A man doused his body with gasoline and set himself on fire in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City this morning, officials said.

The motive behind the self-immolation is not yet known, except that the unnamed man carried a piece of paper with the phone number of his daughter.

The 51-year-old man was ablaze in the square when a passing Jesuit priest ran to his aid to smother the flames with a jacket.

The priest was later joined by two police officers who used a fire extinguisher to put out the blaze.

The unnamed man was treated at a nearby hospital and transferred to a larger one, with serious burns to the upper part of his body.

The attack took place the day after Pope Francis held his final public audience of the year in St Peter’s Square.

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I absentmindedly posted a picture of an oil painting that looked the Prime Minister – the next thing I know it’s spread around the world, writes student Sophie Gadd

Yesterday I was awoken by a frantic phone call from my mother telling me I was on page three of The Daily Mail.

That may rank as one of the most terrifying ways to wake up, after fire alarms and falling out of bed.

My appearance on page three was not the result of me taking my clothes off, but the culmination of 24 hours of viral social media, and it happened like this.

While visiting an admittedly quite boring Berlin museum with a friend, I spotted a painting of a woman who looked remarkably like David Cameron, right down to the receding hairline, jowls and cherubic cheeks.

I absentmindedly posted it on Twitter expecting a few replies

But nothing could prepare me for how quickly the picture spread.

On Twitter it began with hundreds of people retweeting it, and messaging me to say that it was Catherine the Great.

It’s this point during a viral Twitter storm that notifications have to be disabled, for fear that your phone may explode.

This phase was followed by lots of horse jokes – there are many myths about Catherine and strange “incidents” with horses.

The wave of sceptical truthers came barraging in next, claiming everything from Photoshop, to face-swap, to the fact that it was in fact a painting of David Cameron.

I was slightly taken aback by the accusation I might spend my holidays editing photographs of the Prime Minister. Well, everyone needs a hobby.

I hadn’t submitted it to the press, yet in less than a day the picture found its way onto websites, the papers, radio, and TV.

It is an incredibly surreal experience for an average politics student to find their name appearing in the news, having not really done much at all.

This must be one of the laziest ways anyone has got press coverage in 2013. Typical student.

In the last few weeks there have been a few pictures circulating on the internet of teachers holding up signs saying they wanted to teach their pupils how quickly an image can spread online .

I didn’t take this seriously myself until it took less than 24 hours for my picture to get from Twitter to a national newspaper.

It’s slightly nerve wracking reading an op-ed piece on a newspaper website discussing what could’ve been a passing comment in the pub.

It is also strange to think that Cameron himself has probably been made aware of the picture, since it could make up quite a jibe in PMQs. This has certainly made me more cautious about tweeting nonsense.

Just as I thought the storm had died down, The Spectator discovered David Cameron is in fact actually distantly related to Catherine the Great.

So what I thought was a funny observation actually turned out to reveal a new blue-blooded relative for our man of the people . Maybe I should go to museums more often!

A Finnish ferry operator says one of its Sweden-bound vessels is stuck on rocks in the Baltic Sea but none of the nearly 2,000 passengers were injured or in any danger.

Viking Line says the M/S Amorella hit the rocks after a power failure on the ship at midday Saturday as it was on its way from the Finnish port of Turku to Stockholm with 1,945 passengers.

In a statement, the operator said a minor leak has been found in a ballast tank but stressed the ship was not taking in water.

The Aland Islands, a group of semi-autonomous Finnish islands, are midway between the two port cities and the ferry was making a scheduled stop there.

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It’s said that good manners don’t cost you anything and, for the customers of one café, they could even help save the pennies.

A café in the south of France has called out its less well-mannered customers by hiking the price of a coffee if they don’t say please.

The Petite Syrah café in Nice, on the French Riviera, is charging customers €7 for ‘a coffee’, but a more affordable €4.25 for a ‘a coffee please’.

But those customers who request their caffeinated beverage with a cheery ‘good day, a coffee please’ get the best deal of all. Their coffees will set them back just €1.40.

The French are well known for their love of pleasantries.

So when standards drop it can be a particularly unpleasant shock, which is why the Petite Syrah has decided to enforce polite deportment by hitting rude customers in their pockets.

Fabrice Pepino, manager of the Petite Syrah, says the sign has been a success. He’s never been actually had to enforce the novel pricing scheme, he said, but has nevertheless noticed a marked difference in the behaviour of his customers.

It’s said that good manners don’t cost you anything and, for the customers of one café, they could even help save the pennies.

A café in the south of France has called out its less well-mannered customers by hiking the price of a coffee if they don’t say please.

The Petite Syrah café in Nice, on the French Riviera, is charging customers €7 for ‘a coffee’, but a more affordable €4.25 for a ‘a coffee please’.

But those customers who request their caffeinated beverage with a cheery ‘good day, a coffee please’ get the best deal of all. Their coffees will set them back just €1.40.

The French are well known for their love of pleasantries.

So when standards drop it can be a particularly unpleasant shock, which is why the Petite Syrah has decided to enforce polite deportment by hitting rude customers in their pockets.

Fabrice Pepino, manager of the Petite Syrah, says the sign has been a success. He’s never been actually had to enforce the novel pricing scheme, he said, but has nevertheless noticed a marked difference in the behaviour of his customers.

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Bavaria’s state government says it will try to keep Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” out of publication in Germany after the copyright expires in 2015 — reversing a decision to support new editions with critical commentary.

“Mein Kampf” isn’t actually banned in Germany, but Bavaria has used its ownership of the copyright to block publication. The copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death.

The Bavarian governor’s chief of staff, Christine Haderthauer, said late Tuesday Hitler’s anti-Semitic memoir amounts to incitement and the government will file a criminal complaint if anyone tries to publish it in the future, news agency dpa reported.

Governor Horst Seehofer pointed to Bavaria’s participation in a drive to have modern Germany’s main far-right party banned and said that doesn’t fit with supporting publication of “Mein Kampf.”