do that, not close.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So if some of those embassies were reported to have been closed, that was only temporary?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: Absolutely. And there may have been a suspension of services to the public for a while. But ambassadors-and I've been one a few times-are on duty 24 hours a day-they don't close. They don't walk away from their jobs. They're always available, and their staffs are available. And on occasion when we can't work out of the building, we can work out of homes, we can do a lot of things to keep up the flow of information, to keep up our flow of contacts, and to support and help our people in distress.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Amb. Pickering, before we go, a question about Iraq. As you know, Chief UN Weapons Inspector Richard Butler and his counterpart in the International Atomic Energy Agency in letters that were released today to the president of the Security Council at the UN said that essentially they can't do their jobs anymore; that the end of cooperation by the Iraqi authorities makes it impossible to do a large part of what they're supposed to do there. What has to be done about that now? What should be done?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: Elizabeth, the next step--and we've already heard from New York that a number of members of the Security Council are deeply disturbed-we join them in that-that they will want to have a meeting very, very quickly to examine this. We believe that the Security Council needs to take steps to make it clear to Iraq that this is unacceptable, that it is in contravention of the resolution, that the Iraqis have constantly sought a relief from sanctions, and that the steps that they have taken and the reports that have been made by the head of the IEEA and of the UN's Special Commission are very clearly-I think--going to convince the Security Council, if it's not already convinced, that there can be no sanctions relief, and, indeed, that the review of sanctions cannot go ahead until Iraq comes in compliance. In the meantime, of course, our policy with respect to Iraq is very clear. It's a threat to peace and security in the region. Should it take an active role in threatening that, reconstituting its weapons of mass destruction, we are prepared to use what is necessary to deal with those kinds of problems. We have a very clear view that it is a Security Council responsibility, that it is an attack now on the United Nations, if I could phrase it that way, to fail to comply. The Secretary-General has sent his envoy to Iraq. We will, of course, look forward to hearing from him. But the first step and the most immediate step is Iraq should get into compliance, come back into compliance, and should Iraq take more steps, should Iraq become a larger threat, we are prepared, as Secretary Cohen said over the weekend, with forces in the Gulf, with considerably more power than they had the last time, to deal with those emergencies should they arise. In the past, he has played a game, a kind of cat and mouse game, a game of perhaps seeking to get American forces into the region and then coming into compliance. We are not playing that game any longer it's very clear. We are there. We are out there. We are forceful. We will take steps at the time and place of our choosing, when they're necessary. But in the meantime, we believe it is the Security Council's role as a first step to getting back into compliance and the major thing he has to do now is something he hasn't done since the very beginning-disclose his weapons of mass destruction programs--get on with the United Nations resolutions and their compliance.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Can you explain the difference in the U.S. response in this crisis, as opposed to January, February, March, when U.S. spokespeople, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, said if Iraq doesn't come into compliance with UN resolutions, we will use force. And forces were sent. That's not happening now. Why?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS PICKERING: Forces are there. It's extremely important to understand that. It's no less urgent that he come into compliance. It is extremely important that the United Nations continue to act and to act in concert. We're working to do that. As we did in the prior confrontation, we are going to do everything we can to make diplomacy work. That is very clear, and I think that hunting for differences now would be a mistake. It is very clear that our objectives remain the same; our policy remains the same. We're going to try to use diplomacy and the work of the Security Council to end this confrontation between Iraq and the Security Council.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Amb. Pickering, thank you very much for being with us.% ? UPDATE - YANGTZE FLOODING

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the Yangtze floods, junk E-mail, and a Gergen dialogue. Phil Ponce has the flood story.

PHIL PONCE: Central China is accustomed to flooding. Every year monsoons come to the region from June through September. But this year's flooding of the Yangtze River is the worst in recent memory. The nearly 4,000-mile-long river is the world's third longest. Since this year's rains began, more than 2,000 people have died and almost 14 million people left homeless. An estimated 12 million acres of crops have been destroyed. Two hundred forty million Chinese, almost equal to the population of the United States, have been somehow affected by the floods. Treetops are all that can be seen of entire villages. Authorities say it will cost billions of dollars to repair the damage. On Sunday, the Chinese government tried to control the rising river by blowing up several dikes. The result: Water spread out along the flood plains and lowered the river table. This saved Wuhan, an industrial city of 7 million people in the Huber Province, but it also destroyed many smaller towns along the river. Some refugees of this year's flooding are old enough to remember the floods of 1954, which killed 30,000 people.

