[(St Petersburg, Russia; Monday 5 July) An etymological blunder going back to the days when Napoleon was hell-bent on conquering Russia is blamed for a series of miss-spellings of the family name of Vladimir Putin.
So state EU linguists at the Sorbonne in Paris who have uncovered historical documents from the Romanov family archives which show that the letter "a" is part of the original correct spelling, currently missing from the Russian head of government's surname.
"Very embarassing", said a spokesman. "Whatever way you look at it, the cover-up is as bad as the actual meaning of the original spelling."
Asked to elucidate further, he explained "Putain" is the French word for whore and was deleted from the Russian president's birth certificate after a mix-up in the St Petersburg maternity ward where he was born, a common occurence when paternity details were unavailable for official certification.
Asked if the blunder would affect any relatives of the President, an archivist noted that the only source of frantic panic about the linguistic revelation had come from Israel's Ariel Sharon, who along with John Paul II had recently asked the UN Security Council to erase his DNA records from its global register of the usual suspects.
