Cops defrock fake pope

A SLOVAK street performer dressed in white papal vestments has been detained and fined by the police in Rome for bearing too close a resemblance to the late John Paul II.

“The problem was that he looked a lot like Karol Wojtyla,” says a police spokeswoman.

“He was detained for usurpation of title which is a misdemeanour.

“The cassock he was wearing has been confiscated.”

The man has been released and will have to pay between $200 and $1200), depending on a decision by a judge, the spokeswoman says.

Another officer at the station where the 55-year-old man was taken quipped:

“If he had been dressed like Tutankhamen nothing would have happened.”

The performer has been working the main avenue leading up to the Colosseum in his white skullcap for weeks – alongside Roman centurion imitators and other performers – but police say they acted following an anonymous complaint.

A vendor selling miniature Colosseum souvenirs on a spot overlooking the Roman Forum says he saw the man being detained.

“He was right here, near me,” the vendor says.

“He was taken away by two officers in civilian clothes who were pretending to be tourists.”

Man runs from cops into gator’s jaws

A FLORIDA man has run from the law and into an alligator’s jaws.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office says 20-year-old Bryan Zuniga was pulled over in an early morning traffic stop for failing to maintain a single lane.

Deputies say Zuniga stopped the vehicle and jumped out of the passenger door. He then broke through a fence and escaped.

Zuniga was found at a local hospital a few hours later, where he told deputies he had been attacked by an alligator near a water treatment plant.

Zuniga was being treated for multiple puncture wounds to the face, arm and armpit area.

He’s been charged with fleeing police, driving with a suspended or revoked licence and resisting an officer without violence.

Charles’ vegie shop gets the chop

BRITAIN’S weak economy has taken its toll on the nation’s poshest greengrocer – Prince Charles has been forced to close his organic vegetable store, citing falling trade and rising prices.

Prince Charles, the heir to the throne and a champion of the environment, opened a store near to his country home Highgrove in Gloucestershire, south-west England, about eight years ago after converting his estate to organic farming in 1986.

The store, The Veg Shed, sold organic vegetables and fruit freshly grown on the estate’s Duchy Home Farm and became known for selling edible but oddly shaped organic produce that would normally be rejected by supermarkets.

But a spokeswoman for the prince says the store had closed after it failed to make a profit as it was no longer financially viable.

The produce was invariably more expensive than at local supermarkets.

“The Veg Shed has closed, basically in response to consumer trends, a preference for shopping remotely,” says a spokeswoman from Clarence House, the prince’s official London residence.

She says consumers wanting a taste of the royal organic produce can still order boxes online.

Ice Age language may share words with us

OUR Ice Age ancestors in Europe, 15,000 years ago, may have used words we would recognise today, according to a new study in a United States journal.

Words that sound alike in related languages are generally assumed to have come from a common route, like “father” in English and “pater” in Latin.

Lead author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in Britain, and his team were able to take the analysis a step further, by showing that certain commonly used words, like pronouns, are more likely to stay the same over the millennia.

“We discovered numerals, pronouns and special adverbs are replaced far more slowly, with linguistic half-lives of once every 10,000 or even more years,” says Professor Pagel.

In other words, everyday words like “I”, “you”, “we”, “man” and “bark”, have, in certain languages, the same meaning and almost the same sound as they did thousands of years ago.

Their analysis suggests that at least seven major language families in Eurasia all descended from a common ancestor language.

“As a rule of thumb, words used more than about once per thousand in everyday speech were seven to 10 times more likely to show deep ancestry in the Eurasian super-family,” says Professor Pagel.

Focusing on these common lexical items helped the British researchers avoid a common pitfall of historical linguistics – that it is difficult to distinguish between words that sound alike because of common ancestry and words that sound alike because of simple coincidence.

For instance, “team” and “cream” in English are unrelated, but sound quite similar.

But the everyday words are statistically likely to be related, and so when the researchers found ones that sounded alike, they were able to conclude with fair confidence that it was not simply by chance.

The latest study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.