Royal Family

The most enduring and romantic legend of the Russian Revolution -- that two children of Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, survived the slaughter that killed the rest of their family -- may finally be put to rest with the positive identification of bone fragments from a lonely Russian grave.

Driving along the southern coast of Tahiti that day, Nathan Fletcher saw things he had never seen before. The waves broke so big and hard that seawater crashed through berms, surging inland, scattering bits of coral across the road. Villagers pedaled their bicycles out to watch. Down at Teahupoo beach, a big-money contest with Kelly Slater and some of the best surfers in the world had been put on hold. Government officials had declared a "code red" for safety reasons. "Nobody wanted those waves," Fletcher said.

Britain's Royal Family was thrust into a national debate about mental illness today after it was revealed that not just two but five of Queen Elizabeth's cousins were hidden away in a mental hospital on the same day 46 years ago. Newspapers delved at length into previous cases of royal madness and one mental-care expert urged the queen to visit her relatives--four are alive--to bring the issue of mental health into the open.

Things are looking up for future females born into the British royal family. After centuries during which first-born males succeeded to the throne ahead of their elder sisters, the British Commonwealth countries that recognize the monarch as head of state agreed Friday to abolish the practice of primogeniture. When it comes to inheriting the throne, birth order will now trump gender. Girls rule (when they're older than their brothers). For the rest of the Western world this development may not seem to be on the cutting edge of equal rights.

One of Korea's last princes lives out of a two-seat van packed with books, laundry and a microwave oven. He used to sing at nightclubs for American GIs and sleep in flophouses. Yet he's so proud of his blood line that he never takes off his clothes in a public bathhouse when others are around. Now Yi Seok, 62, is pursuing a one-man crusade to restore the lost dignity of his disgraced Yi Dynasty family, which ruled the Korean Peninsula for 518 years until colonial Japan took over in 1910.

The phone call came to the royal palace in Kuwait city just before 4:30 a.m. It was Princess Mariam Saad al Sabah's brother-in-law. "You have to leave the palace. Go to the summer house," he said when she reached over to her bedside table and picked up the telephone. "He had no time to say why," she recalls. "All I knew was, he is a calm person, and at that time his voice wasn't calm. We left."

The Sunday Times, one of Britain's most respected newspapers, launched a blistering attack on the Royal Family's role in the Gulf War, accusing some members of exhibiting "upper-class decadence and insensitivity." "Britain's armed forces . . . stand on the brink of the biggest land battle since the Second World War. Yet, on the home front, too many of the royals . . .

When the BBC announced to viewers that the Princess of Wales had died in a car crash early Sunday, it did so to the image of the Union Jack waving at half-staff and the strains of "God Save the Queen."

Members of Britain's royal family have been shooting game birds, playing golf or skiing while the nation's troops are at war--and some media have lashed out at the monarchy. Buckingham Palace responded today to a barrage of withering media attacks by publicizing a list of Gulf-related royal engagements, including a trip to Saudi Arabia by Prince Charles in December.

"Kuwait is liberated," President Bush told the world in an address from the Oval Office. "Iraq's army is defeated. Our military objectives are met." And so, for Kuwait's exiled leadership, the future is now. The leaders will return to a country in the midst of celebration--but will face the formidable task of recovering from the war.

If a single prince is in want of a wife, no one puts on a better show than the British when he finally gets one. That truth was universally acknowledged Friday when William Arthur Philip Louis Mountbatten-Windsor, second in line to the British throne, married Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, his college sweetheart, in a ceremony dripping with tradition and sparkly jewels. The couple exchanged vows in the soaring Gothic interior of Westminster Abbey before 1,900 guests, including more than 40 crowned heads and scores of dignitaries and celebrities.

Roslynd Hadley is enough of a royalist that she's happily hosting a garden party Friday to celebrate the much-anticipated marriage of Prince William to his college sweetheart, Kate Middleton. But Hadley is also enough of a businesswoman to know that, though the wedding may buoy people's spirits, it's no boon to her company. Since the British government declared Friday a national holiday in honor of the event, cancellations of bookings for the day have cost her busing firm about $22,000 in lost business.

The most telling moment in "Come to the Edge," Christina Haag's memoir of her love affair with John F. Kennedy Jr., comes after his death in a plane crash off Martha's Vineyard. There are two memorial services, one for dignitaries and family, the other for Kennedy's friends. Haag, no longer his girlfriend after a drawn-out breakup nine years earlier, attends the latter. Of all the words that are shared at the informal service, Haag remembers Christiane Amanpour's the best. Amanpour was a foreign correspondent for CNN at the time, and a former roommate of Kennedy and Haag's when they lived together as friends in a rambling Victorian house in Providence while attending Brown.

Days after the Bahraini government banned demonstrations by opponents, about 2,000 residents of the mostly Shiite Muslim village of Sitra turned a funeral into the first protest under a new three-month state of emergency, a show of deepening resistance against the regime. The government has arrested more dissidents and human rights workers, destroying their homes and also beating relatives, witnesses said. Many other activists have now gone into hiding in this tiny country, their family members said.

Hundreds of troops from Saudi Arabia and police officers from the nearby United Arab Emirates have entered Bahrain at the request of the ruling family, a move that further polarized the tiny island nation and marks the first time Arab nations have intervened in another country's affairs amid sweeping unrest in the region. Bahrain television showed a line of armored vehicles Monday carrying Saudi soldiers crossing the 16-mile King Fahd Causeway that links the two countries. The surprise deployment came after several days of worsening violence that had paralyzed the country and threatened to bring down the monarchy.

"The King's Speech" is poised to be crowned with several Oscars on Sunday, Hollywood's biggest night of the year. But the small, independent movie, which has been both a critical and commercial hit with more than $200 million in worldwide ticket sales, hardly received the royal treatment when it was filmed in Britain. Starring Oscar nominees Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter, the picture tells the story of King George VI's triumph over a debilitating stutter.

LLOYD G. SCOTT Construction worker, from London, three years in Southern California I understand that Prince Charles said he was forced to marry Diana even though he didn't love her. Well, the Royal Family's been doing that for hundreds of years. Originally, the children used to marry princesses or princes from Germany or France just to keep the peace among nations. So it's nothing new. The fact is that now, through the media, it comes out.

A British newspaper story claiming that Queen Elizabeth's nephew Viscount Linley had been banned from a bar for throwing beer around was a "tissue of lies" from start to finish, a judge said today. Viscount Linley, the 28-year-old son of Princess Margaret and her former husband Lord Snowdon, is the first member of Britain's Royal Family in this century to bring a libel action to court.

Beyond the hospital grounds, heavily armed police trying to secure this tiny kingdom against the contagion of unrest spreading across the Middle East manned checkpoints and grimly gripped their weapons. Within, perplexed and angry protesters insisted that they wouldn't be cowed. The night before, a bloody assault against sleeping demonstrators killed at least four people. But the front line shifted across town Thursday to the Salmaniya Medical Complex, where the dead were laid out. Doctors were treating those who had been tear-gassed, clubbed or wounded by gunfire, and an angry crowd was chanting slogans against the royal family.