Word: bern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Social Democrats, however, underestimated the resistance of male politicians in a country that did not even allow women to vote in national elections until 1971, and that still does not in certain local contests. Meeting in the smoke-filled bars of Bern to plot their strategy, members of Parliament (in which women fill only 25 out of 246 seats) grumbled that Uchtenhagen was "too emotional," "unable to stand the strain of high office," "too elegant" and "not enough of a mother figure." When they returned to the lower-house chamber after their informal evening debate, they rejected Uchtenhagen...
...fact, public opinion polls taken before the vote showed that 64% of citizens thought it was time to have a woman at the highest level of government. Said the Zurich tabloid Blick: "The people wanted Lilian, but the gentlemen in Bern elected a man." Swiss women refer to the day of the vote, Dec. 7, as Black Wednesday...
Rank-and-file Social Democrats will gather in Bern in February to ratify their leaders' decision to leave the coalition. The outcome of the vote is not certain. Even if the party goes into opposition, Switzerland will no doubt remain a model of economic and political stability. But for Swiss men the experience may serve as a warning that it takes more than a magic formula to preserve harmony at home...
...appears that the Soviets may have been outfoxed. Apparently, the U.S. embassy discovered the subterfuge, and the commercial attaché in Bern intercepted the machines in France while they were en route to Moscow. Cooperating with the French counterintelligence service, he short-circuited the wiring and removed vital parts, reducing $500,000 worth of equipment to electronic scrap. But Swiss authorities warn that the scam may have a different twist: accounts of the CIA's role might have been planted by the KGB to reduce Western anxieties about the wholesale theft of technology by the Soviets...
DIED. Valery Tarsis, 76, dissident Soviet novelist who was deprived of his U.S.S.R. citizenship in 1966 during a lecture tour of Britain, becoming the first in a modern line of enforced exiles; after a heart attack; in Bern, Switzerland. Once a writer and editor in good official standing, Tarsis grew disillusioned with Communism in the 1950s. The publication abroad of his scathing 1962 novel The Bluebottle earned him an eight-month stay in a Soviet mental hospital, an experience he described in his autobiographical novel Ward 7: "All around him were faces exposed by sleep or distorted by nightmares...