MA XIUGU: (speaking through interpreter) The water came, and my house was destroyed. I had to get out. There's no way to live there. When I was eight in 1954, there was another massive flood like this one. Now, I'm over 50, and it has happened again.

PHIL PONCE: Four years ago, construction began on the controversial Three Gorges Dam, a project aimed in part at controlling the river. But the dam won't be finished until at least the year 2009. For now, thousands of homeless people are living in tent cities of plastic lean-tos, which have sprung up along the riverbank. Six hundred thousand soldiers from the People's Liberation Army and hundreds of thousands of civilians have been mobilized to reinforce the dikes with sandbags and sacks of straw. Officials have mounted a massive relief effort to bring food, water, and medicine to the flood victims. The United States Air Force sent two cargo planes of essential supplies to the southern province of Hunan this week. And nature is not expected to relent anytime soon. The Yangtze is expected to remain swollen for several more weeks, and officials fear more rain will trigger yet another flood crest.

PHIL PONCE: We're now joined by David Lampton, director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He's also director of China Studies at the Nixon Center, a think tank in Washington; Lester Brown, president of Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization, and author of the book "Who Will Feed China?," and Yu Shuning is the spokesperson for the Chinese embassy here in Washington. Gentlemen, welcome.Mr. Yu, what is the latest in the fight against the flood and in helping the victims?

YU SHUNING, Chinese Embassy: Well, the situation is still very serious. In the last day or two the water levels at various places along the Yangtze dropped a little bit. But, as I understand, because of the heavy rainfall in the Three Gorges area, the fifth flood crest is forming. So we are still very much on alert to continue our fight against the flood.

PHIL PONCE: So there have been four flood crests so far, and you're expecting a fifth.

YU SHUNING: Yes.

PHIL PONCE: Would you say that-would you say that the country is holding its own, is the country losing the battle? How would you describe that?

YU SHUNING: So far, we have been successful in containing the waters along the Yangtze. Of course, there was some breach. For instance, in the city of Jujung levee but with joint efforts by the civilians and the PLA officers and soldiers-

PHIL PONCE: People's Liberation Army?

YU SHUNING: Yes. People's Liberation Army-two dikes were actually built inside the city, itself, so the situation is stabilizing.

PHIL PONCE: Is that the main problem, whether or not some of these levees are strong enough to hold, to withstand the pressure?

YU SHUNING: Anyway, they are very much on the alert. They are trying to fortify these dikes to get ready for new crests.

PHIL PONCE: Prof. Lampton, you lived in the area that's affected. Tell us a little bit about the area and why it's important to China.

DAVID LAMPTON, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies: Well, the river is complex, and there are different stages of the river, but basically it's a very broad river. In many places it's a mild wide, but going through the Three Gorges, it narrows considerably. Sometimes it spreads out and goes through lakes and other holding ponds. The area is a very hot area in China, so the people that are now displaced-and you're talking about 1 percent of the Chinese population displaced at this point and many living on dikes are in tremendous heat and humidity, and so one of the attributes of this area is not just the water, but the tough physical environment that people are having to put up with you can expect, I think, despite the best efforts of China's health authorities, water born disease, sewage disposal problems, and everything that goes with that, so this is an extraordinary problem the Chinese are facing.

PHIL PONCE: And from what you can tell, how good of a job is the government doing in responding to that?

DAVID LAMPTON: This is a mammoth thing that we're talking about. We're talking about 20 percent of the Chinese people affected in one way or another, 40 percent of China's gross value of industrial and agricultural outlet, 30 percent of its population I think by any fair estimation you'd have to say the Chinese government is doing rather well. I would have to say too foreign press have not been allowed into the area, and I think it'll be probably months before the outside world fully understands and probably the Chinese authorities, themselves, fully understands what's happening in some of the more remote areas.

