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CHICAGO (Reuters) - New genetic evidence supports the theory that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis to Europe from the New World, U.S. researchers said Monday, reviving a centuries-old debate about the origins of the disease. They said a genetic analysis of the syphilis family tree reveals that its closest relative was a South American cousin that causes yaws, an infection caused by a sub-species of the same bacteria. "Some people think it is a really ancient disease that our earliest human ancestors would have had. Other people think it came from the New World," said Kristin Harper, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "What we found is that syphilis or a progenitor came from the New World to the Old World and this happened pretty recently in human history," said Harper, whose study appears in journal Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases. She said the study lends credence to the "Columbian theory," which links the first recorded European syphilis epidemic in 1495 to the return of Columbus and his crew. "When you put together our genetic data with that epidemic in Naples in 1495, that is pretty strong support for the Columbian hypothesis," she said. Syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum, starts out as a sore, but progresses to a rash, fever, and eventually can cause blindness, paralysis and dementia. Most recent evidence of its origins comes from skeletal remains found in both the New World and the Old World. Chronic syphilis can leave telltale lesions on bone. "It has a worm-eaten appearance," Harper said in a telephone interview. SYPHILIS FAMILY TREE Harper used an approach that examines the evolutionary relationships between organisms known as phylogenetics. She looked at 26 strains of Treponema, the family of bacteria that give rise to syphilis and related diseases like bejel and yaws, typically a childhood disease that is transmitted by skin-to-skin contact. The study included two strains of yaws from remote areas of Guyana in South America that had never been sequenced before. "We sequenced 21 different regions trying to find DNA changes between the strains," Harper said. They concluded that while yaws is an ancient infection, venereal syphilis came about fairly recently. Harper suspects a nonvenereal subspecies of the tropical disease quickly evolved into venereal syphilis that could survive in the cooler, European climate. But it is not clear how this took place. "All we can say is the ancestor of syphilis came from the New World, but what exactly it was like, we don't know," she said. In a commentary published in the same journal, Connie Mulligan of the University of Florida and colleagues disagreed with Harper's analysis, suggesting her conclusions relied too heavily on genetic changes from the Guyana samples. Mulligan suggested that better clues would come from DNA extracted from ancient bones or preserved tissues. Harper concedes that more work needs to be done to explain the journey of syphilis to the New World. "This is a grainy photograph," she said. (Editing by Maggie Fox)

TORONTO (Reuters) - A new law meant to help crack down on young Canadian street racers in their souped up cars has nabbed an octogenarian in his Oldsmobile. The 85-year-old man is one of 2,300 drivers across Ontario to be charged under new legislation, designed to combat "street racing, stunts and contests," since it came into effect three months ago -- and he's the oldest. The man was pulled over after allegedly driving 161 kilometers per hour (100 mph) this week on a main highway north of Toronto, where the speed limit is 100 km/h, Ontario Provincial Police said. "It really doesn't matter the age of the person or whether they're trying to race another car," OPP Sgt. Cam Woolley said on Friday. "The consequences of the crashes and the laws of physics are always in effect." Under the street racing legislation, a person is charged if they are driving 50 km/h more than the posted speed limit. "Street racing was probably a bad title for it, extreme driving probably would have been better," Woolley noted. Under the legislation, the 85-year-old could face a minimum C$2,000 ($2,000) fine. His license has been suspended and his car impounded for a week. Woolley said that, in the case of the 85-year-old, a police officer driving in a marked car saw the Oldsmobile and tried to get the driver's attention, honking her horn and waving. "He flew past her," said Woolley, adding he was going about 140 km/h at the time -- and then speeded up. When he finally stopped, the man told the officer he was going to the bank and planned to go shopping, Woolley said. "When she informed him that his car was being impounded for a week, he said: 'God damn, you're not taking my car, are ya?'" Woolley said, adding the man later apologized for swearing, and the officer drove him to the bank. Until this week, two 75-year-old men were the oldest to be charged under the law. The youngest is a 16-year-old woman. Most are men in their 20s. (Editing by Rob Wilson)

BERLIN (Reuters) - From a Greek nunnery turned into a marijuana farm by two men posing as gardeners to a South African man with a gunshot wound told by a doctor to "walk the pain off," the world was full of weird news in 2007. A Moscow woman set fire to her ex-husband's penis as he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka. The couple divorced three years ago but continued to share a small flat. "I was burning like a torch," the wounded ex-husband told Tvoi Den newspaper. "I don't know what I did to deserve this." In another unusual living arrangement, a German man left his dead mother seated in her favorite armchair at their shared home for two years after her death of natural causes at age 92. Yet not everything that smelled like a corpse was really dead in 2007. In the German town of Kaiserslautern, police broke into a darkened flat expecting to find a corpse after neighbors complained of a nasty smell seeping out into the hallway. But instead they found a tenant with very smelly feet asleep in bed next to a pile of extremely foul-smelling laundry. There were sadly many deaths in 2007 that were hardly noticed, such as in Zagreb, where a Croatian man who boarded a night tram and died in his seat rode through the city for more than six hours before the driver discovered he was dead. CORGI MEAT BALLS? Unusual diets made headlines in 2007 -- such as: "No more crispy duck at Beijing toilets." Food stalls attached to Beijing's public toilets were banned ahead of the Olympics after complaints over toilets with poor sanitation. Also in China, 66-year-old Jiang Musheng said 40 years of swallowing live tree frogs and rats helped him avoid intestinal pain and made him strong. British artist Mark McGowan ate a meal of meatballs made from a dead corgi dog in a protest against animal cruelty. He said the corgi, which died from natural causes, tasted terrible. Criminals filled odd news headlines around the world. In the United States, two Colorado men were accused of plotting to kill a man with rattlesnakes in a dispute over a $60,000 poker debt. "It's a story out of the Wild West -- there's poker, rattlesnakes and unsavory characters," said Lance Clem, of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. "You've got a bunch of snakes becoming involved with a bunch of snakes." In Sarajevo, two armed men disguised as Muslim women in burqas held up a bank and escaped with $40,000. A Zimbabwe man stole a bus because he needed transport to get his driving license. A German bus driver threw a 20-year-old off because he said she was too sexy for his bus. "He opened the door and shouted 'Your cleavage is distracting me every time I look into my mirror and I can't concentrate on the traffic'," the woman said. In La Paz, the winner of a Bolivian beauty contest was stripped of her title moments after her coronation when judges noticed she was wearing false hair plaits. Climate change found its way into weird news. A Hummer owner in Russia's St. Petersburg gave activists the green light to pelt his over sized vehicle with rotten eggs and tomatoes. A 60-year-old German man stunned lawyers during his appeal hearing on a flashing conviction by stripping off in court. Every story needs a happy ending and Bangkok delivered for this one. A 76-year-old Malay Muslim woman from southern Thailand got on the wrong bus 25 years ago and got lost, ending up living as a beggar at the other end of the country. But in 2007 she was finally reunited with her family. (Editing by Alison Williams)

