German Chancellor Angela Merkel won over German voters in the Federal Election on Sept. 27. Can she now be won over by a French charm offensive (1) at repairing the relationship that was once at the heart of Europe That’s the question being asked in Paris, (2) top government officials are (3) talking about their desire to rekindle closer ties (4) their neighbors across the Rhine. (5) the end of World War II the Franco-German relationship has been the motor of European integration, the (6) force behind the creation of the European Union and, more recently, the introduction of the euro. But the ardor has (7) in this decade, particularly under Merkel, who has regularly struggled to (8) her irritation with French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s grandstanding. Sarkozy, (9) , has often been impatient with what he (10) Merkel’s lack of resolve.
B.
The sometimes (11) personal rapport is a long way from the public shows of affection their predecessors staged, particularly Helmut Kohl and FranCois Mitterrand, who movingly held (12) in 1984 in a Verdun cemetery. There’s been tension on (13) , too. Charles Grant, director of the London-based think tank Centre for European Reform, points out that France and Germany have been (14) on issues from how best to reflate their economies during the economic (15) to the smartest strategies for dealing with Russia.
C.
But influential movers in France are now (16) to put the relationship back on a friendlier footing. In a recent paper French think tank Institute Montaigne (17) an ambitious agenda for the two nations, (18) that a new impetus is needed if Europe’s voice is to be heard in a world (19) of big new players, such as Brazil and India, and at a time when President Obama seems fax more (20) with China and the rest of Asia than with America’s traditional allies in Europe.
Education is one of the key words of our time. A man, without an education, many of us believe, is an unfortunate victim of unfortunate circumstances deprived of one of the greatest twentieth-century opportunities. Convinced of the importance of education, modern states "invest" in institutions of learning to get back "interest" in the form of a large group of enlightened young men and women who are potential leaders. Education, with its cycles of instruction so carefully worked out, is punctuated by textbooks--those purchasable wells of wisdom what would civilization be like without its benefits
B.
So much is certain: that we would have doctors and preachers, lawyers and defendants, marriages and births; but our spiritual outlook would be different. We would lay less stress on "facts and figures" and more on a good memory, on applied psychology, and on the capacity of a man to get along with his fellow-citizens. If our educational system were fashioned after its bookless past we would have the most democratic form of "college" imaginable. Among the people whom we like to call savages all knowledge inherited by tradition is shared by all; it is taught to every member of the tribe so that in this respect everybody is equally equipped for life.
C.
It is the ideal condition of the "equal start" which only our most progressive forms of modern education try to reach again. In primitive cultures the obligation to seek and to receive the traditional instruction is binding on all. There are no "illiterates"--if the term can be applied to peoples without a script--while our own compulsory school attendance became law in Germany in 1642, in France in 1806, and in England in 1976, and is still non-existent in a number of "civilized" nations. This shows how long it was before we considered it necessary to make sure that all our children could share in the knowledge accumulated by the "happy few" during the past centuries. Education in the wilderness is not a matter of monetary means. All are entitled to an equal start. There is none of the hurry that, in our society, often hampers the fui1 development of a growing personality. There, a child grows up under the ever-present attention of his parents; therefore the jungles and the savages know of no "juvenile delinquency". No necessity of making a living away from home results in neglect of children, and no father is confronted with his inability to ’"buy" an education for his child.
Late next century, when scholars are scripting the definitive history of the PC, these last few years of high-octane growth may actually be (1) as the Dark Ages. Historians will marvel at (2) we toiled in front of monolithic, beige BUBs (big ugly boxes), suffering under the oppressive glare of cathode-ray tubes (3) our legs scraped against the 10-pound towers beneath our desks.
B.
They may also mark 1999 (4) the start of the PC renaissance, (5) manufacturers finally started to get it: design matters. In this holiday season, computer shoppers will (6) unprecedented variety in shapes, sizes and colors—and (7) in Apple’s groundbreaking line of translucent iMacs and iBooks. (8) every major PC maker now has innovative desktop designs (9) the way to market, from hourglass-sculpted towers to flat-panel displays with all the processing innards (10) into the base. (11) industrial designers, who still think the PC has a long way (12) you’ll want to display it on your mantle, the only question is, what took (13) "The PC industry has ridiculed design for a long time," says Hartmut Esslinger, founder of Frog Design. "They (14) their customers and have underestimated their desires."
C.
PC makers are finally catching on-and it’s partly (15) desperation. Manufacturers (16) to sell computers by trumpeting their techno bells and whistles, (17) processor speed and memory. But since ever-faster chips have given us more power on the desktop (18) we could ever possibly use, computer makers (19) on price——a strategy that has dropped most units below $1,000 and slashed profits. Last week IBM limped from the battlefield, (20) it would pull its lagging Aptiva line from store shelves and sell it only on the Web. Competing only on price "made an industry shakeout inevitable," says Nick Donatiello, president of the marketing-research firm Odyssey.
President Bush takes to the bully pulpit to deliver a stern lecture to America’s business elite. The Justice Dept. stuns the accounting profession by filing a criminal indictment of Arthur Andersen LLP for destroying documents related to its audits of Enron Corp. On Capitol Hill, some congressional panels push on with biased hearings on Enron’s collapse and, now, another busted New Economy star, telecom’s Global Crossing. Lawmakers sign on to new bills aimed at tightening oversight of everything from pensions and accounting to executive pay.
B.
To any spectators, it would be easy to conclude that the winds of change are sweeping Corporate America, led by George W. Bush, who ran as "a reformer with result." But far from deconstructing the corporate world brick by brick into something cleaner, sparer, and stronger, Bush aides and many legislators are preparing modest legislative and administrative reforms. Instead of an overhaul, Bush’s team is counting on its enforcers, Justice and a newly empowered Securities & Exchange Commission, to make examples of the most egregious offenders. The idea is that business will quickly get the message and clean up its own act.
C.
Why won’t the outraged rhetoric result in more changes For starters, the Bush Administration warns that any rush to legislate corporate behavior could produce a raft of flawed bills that raise costs without halting abuses. Business has striven to drive the point home with an intense lobbying blitz that has convinced many lawmakers that over-regulation could startle the stock market and perhaps endanger the nascent economic recovery.
D.
All this sets the stage for Washington to get busy with predictably modest results. A surge of caution is sweeping would-be reformers on the Hill. "They know they don’t want to make a big mistake," says Jerry J. Jasinowski, president of the National Association of Manufacturers. That go-slow approach suits the White House. Aides say the President, while personally disgusted by Enron’s sellout of its pensioners, is reluctant to embrace new sanctions that frustrate even law-abiding corporations and create a litigation bonanza for trial lawyers. Instead, the White House will push for narrowly targeted action, most of it carried out by the SEC, the Treasury Dept. , and the Labor Dept. The right outcome, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill said on Mar. 15, "depends on the Congress not legislating things that are over the top."
E.
To O’Neill and Bush, that means enforcing current laws before passing too many new ones. Nowhere is that stance clearer than in the Andersen indictment. So the Bush Administration left the decision to Justice Dept. prosecutors rather than White House political operatives or their reformist fellows at the SEC.