PHIL PONCE: I'd like to get back to Mr. Yu on the issue of foreign press coverage and accessibility, but Mr. Brown, first of all, in your estimation, is this primarily a problem of nature, or are there some manmade contributions to this flooding?

YU SHUNING: China always has floods. The intensity varies, and there are always floods in this river basin. The thing we have to realize is there are 400 million people living in the river basin. I don't know Americans can even begin to understand how much pressure there is on land resources there. In this country we'd have to take the entire U.S. population, squeeze it East of the Mississippi River and multiply it by five to get a feel for the density of population in the inhabited region of China, which is mostly Eastern and Southern China.

PHIL PONCE: And that density and that population creates what kinds of pressures that might contribute to the flooding?

LESTER BROWN, Worldwatch Institute: For example, just making room for people means a lot of deforestation. 85 percent of the original forests covering the river basin is no longer there. So the capacity of the land to absorb and hold water has been greatly reduced as the population has built up over the generations. The other thing that we have to keep in mind is not only are there not trees and forests there to hold the water and to absorb it anymore, but there's an enormous amount of construction. The average size family in China is about 3.8 people, less than 4. And you have 400 million people living in that river basin. That's 100 million homes, if you can sort of try to imagine that number. In addition, there are a lot of factories. I would guess that easily 50 million of the 400 million people are in the industrial work force. The average size factory in China employs in the private sector less than 100 people, so we're looking at 500,000 factories, and when you get this much building, plus streets and roads and so forth, you have a lot of areas that can't absorb water at all, everything runs off, so when you have on the one hand less forest cover, in fact, very little forest cover left, and on the other hand, a lot of building, the runoff potential is enormous, and it will become even more so, and in the future, as industrialization progresses.

PHIL PONCE: Mr. Yu, how about that, too much development, too much deforestation?

YU SHUNING: Actually, no, because as I see it, the disaster is more from Mother Nature, because, as we know, at first we had El Nino. Now we're having the effects of La Nina, so because of the very heavy rainfall from this year much earlier than the last years, the river levels are very high, it's places they reached record highs.

PHIL PONCE: So you're saying it's primarily a function of nature, not so much of what has been manmade or allowed by the government. How do you respond to Prof. Lampton's concern, or the issue he raised, that there isn't enough access necessarily on the part of the press to some of the areas, the concern being that things are much worse than the Chinese government is allowing people to see?

YU SHUNING: I'm not aware of any restrictions imposed on foreign press. As a matter of fact, we have so many shots, as we have seen, we have so many stories in the papers and over the TV screen, so I think the foreign journalists still have access to the areas hit by the floods. Of course, the reporting, I think, the coverage should be done in an orderly way, so I'm not aware of any restrictions, myself.

PHIL PONCE: Prof. Lampton, what are your thoughts on the issue of flooding some of the countryside in order to "save the cities?"

DAVID LAMPTON: Well, I've thought about the kind of political problem the Chinese have. They have this crest of water surging down this, in effect, canyon-like areas, and imagine the Mississippi River rising and between Illinois and Missouri, and this national government has to decide do we blow the retaining walls on the Missouri side, or the Illinois side to save St. Louis? And imagine the kind of political, economic, industrial, imagine what Sen. Ashcroft from Missouri versus Moseley Braun would think about that decision, so a fascinating part of this whole story is how to decide who is going to pay the price, because in a flood in China and particularly in the Yangtze River, you are talking about where to put cubic miles of water, spatially thinking of a cube of water a mile high, wide, deep, and where do you place that in an area that's as densely populated and constructed, as Mr. Brown just said? That is a huge political problem.

PHIL PONCE: Mr. Yu, how does the government make that decision?

YU SHUNING: Well, it's a difficult decision to make, but we have to do that as a last resort. As we say, we have already relocated 13.8 million people to safety.

PHIL PONCE: Those people can't be very happy about having their countryside flooded.

YU SHUNING: But in order to make the whole-overall interest of the country as a center, the presence they know-this is the best choice for the country. Besides, they will be compensated fully by the government, and secondly, their livelihood will be guaranteed. For instance, they will be provided with shelter, with clothing, daily necessities, and the government will see to it that every citizen, every locatee will have 1/2 a kilo of grain a day. So on the whole, the peasants are supportive of the measures the government has to take.

