April 22, 1996

Sooner than expected, New Jersey's area codes are running out of numbers, and the telecommunications industry is divided over how to alleviate the overcrowding. Bell Atlantic Corporation has proposed adding area codes within the 201 and 908 regions for new customers. Under the system, residents could find themselves dialing 10 digits to reach a neighbor.

A New Phone Merger Creates a Giant in the East The merger of Bell Atlantic and Nynex, to be announced today, will create the second-largest telephone company in the United States after AT&T -- with $27 billion in sales, 127,600 employees and 36 million customers in 12 states. The impact on consumers is far from certain, since the two companies do not compete directly. [Page A1.]

A monitoring team appointed by the State Department of Education will begin a two-week review today to find out whether Atlantic City's public schools are taking the steps recommended last year after the district failed to meet standards for recertification. Dr. Martin Ney, the Atlantic County Superintendent of Schools, said the team would look at whether the district had improved in areas like attendance, discipline and financial practices. If the team is not satisfied with the district's progress, it could recommend intensified monitoring. Dr. Ney said such a step would be "a prelude to takeover" of the district by the state.

When the official New China News Agency announced three months ago that it would start supervising international agencies that sell financial information in China, that decision was widely interpreted as an effort by the Communist Party to protect itself from the swelling pool of information available here. Like so much in today's China, however, it now seems that the agency's plans have more to do with its thirst for money and bureaucratic control than anything else. Last week, the New China News Agency detailed its plans for how to control the sale of financial information by the foreign agencies, Reuters and Dow Jones Tele-rate, a unit of Dow Jones & Company.

Jo A. Lernout and his partner, Pol Hauspie, found new ways to allow computers to recognize speech and turn written text into the spoken word a few years ago. After starting a company in Belgium in 1987 to research and develop these products, they found customers ranging from AT&T to Samsung. By the middle of last year, they had decided to go public so that investors could discover them. But the local stock exchange was not an appealing prospect. Even by the standards of Europe's small stock markets, the stodgy Brussels bourse is a minnow. Turnover rarely approaches five million shares a day, compared with hundreds of millions in the United States, and Belgians prefer to invest in established local companies like Petrofina, the big Belgian energy company.