Word: monarches
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Fractious politics are a Belgian speciality: in the past decade the government has fallen eight times. Belgians have instead looked to their monarch, Baudouin, for stability -- until last week, when the King became a commoner for two days. Confronted with a bill passed by parliament that legalized abortion, Baudouin, a devout Roman Catholic, had the Cabinet declare him unable to reign so he could avoid signing the measure into law. The Cabinet promulgated the law instead...
King Birendra Shah has ruled Nepal since 1972 without much of a nod to democracy. Political parties are outlawed, and the King effectively controls the parliament. Last week, as he confronted an increasingly militant popular movement for democracy, the monarch decided to appear conciliatory. He dismissed his hard-line Cabinet and promised to create a new government that would "consult people holding different political views...
...some disinterested observers, the warnings about damnation seemed rather medieval, like a penitent monarch shivering in the cold at Canossa. But something quite substantial is involved here. In another much publicized conflict, San Diego Bishop Leo Maher denied Communion to Lucy Killea, a pro- choice Catholic candidate for the California senate (who predictably won her race after the bishop's ban was announced...
...conceal or cut out the glories that make Shakespeare unique. Lear, for example, drops much of the high-flown language and reduces the former King's mad scenes in the storm and at Dover from symphonies to single brief movements. As played by Richard Briers, this is no autumnal monarch but a mediocre middle manager peevishly protesting his pink slip...
Leka, the son of Albania's first and last native-born monarch, King Zog, told the South African newspaper Business Day last week that he plans to launch a blitz by balloon, attaching leaflets advocating revolution to helium bags and floating them over his homeland. With the rest of Eastern Europe changing so swiftly, he said, the time is ripe for a softening of the last Stalinist holdout on the Continent...