PHIL PONCE: Mr. Brown, your reaction to that.

LESTER BROWN: It's a tough political decision, and it's sort of rural, small town versus big town. And as David was indicating, we actually had to make some of these decisions in '93, when the Mississippi was in record flood stage, and there are no indecisions. They're tough. The Chinese have a lot of experience with dealing with floods. But I do think that the-and I think they do remarkably well. I mean, they really mobilize in a way that we can't even imagine. I mean, there are literally millions of people working to maintain the levees and watching them. They're spaced every so many yards apart. It's a remarkable mobilization that they've developed over the years. At the same time I think there is a very strong hand of man involved in the flooding, and it's not easily avoidable. When you have this many people in such a small area, you're going to have an increase in runoff, and you can't retain all the forests and have all the people both. So it's a tough one.

PHIL PONCE: I'm afraid we're all out of time. Gentlemen, thank you all very much.% ? FOCUS - E-MAIL JUNK

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Next, getting rid of Internet junk mail. Spencer Michels reports.WOMAN: Don't you want your eight-year-old daughter, you know, downloading this in her E-mail box and opening it?

SPENCER MICHELS: Like millions of Americans who use their computers to send and receive electronic messages or E-mail on the Internet, California Assemblywoman Debra Bowen is annoyed by unwanted advertisements, mail she considers trash.

DEBRA BOWEN, California Assemblywoman: This is the list of E-mail that's come into my account on America OnLine in the last day and a half, and you can get a sense of it. "Get a college degree in six months, really," and then we get into this stuff, "Hot studs," "Check out these celebrities." This is the kind of stuff that I think really annoys people.

SPENCER MICHELS: I thought AOL was supposed to filter this stuff.

DEBRA BOWEN: They claim to filter it, but you can see how much impact it has.

SPENCER MICHELS: Unsolicited junk E-mail is booming. America OnLine, the largest provider of Internet service, says it must deal with up to 4.2 million pieces of it a day. Some is eliminated but much gets through. The junk messages range from selling a product to get-rich-quick schemes to pornography. Adult E-mail like this appeared in the computer mailbox of an 11-year-old boy. Internet service providers say their members, regardless of age, are getting jammed with junk.

GLEE CADY, Netcom: We have individual subscribers, company subscribers-

SPENCER MICHELS: Glee Cady, senior director at Netcom, one of those Internet service providers, or ISP's, says members complain often about the garbage in their mailboxes.

GLEE CADY: They most frequently complain about that which is directed to adult-oriented material showing up in a mailbox where a young child can see it.

SPENCER MICHELS: Netcom also tries, with limited success, to eliminate the unwanted material. Netcom estimates it spends $1 million a month trying to do that. And those costs are then passed on to subscribers.

GLEE CADY: We think that maybe of your $24.95 or your $19.95 costs, as much as 10 percent of that might be going to our processing Spam to keep it our of your mailbox.

SPENCER MICHELS: Spam? That usually refers to a meat product made by Hormel, but the name Spam has been hijacked, much to Hormel's dismay, to describe how these mass E-mail ads pollute the Internet.

GLEE CADY: It came from a Monte Python sketch.

SKETCH: Could I have egg, bacon, Spam, and sausage without the Spam?

GLEE CADY: There was a wonderful, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam skit.

(SPAM SKIT)

SPENCER MICHELS: How do you know that that's where it came from?

GLEE CADY: It's an Internet legend.

SPENCER MICHELS: The legend is that, like Monte Python's Vikings chanting "Spam," electronic Spam drowns out all other voices. Virtually anyone with a computer can send Spam around the globe. Much the same as home addresses, E-mail addresses are often sold, and they're cheap. Lists of millions of E-mail addresses can be purchased for around $50 or even list. And since bulk advertising on the Internet is so easy, it has some appeal even to legitimate businesses. For example, the founders of Virtual Vineyards, a Palo Alto firm that sells wine and gift baskets to thousands of customers on the Internet, flirted briefly with mass E-mail solicitations. Robert Olson says he was not happy with the outcome.

