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The French government has lost its long battle to keep Hoof-and-mouth disease out of France. The first confirmed cases were reported there today.

France has slaughtered tens of thousands of animals that were imported from Britain before the disease was discovered there, trying to keep the disease at bay. The sick herd found today on a farm at Mayenne in northwestern France, is the first anywhere on mainland Europe to have caught the highly contagious disease.
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John Fairley went outside last Tuesday night to feed leftover chicken to his German shepherd, when he noticed that the chicken bones were glowing green.

Nine people had eaten the chicken for dinner the night before. On Tuesday night and on Wednesday, some of Fairley’s family and friends said they felt nauseated and the dog, Tasha, seemed sluggish.

He called a nearby medical center, then the police. “They had little faith in my report at first,” he said. “When the police officer came up in my driveway and saw them glowing at him, 18 vehicles were stacked around my house in a short period of time.”
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A 3 pound chunk of ice crashed through the roof of a house owned by a 63 year old woman in Sydney, Australia last Wednesday. No one was hurt when the block smashed to pieces on the bathroom floor. The woman was home when she heard the crashing noise, and police found a hole in the ceiling.

Police Inspector Paul Hume consulted the weather bureau, which said it couldn’t have been hail. He says the only explanation is that the ice block fell from an airplane, but the house is not underneath a flight path.

An Airservices Australia spokesman said it was “virtually impossible” for the ice to have fallen from a plane. “For the ice to freeze on the airplane, it would have to be flying at a very high level,” he said.
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Biologists are worried about powerful mutant strains of fungus which the Russian space station Mir will bring back to Earth when it crashes into the ocean near New Zealand later this month.

Yuri Karash, a Russian space expert, thinks the micro-organisms, which have spent 15 years quietly mutating in an isolated environment on Mir, could be a real problem on Earth. “I don’t want to be a pessimist,” he said, “But the problem is there and it is a serious one. The mutant fungi do exist and in the future they could do serious damage to humanity. We can only draw the final conclusions after we have completed our research.”
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