Word: bonnes
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...when covered with a condom. West Germany is also in the midst of an all-out campaign to promote condoms. By this week 66 million newspapers and magazines will have carried a drawing of a man and woman with the tag line "Trust is good; condoms are better." The Bonn government is planning explicit TV ads as well. A prudish concern about offending conservative sensibilities, says Dr. Hartmut Meyer of the federal Health Ministry, is now "too dangerous...
West German elation at Hamadei's arrest quickly dissolved when Cordes, then Schmidt, was kidnaped. It was immediately assumed that the abductors planned to use the West German hostages as bargaining chips for Hamadei's release. The hostage takings were a rude awakening for West Germans. For years Bonn has cultivated good relations throughout the Muslim world. Partly as a result, the three-year spree of kidnapings in Lebanon, until now aimed mostly at the U.S. and France, has had little impact on Germans living in Beirut, who continued to operate more or less normally...
...West Germans' captors lost no time making their demands known. Within 24 hours of Cordes' disappearance, officials in Bonn received word that his kidnapers were indeed demanding a hostage-for-prisoner swap. Suspicion immediately centered on the radical Shi'ite organization Hizballah (Party of God), to which Hamadei is thought to be linked. A West German radio station, quoting an unnamed Christian source in Beirut, said the abductions were planned by Hamadei's brother Abdul, who is thought to be a Hizballah security officer...
...Bonn was also under pressure from the Reagan Administration to extradite Hamadei to the U.S., where he faces a dozen separate charges related to the 1985 hijacking. Early in the week, the Justice Department reluctantly agreed to promise that it would forgo the death penalty for Hamadei, bowing to a provision in the U.S.-West German extradition treaty that prevents Bonn from turning over prisoners who face capital punishment. After first indicating that extradition would be arranged quickly, Bonn officials grew concerned that any such course would doom one or both of the new hostages. Turning Hamadei over...
...Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the hostage crisis could hardly have come at a worse time. In the closing days of a re-election drive that he was expected to win handily, Kohl was forced to spend much of his time directing the behind- the-scenes effort to free the hostages. Bonn's strategy: to negotiate the release of the German hostages with the help of Middle East governments linked to Hizballah, including Iran and Syria. The Chancellor carefully consulted leaders of the opposition Social Democratic Party, the major challenger to his center-right coalition. SDP Candidate Johannes Rau declared that...