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There's nothing remotely schoolmarmish in the mien of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, but it appears he's ready to start grading papers and rapping on knuckles to keep his government in line. In the coming months, members of Sarkozy's cabinet will undergo regular evaluations by examiners from a private company assessing each one's productivity - or lack of it. The laggards in Class Sarko won't be held back the way underperforming students do; instead, they could lose their ministerial seats...
...produce quarterly evaluations on how well cabinet members fulfill policy objectives laid out when they assumed office. Reviewing those indicators, Wauquiez explained, will "allow [us] to judge progress made in every area of government activity, [and] evaluate what moves and what doesn't." With those scorecards in hand, French premier François Fillon will meet with his 27 ministers and secretaries of state four times a year to discuss their performance...
...opening opera in their country's highest palace of performance, the $40 million National Center for the Performing Arts, which is often referred to by its former name, the National Grand Theater, but is better known in Beijing by its shape: "the egg." The building, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, is a gleaming dome surrounded by water - one of the most distinctive new buildings in a city consciously trying to turn itself into a 21st century metropolis...
...unerring commitment of French governments, on the right and the left, in favor of cultural diversity ... goes well beyond the simple defense of French culture. But as TIME rightly underlines, this solid consensus ? must not be a pretext for withdrawal into ourselves. It must on the contrary incite us to be audacious, to bet on the talent of new generations, by widening access to culture, by opening France still more to sensibilities from beyond its borders. Jean-Marie Bockel, SECRETARY OF STATE FOR COOPERATION AND FRANCOPHONE AFFAIRS, IN LE FIGARO...
...TIME's cover story] has had the same effect as Orson Welles' radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds in 1938 ... The French were persuaded to believe in an American attack on French culture. The controversy of the past weeks is purely manufactured, the handiwork of three people: the clever journalist who wrote the article, the shrewd editor who put it on the cover, and the graphic artist who brilliantly associated the widely lamented death of Marcel Marceau with, if I may draw on modern French thought, the empty signifier "French culture." John Brenkman, PROFESSOR, BARUCH COLLEGE...