ROBERT OLSON, Virtual Vineyards: We have twice used lists. This was a couple of years ago with a partner who told us that all of these people had agreed to receive E-mail from companies such as ours. That attempt had two major problems with it. One is it didn't turn out very many customers and second, we got a staggering amount of hate mail back from people who were on the list who wanted to know how come they were receiving these solicitations. We've never done it since.

SPENCER MICHELS: One of the major problems with eliminating Spam is the fact that often it is difficult to determine who is sending it. Many Spammers use false return addresses and fake company or domain names. J. D. Falk is a Spam detective of sorts. He works for Critical Path, a San Francisco company that manages E-mail for large organizations, and his job is to track where Spam originates.

J. D. FALK, Critical Path: The majority of repeat Spammers that we see are trying to sell software so that you can go out and be a Spammer.

SPENCER MICHELS: Some Internet service providers like America OnLine have banned individual Spammers from using their network. But Falk says that most people who send junk mail are unaware of the cost to the recipient and to the ISP.

J. D. FALK: Most are misguided. They just haven't really thought about the impact of what they're doing. Some of them-they continue doing it after they've thought about the impact, and they are the textbook definition of a sociopath.

SPENCER MICHELS: Really, a sociopath? A guy who's trying to make a living?

J. D. FALK: They get beyond trying to do it for a living. It gets to be kind of a revenge thing for a lot of them, where they've been kicked off of ISP after ISP, they know that nobody wants it, they know that they are disrupting society, and they keep doing it, and that's the definition of a sociopath.

SPENCER MICHELS: Almost all E-mail users find Spam annoying, but some people think it could ultimately cause the death of the Internet. Carey Heckman directs Stanford's Law & Technology program.

CAREY HECKMAN, Stanford Law School: I think the biggest danger is it would grow to the point where it would use up a lot of the capacity of the Internet that would change the costs, increase costs by a great deal, and basically people would stop using Internet. It would say this is just a place with a lot of advertising; it's not really useful communication.

SPENCER MICHELS: Eric Allman wants to make sure the Internet does not become obsolete because of Spam. He founded the California company Sendmail, which makes software to facilitate E-mail. Allman developed a program that attempts to filter out suspicious mass mailings.

ERIC ALLMAN, Sendmail: So, for example, if I get mail from, you know, Tammy, I don't know anyone named Tammy, I probably don't want to accept that, I reject mail from hosts that simply don't exist, so Spammers use fake domain names so that when you try and complain to them, there's nobody to complain to.

SPENCER MICHELS: But Allman says his Spam filters can't catch it all.

ERIC ALLMAN: There's lots of Spam out there, and it is an arm's race. As we get better, they get better. People comply lists of Spammers; they try and create fingerprints of what Spam looks like. There are some attempts to do artificial intelligence to guess when something's pornographic. I don't think that's likely to work. It's hard to tell.

SPENCER MICHELS: Besides, according to Assemblywoman Bowen, the Spammers actively look for ways to foil filters.

DEBRA BOWEN: I wondered at some point why all these porno people couldn't spell, and I realized they're deliberately misspelling these words to get around the porn filters.

SPENCER MICHELS: As lawmakers have become more technologically adept and as they have received more and more complaints, some of them have been introducing bills to curtail Spam. In Congress and in several states, including here in California, laws have been proposed to attack the problem on several fronts. In California, Assemblywoman Bowen has introduced a bill to make sure residents can have their name removed from a Spammer's mailing list.

DEBRA BOWEN: It's the same thing we do with junk mail that goes through your U.S. Postal Service mailbox. You can get off the mailing list, and you can also get off a telephone solicitation list, although I think most people don't know that.

SPENCER MICHELS: And you believe that your legislation could stop this person from sending this kind of thing?

DEBRA BOWEN: It's a misdemeanor under the bill if you E-mail to someone who has opted out. So there's actuallyjail time possible. But the other thing that's important that you just highlighted is that we require that people give their true return address.

GARY MILLER, California Assemblyman: We're trying to say you should not be forced to pay for something you don't want in your home. And that's what's happening today.

