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British cooperation with Ireland, however, appears to be growing. Michael Nicholson, a Roman Catholic, was named to Northern Ireland's High Court, making him the third Catholic on what will be a ten-judge bench. Irish and British representatives also met in London on Dec. 30 and reportedly discussed a hunger strike by three Irish National Liberation Army terrorists in prison near Belfast. Last week the prisoners began eating again. The British deny that they made concessions, but Irish officials were confident that the men had won one demand: early appeals on their murder convictions.
WEST GERMANY Settling a Painful DebtAmong the countless horrors committed by the Nazis during World War II was the use of slave labor from concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners, many of them Jews, were forced to keep vital war industries running. In the decades since the war, several German companies, among them Siemens, I.G. Farben, Krupp and AEG-Telefunken, have paid compensation to these ill-treated workers. But one major company had resisted making reparations: the Flick group, the largest privately owned firm in West Germany until its takeover this month by Deutsche Bank. Its founder, Friedrich Flick, was convicted by a U.S. war-crimes tribunal in Nuremberg in 1947 of crimes against humanity for, among other things, using slave labor, and spent five years in prison. Still, his company refused to acknowledge any guilt.
Last week Flick finally paid at least part of its debt. The German company, which is now called Feldmühle Nobel A.G., assigned about $2 million to the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The money will be distributed among an estimated 1,300 former Jewish slave laborers.
EUROPE An Island No MoreDescribing the English Channel as "a ditch that will be leaped whenever one has the boldness to try," Napoleon once dreamed of digging an underwater tunnel to Albion's shores. Neither he nor anyone else ever managed that formidable task. But next week, in the northern French city of Lille, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand will confer their blessings on one of four competing plans to build a fixed link across the Channel. In all likelihood, they will settle on either a $3.6 billion proposal for constructing twin railway tunnels or a $3.7 billion scheme involving parallel pairs of rail and road tunnels. The project, in terms of its sheer scale and cost, would be one of the engineering marvels of all time.
The French lean toward the rail-only plan, largely because it would boost their national railway system. Thatcher, on the other hand, prefers the road-rail option. She is concerned that a railway could be shut down too easily by a strike. A possible compromise: agreement on a rail system now with a road link to be added later. Either way, by the early 1990s, if all goes well, the "Chunnel" will be a reality at last.