Maybe the devil made her do it. A fake Manhattan soothsayer pleaded guilty to using her powers to persuade a client to fork over more than $650,000.

Janet Miller, 39, claimed she was able to see that her victim needed protection from being cheated, the Manhattan district attorney's office said Friday.

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 police said on Friday.

"The problem was that he looked a lot like Karol Wojtyla. He was detained for usurpation of title which is a misdemeanour," a police spokeswoman told Agence France Presse.

Mongolia may need to rustle up some more glass cases for its first dinosaur museum after US authorities announced Friday they will hand back a large new collection of stolen fossils.

At a ceremony on Monday, officials had turned over the nearly complete skeleton of a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar, a cousin of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex.

An Iranian man condemned to the gallows for murdering a policeman was pardoned by the victim's family and his life saved only moments after he was hanged, the Mehr news agency reported on Thursday.

Relatives "cried out their pardon after the murderer had already been hanging for a few seconds" the agency said, publishing a photo of people grab the man and holding him until they could remove the noose from around his neck.

A team of smokejumpers parachuting into a fire in the mountains of Southern Oregon landed in an illegal marijuana garden being prepared for growing season.

The six smokejumpers found the site Monday evening, when there was a rash of lightning strikes.

The head of Mexico's consumer protection agency has avoided the ax despite a scandal over his daughter's attempt to get a restaurant shut down for denying her the table she wanted.

After a probe ordered by President Enrique Pena Nieto, the government announced Thursday that four officials from the Profeco agency would be temporarily suspended over the incident, but that there was no cause to punish its chief, Humberto Benitez.

A Chinese court ordered a controversial professor who claims descent from the ancient sage Confucius to apologize and pay a fine after a heated online row over poetry, local media reported Friday.

Kong Qingdong, a professor at the elite Peking University who sparked an outcry in 2012 by calling Hong Kong people "dogs", said online that a student was a "dog-like traitor" for criticizing a poem he wrote, the Beijing News reported.

A 22-year-old Austrian had the shock of his life when he received a tax bill for more than 29 million euros ($38 million), a newspaper reported Wednesday.

Agadir B. told the Heute daily he got the bill after filing his tax return for 2008, when he earned around 600 euros a month as a trainee, with the demand that he paid one percent -- 290,420.13 euros -- immediately.

The colorful handmade giraffes, elephants and warthogs made in a Nairobi workshop were once only dirty pieces of rubber cruising the Indian Ocean's currents.

Kenya's Ocean Sole sandal recycling company is cleaning the East African country's beaches of used, washed-up flip-flops and other sandals.

A 28-year-old woman miraculously survived after her husband accidentally shot her in the mouth with a harpoon, Brazilian officials said Wednesday.

The Rio de Janeiro State Health Department said in a statement that the woman's husband was cleaning his spear gun when it went off, firing a harpoon that hit her cervical spine.