SPENCER MICHELS: Assemblyman Gary Miller has another bill that allows the Internet service providers to ban Spam and to sue those who send it. Under Miller's bill the ISP's could sue Spammers for up to $15,000 every day they send Spam.

GARY MILLER: It puts the provider into a situation where they can go to court and have legal recourse against Spammers. I don't want the state to get involved in the Internet. I don't want to limit freedom of speech. But I want reasonable controls placed in the hands of people who own private property. And that's what we're trying to do.

SPENCER MICHELS: Although there has been little opposition to either bill, Ann Brick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, is concerned that what legislators are doing will limit freedom of speech.

ANN BRICK, American Civil Liberties Union: Well, commercial speech has value. It's protected by the First Amendment. And that's because what may be junk mail to me could very well be important, useful information to you. And that's a decision that the individual should be making. But it isn't a decision that the government ought to be making for us and it isn't a decision that Internet service providers ought to be making either, because what we're talking about here is commerce in ideas.

GARY MILLER: Well, if empowering the citizens and justifying their principal rights, I believe, constitutionally of private property, and the right they have to not receive pornographic literature if they don't want to receive it, if doing that is limiting freedom of speech, I think that's a far stretch to justify.

SPENCER MICHELS: But the ACLU position gets support from Robert Olson at Virtual Vineyards, who deplores the Spam on his computer, but, nonetheless, fears the state's involvement.

ROBERT OLSON: I am uncomfortable with government intervention in what I consider to be personal freedoms like that. We work in the alcoholic beverage industry, and it's a very highly regulated area. Not all the regulations are designed to protect consumers. Many of them are designed to protect other individuals. It's easy to start out with good intentions in regulation and end up destroying some fundamental personal right.

SPENCER MICHELS: And even some of those who support regulation don't expect it to work at the state level.

ROBERT OLSON: It's so unrelated to the nature of this technology, this is a global technology, the best answer is going to be a combination of some federal government action, perhaps even some international agreements, combined with industry getting together and agreeing on some basic practices.

SPENCER MICHELS: Nevertheless, both California bills are expected to become law later this summer. The U.S. Congress is considering similar measures at the federal level, but it's unclear when they'll be acted upon.% ? DIALOGUE

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Finally tonight a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages writer Patricia O'Toole, author of "Money and Morals in America, A History."% ? DIALOGUE

DAVID GERGEN: Patty, some nine years ago you walked out of a hotel here in Washington and went out and saw in the midst of a lot of opulence homeless people on the streets. And that set you on an investigation ofthe character of America, and you went way back in history. What did you find?

PATRICIA O'TOOLE, Author, "Money & Morals in America:" I went back to the Puritans. Actually, I started with Columbus, but I ended up not writing about it. Columbus came to this country, and to my mind on a business trip, more or less, and the Puritans came to found a new and better, more idealistic society, and the tension between those two things, the opportunity for individual wealth and the aspiration to create a better, more open, more democratic, equal society has been with us ever since.

DAVID GERGEN: The notion of Columbus coming for an Eldorado and John Winthrop coming to find a city upon a hill.

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: That's right.

DAVID GERGEN: And that tension played itself out in Puritan days all up and down the East Coast.

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: That's right. They had this extravagantly idealistic notion of they would found a society on Christ's imperative to love one another. And it worked for about a week and a half. All the shortages that there are in a wilderness of labor and materials--everybody had an opportunity to charge more for what they could contribute in the way of labor, or ask more for goods they had for sale, and that set off a round of price and wage controls that were sort of on and off for many years until--actually what solved the problem was more immigrants coming, so there were more customers for things that--produce, for example, that people raised and also more labor.

DAVID GERGEN: So you had posed almost against each other one very strong sense of individualism, getting ahead, making your own way in the world, and against that idealism, creating a community, having something that was special, a chosen people.

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: Right. Taking care of the poor, as long as they were the deserving poor, however, you know. If we didn't like what kind of poor they were, we packed them off to the next town.

DAVID GERGEN: And you see those same strains going through American history?

