By Now, Prince Has Probably Gotten a Royal Earful

--TV naturalist Jim Fowler displayed an endangered Florida panther, a cheetah, a harris hawk and a Florida screech owl for the visiting Prince Charles. But he could have displayed more tact when he got to the chimpanzee. Some members of the Vero Beach crowd chuckled when he said: “You’ll notice those big ears.” Of course, he meant no offense. “I was looking at the chimp. I was talking about how many human qualities they have. I had no idea anyone would misinterpret that,” Fowler said later. Charles, whose ears have sometimes been a target of humor, showed no reaction to the comment. “I don’t think he’s easily offended by innocent remarks,” British Embassy spokesman Francis Cornish said. In a previous encounter with royalty at a wildlife exhibition 18 months ago, Fowler exhibited snakes, only to discover that the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, was extremely frightened of them. After petting the panther and bottle-feeding the chimp, the heir to Britain’s throne scored two points in his team’s 10-7 victory in a polo match to benefit Friends of Conservation, a wildlife conservation group founded by the Prince’s friend and teammate, Geoffrey Kent, and Kent’s wife, Jorie.

--An aide to former President Richard M. Nixon has sent a memo to Nixon’s friends telling them not to help ABC with a planned television movie based on the book “The Final Days,” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who helped to uncover the Watergate scandal as reporters for the Washington Post. Aide John H. Taylor said researchers for the network are asking Nixon supporters for help without revealing that the film will be based on the book, and he asks recipients of the memo to “refuse to have anything to do either with this project or indeed for the time being with ABC,” the Miami Herald reported. Woodward denied that the network was hiding the script’s origin. “This is the classic enemies-list mentality that led to all the trouble,” he said. “My question to Mr. Taylor is: Don’t they ever learn?”

--Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov was upset when an outdated version of his country’s national anthem, from the era of Josef Stalin, was sung by mistake at a ceremony to award him a $20,000 human rights prize in Winnipeg, Canada. He said the anthem “really symbolizes the period of great tragedy and cruelty that swept my country.” Previous winners of the prize from the St. Boniface Hospital Research Foundation include Britain’s Prince Philip, Mother Teresa and heart transplant surgeon Christiaan Barnard.