By Associated Press ROME (AP) - The church where the tradition of celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25 may have begun was built near a pagan shrine as part of an effort to spread Christianity, a leading Italian scholar says. Italian archaeologists last month unveiled an underground grotto that they believe ancient Romans revered as the place where a wolf nursed Rome's legendary founder Romulus and his twin brother Remus. A few feet from the grotto, or "Lupercale," the Emperor Constantine built the Basilica of St. Anastasia, where some believe Christmas was first celebrated on Dec. 25. Constantine ended the frequent waves of anti-Christian persecutions in the Roman empire by making Christianity a lawful religion in 313. He played a key role in unifying the beliefs and practices of the early followers of Jesus. In 325, he convened the Council of Nicaea, which fixed the dates of important Christian festivals. It opted to mark Christmas, then celebrated at varying dates, on Dec. 25 to coincide with the Roman festival celebrating the birth of the sun god, Andrea Carandini, a professor of archaeology at Rome's La Sapienza University, told reporters Friday. The Basilica of St. Anastasia was built as soon as a year after the Nicaean Council. It probably was where Christmas was first marked on Dec. 25, part of broader efforts to link pagan practices to Christian celebrations in the early days of the new religion, Carandini said. "The church was built to Christianize these pagan places of worship," he said. "It was normal to put a church near these places to try to 'save' them." Rome's archaeological superintendent Angelo Bottini, who did not take part in Carandini's research, said that hypothesis was "evocative and coherent" and "helps us understand the mechanisms of the passage from paganism to Christianity." Bottini and Carandini both said future digs could bolster the link between the shrine and the church if structures belonging to the "Lupercale" are found directly below the basilica. The Basilica St. Anastasia was the first church to rise not on the ancient city's outskirts, but on the Palatine Hill, the palatial center of power and religion in imperial Rome, Carandini said. Though little known today, at the time of Constantine it was one of the most important basilicas for Christians in Rome, he said. The "Lupercale" shrine - named after the "lupa," Latin for she-wolf - is 52 feet below ground. So far, archaeologists have only been able to see it by inserting probes and cameras that have revealed a vaulted ceiling decorated with colored marble and a white imperial eagle. Though some experts have expressed doubts that the grotto is in fact the mythological nursery of Romulus and Remus, most archaeologists believe the shrine fits the descriptions found in ancient texts, and plans are being drawn up to excavate the structure further.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - A man being held in a Dutch police cell on suspicion of growing cannabis got an unintended treat in his lunch — a piece of hashish-laced cake, a spokesman said Thursday. "It was an accident," said Alwin Don, police spokesman in the southern province of Zeeland. The hash cake had earlier been seized by police in an unrelated investigation and stored in a refrigerator — close to lunch packets served to suspects being held in cells at the police station in Goes, 110 miles south of Amsterdam. "Clearly it looked a lot like the other lunch packets," Don said of the hash cake, which was served with a cup of coffee on Sunday. "Officers returned to the cell a half hour later and the suspect told them: 'I think you've given me something you weren't supposed to,'" Don said. The man had only nibbled at the cake and a doctor who was called to examine him said he suffered no ill effects. "It was pure coincidence that this man got the cake," Don said of the fact that a suspected drug grower had been given the cake. "What was in the cake had nothing to do with his case."

Coffee customers "pay it forward" by paying for those behind By Christina Siderius Seattle Times staff reporter What started as a small gesture of holiday cheer Wednesday has, in 24 hours, grown to involve more than 500 coffee drinkers in a chain of giving in Marysville. At about 8 a.m. Wednesday, a woman purchasing a drink at a Starbucks drive-through at 3725 116th Street Northeast offered to buy the drinks for the customers in line behind her. She told the employee who was working the window to wish the folks happy holidays, and she drove away, said the store's assistant manager Michele Case. Those customers were so touched that they paid for the order of the folks behind them. Countless gingerbread lattes and peppermint mochas later, the spirit of reciprocity carried on. As of 8 a.m. today, the line of giving had grown to involve 490 customers picking up tabs for those next in line at the store's drive-through and lobby, said Case. Case said it shows that a small gesture can have a big impact. "Each time people were just so excited," Case said. Often people paid more than needed to cover the tab, and that money was added to a pool for the cause. When people were unable to cover others' totals, the pooled money was used. Any leftover money in the pot will go toward buying toys for the store's toy drive, said Case. Christina Siderius: 206-464-2112 or csiderius@seattletimes.com Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company