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: I think so. The Puritans made us nervous about being greedy. I think that's their most important legacy to us. You know, we have all this conversation now about the great wealth that's been created and what should we do with it, and I mean, even to be having that kind of conversation suggests that something isn't right if it's just in the hands of a few people. And on the other end of things to try to find more ways to build communities, seeing a great outburst of philanthropic activity and volunteer activity in the 90's.

DAVID GERGEN: Did Andrew Carnegie really epitomize that dual strain more than almost any other individual in American history?

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: More than any other one that I know about. He set himself the wonderful task of giving away his entire fortune. At the time he was the richest man in the world. He had $350 million. And he started doing it just writing a check for this and a check for that. But by the time he got to be about 75, he still had half of his $350 million left, so he had to-he shoveled and shoveled, and he couldn't get rid of it all, so he had to create some foundations and put great big sums of money in them. We remember him mostly for libraries and educational institutions. Many of the organizations he founded still go on. And he also systematized philanthropy, made it large scale and national in the same way that he systematized the production of steel. And that's a model of philanthropy that we still pretty much have.

DAVID GERGEN: And so today if you look at it in the context ofAmerican history, where are we on the scale of moneys versus morals, as you call it, or as I guess Henry Demarest Lloyd put it, wealth versus common wealth, where do we stand today, in your judgment?

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: I think we're on the cusp of something that could be wonderful. I mean, people are all of a sudden interested in having conversations about this. We see some great big philanthropic activities going on with George Soros and Ted Turner and others. And it's something that people do want to talk about. Americans are the most generous people in the world. They give more to charity than anybody else. And they volunteer more than anybody else. And I think that this philanthropy is a wonderful thing. I also think we need to figure out as a group, whether that's through government or some other way, how to find collective solutions to some of these problems that seem intractable-childhood poverty, for example. Despite the fact that we've had this great economic boom for the last six and a half years, we still have about 20 percent of children living in families at or below the poverty line. So something isn't working there.

DAVID GERGEN: But you do see today in the context of American history an enormous accumulation of wealth at the top, much more rapid than anything we've seen since say perhaps the late 19th century, and then almost like Carnegie turning to--so how do w e make more productive use of this?

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: Yes, I think that's going on. I think one thing that we could do is pay people at the bottom more. That would be a wonderful way to solve a lot of the problems that there are at the bottom. I don't know how that would play over at the Federal Reserve, but-

DAVID GERGEN: But Andrew Carnegie believed in profit sharing.

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: Late in his life he believed in profit sharing, after Henry Ford announced the $5 day in 1914, which effectively doubled the average factory wage, Andrew Carnegie had come around to the idea that that was a wonderful thing to do. But earlier in his life when he was the head of the Carnegie Steel Corporation, he didn't feel that way.

DAVID GERGEN: Let me put to you-because you talk about money and morals as if they're two different ideas that often are in tension. I'm not sure I understand what morality means in your context.

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: I think this would be a great time now that we've created all this new wealth to be thinking about what we want to do with it. What kind of society do we want to have? What do we mean by the phrase "common good?" It's a phrase that we all know and use all the time. But I think if you stop to think of what your idea of common good was and ask someone else, other people for their ideas, we really don't have a consensus about that anymore. So if we could figure that out and then make sure that it's common to all, it sort of doesn't matter to me anyway what the distribution is.

DAVID GERGEN: And that would be in keeping with the American character?

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: I think so. You know, we've had this aspiration from the very beginning to create a better society and a society with opportunity for everybody. And when you have opportunity for everybody, it doesn't mean that everybody ends up running the same number of miles in the same amount of time and accumulating the same amount of goods, but for people to be left farther and farther behind when they're working harder than they ever did just doesn't seem to be what we had in mind in the beginning.

DAVID GERGEN: Patricia O'Toole, thank you very much.

PATRICIA O'TOOLE: My pleasure. % ? RECAP

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Again, the major stories of this Wednesday, the president of Kenya announced arrests in the U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi. The search for survivors there was called off. Secretary of State Albright was in Germany to escort home the bodies of ten of the twelve Americans killed, and there were no deaths or injuries from two earthquake tremors 90 miles South of San Francisco. The strongest registered 5.3 on the Richter Scale. We'll be with you on-line and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Elizabeth Farnsworth. Thank you and good night.