For the Seals, a Royal Reprieve?

Normally distancing himself from affairs of a controversial nature, an outraged King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden nevertheless plunged right into the thick of protests over the clubbing of seals in neighboring Norway. In an almost unprecedented intervention from a monarch, the king challenged Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland to stop the slaughter. “If Gro Harlem Brundtland can’t take care of the seal problem, how is she supposed to take care of the Norwegian people,” the king declared. The slaying of the seals with ice-picks and axes was the subject of a gruesome television documentary shown in Britain, Sweden and other countries last week. “If the king really said what he did, he must have been very angry,” Swedish Foreign Minister Sten Sture Andersson said.

--Misunderstandings have been the greatest stumbling block to friendly superpower relations, says the son of Nikita S. Khrushchev. Then, as if to underscore his point, Sergei Khrushchev’s interpreter promptly muffed a punch line in a story, causing the comic sally to drop on the Harvard University audience like a lead samovar. In stressing continued misunderstandings, Khrushchev, attending a conference on a six-year Harvard study of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, pointed to what he said was an inaccurate report that Fidel Castro asked his father to launch a nuclear strike against the United States. The report came last month at a Moscow conference on the missile crisis. “It seems to me that the main thing is, we’ve come to understand how poorly we actually understand each other, and those misunderstandings have led to missteps even at the highest levels,” the 54-year-old computer scientist said.

--Life isn’t easy when your name is George Bush. For one thing, you can’t order a pizza under your own name. “They’ll hang up on you. . . . I use a different name,” said George C. Bush, a 64-year-old general manager of transportation with LTV Steel Co., whose name is not the only thing he shares with the President. He’s also 64 years old and a Republican. And he had a connection to Kennebunkport, Me., where George Herbert Walker Bush maintains a residence. When the suburban Cleveland resident’s daughter, Karen, worked in Kennebunkport a few summers ago, she made a restaurant reservation for her visiting parents and brothers. The restaurant at first mistook them for then-Vice President Bush and his family. “The table was very discreet and beautifully set,” the other Bush said. “The chef even came out to peek.”