ALSO OF NOTE FROM WEST GERMANY

* Police are fed up with having stones and slingshot pellets hurled at them by masked demonstrators who are hard to identify and prosecute. The policemen's trade union is now demanding a ban on the hiding of demonstrators' faces.

In the antinuclear, pro-squatter protests that have become routine in West German cities this year, marchers frequently pull their Palestinian scarves over their noses and mouths in wild-west bandit style. So far the ruling Social Democratic-Liberal coalition has opposed any masking ban because of the difficulty of defining legally what constitutes hiding the face.

* The wage negotiations are dead. Long live the wage negotiations. This might be the cry of the bellwether metal industry talks in the state of Hesse that broke down April 24 over a reported difference of 0.3 percent. The union will now poll the 3.7 million metal workers on staging staggered strikes throughout West Germany. A final hedge has been made, however. In another region, north Wurttemberg and north Baden, one more management-labor session has suddenly been set for April 28.

* Henceforth the Bundeswehr not have Prussian-style induction ceremonies for recruits. The grand old bugle tattoo will go, Defense Minister Hans Apel says. But some public ceremony, with "new forms," will be continued from time to time. Opposition conservatives -- who won a "permit for traditions" as a compromise between military reformers and traditionalists back when they held the Defense Ministry in 1965 -- are protesting. They view the move as a knuckling under to the "street pressure" of young and sometimes violent protestors who object to the public oath-taking c eremony.