Bureaucracy

By Harriet Barovick, Michelle Derrow, Tam Gray, Daniel Levy, Lina Lofaro, David Spitz, Flora Tartakovsky and Chris Taylor

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER Spring cleaning comes late in legislative sessions. Very late sometimes. A look at some of this month's housekeeping:

Russia: Absolved four Romanovs who were executed 80 years ago

New Hampshire: Became the last state to declare Martin Luther King Day an official holiday

Alabama: Proposed lifting from its constitution a ban on interracial marriages

France: Declared its seven-year skirmish with Algeria, which ended in 1962 after more than half a million deaths, a "war"