Word: gretl
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...most comic episode of European arms smuggling to surface involves a 4,300-ton West German freighter that has been sailing back and forth off the coast of Portugal for nearly a month. Gretl, owned by a Hamburg shipper, was carrying $6.8 million worth of Portuguese-made munitions, including some 67,000 120-mm mortar shells that were originally bound from the port of Setubal to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. The shipment in a West German flag carrier was illegal under a Bonn law that forbids the transport of armaments to "areas of tension." The delivery was contracted...
West Germany was alerted on Feb. 9 to Gretl's illicit actions by members of the national seamen's union. The Bonn government immediately demanded that the ship put in at the nearest port of the twelve-member European Community. Not eager to have its cargo confiscated, Gretl headed back to off-load in Setubal...
...Portuguese government had other ideas. Anxious to prop up its shaky , domestic arms industry, Portugal has lifted all strictures against arms sales to Iran or its enemy Iraq. Insisting that Gretl's shipment was legal and should be delivered to Iran, the Lisbon government refused to let Gretl's crew dump its high-explosive cargo back on Portuguese docks. Ever since, the ship and its hapless crew have been condemned to their Iberian shuttle, at a cost of roughly $10,000 a day, while the West German shipper, the Danish charterer and the governments involved try to untangle the mess...
...final destination in Portugal. Tipped off about the subterfuge, Lisbon did not permit Adonis to dock, and on Jan. 14 the ship canceled its request. Thus, when it came time to ship the country's own armaments to Iran, a vessel had to be chartered. Enter the ill-fated Gretl...
Nisbett's book also describes Lorenz's remarkably symbiotic marriage to his wife and collaborator Gretl and relates, in great detail, the studies upon which he based his books and theories. Lorenz, in the course of his work, served as "mother" to a family of goslings, spent apparently interminable hours observing jackdaws, fish and other animals before developing his hypothesis that overcivilized modern man lives in a state of moral decay...