Canada confirms 6th mad cow case
Canada confirmed on Tuesday its sixth case of mad cow disease and said it would investigate where the cow was born and what other animals may have eaten the same feed.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said test results confirmed what was suspected last week. The animal was at least 15 years of age, and was born before Canada implemented restrictions on potentially dangerous feed in 1997.
The agency said it was launching an investigation.
Mad cow disease is believed to spread through feed, when cows eat the contaminated tissue of other cattle. Humans can get a related disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, in similar fashion – by eating meat contaminated with mad cow. There have been more than 150 human deaths worldwide linked to the variant.
Valencia, Spain
Derailed train went too fast
A train that derailed and killed 41 people in Spain’s worst subway accident was traveling at twice the normal speed, a government official said Tuesday.
The train’s excessive speed has led officials to believe the driver had either fainted or become otherwise indisposed before it derailed and overturned inside an underground tunnel in the Mediterranean port of Valencia on Monday, said Jose Ramon Garcia Anton, Valencia’s regional transport minister.
The train was traveling at 50 mph, rather than the average 25 mph at the curved section where it derailed, Garcia Anton said.
He said neither the train nor the tracks had suffered any kind of mechanical failure before the derailment, denying initial reports that a wheel had broken.
“There was an excess of speed at some point,” the minister said in the first government news conference about the accident.
He said the driver, who died, was fully qualified and been on the job since April after undergoing more than 250 hours of training.
Rostov-on-Don, Russia
Gunmen attack military convoy
Gunmen attacked a Russian military convoy in the Chechnya region Tuesday, killing at least five troops and wounding as many as 25 others, officials said. Pro-rebel Web sites claimed more than 20 Russian soldiers were killed.
The convoy was traveling near the town of Avtury, southeast of the Chechen capital of Grozny, when it came under fire from three or four areas, according to the Interior Ministry in the mostly Muslim republic in southern Russia.
Chechnya has been torn by two wars pitting Russian forces and local allies against separatist rebels in the region in the past 12 years. A Kremlin-backed government is in power and large-scale battles are now rare, but fighting persists.