Mauritania: Government puts down coup

Government forces crushed a coup attempt by the disgruntled military after two days of street battles in the capital, Mauritania’s leader said Monday.

President Maaouya Sid’Ahmed Ould Taya, unseen by the public since the fighting began early Sunday, appeared before the nation in a brief speech broadcast from his presidential palace in Nouakchott and thanked soldiers who remained loyal to him.

Gunshots and explosions, which had rocked Nouakchott since early Sunday, subsided Monday afternoon and there were no reports of fighting elsewhere.

Canada: All mad cow tests negative

All tests on cattle linked to Canada’s lone case of mad cow disease came back negative, investigators reported Monday, while a Swiss expert said a few more cases of the illness probably exist in North America.

Dr. Ulrich Kihm, the former chief veterinary officer in Switzerland, praised the Canadian investigation as comprehensive but said his three-member panel, invited to assess the situation, would recommend tighter surveillance and testing.

Kihm said it was likely at least a few more cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, exist in North America, and only an aggressive surveillance system would lower the risk of infected animals going undetected.

Canadian meat exports are safe from BSE, Kihm said, but it is harder to make that assurance for live cattle.

Russian: Chechnya gas official killed

In the latest attack on Moscow-backed authorities and businesses in Chechnya, the deputy director of the region’s natural gas network was shot and killed in his home, police said Monday.

Masked intruders broke into Abdulla Arsanukayev’s home in the southwestern village of Katyr-Yurt before dawn Sunday, the press service of the Chechen Interior Ministry said. Arsanukayev was shot and killed by automatic-weapon fire.

Arsanukayev was deputy director of the Chechen Gasification Co., a state-backed firm responsible for gas supplies in the region. It was unclear whether political or business interests, or both, were the prime motivation for the killing.

Mexico City: Anti-bias law signed

President Vicente Fox signed a law Monday that bans all forms of discrimination, a groundbreaking measure in a nation struggling to overcome racism and other forms of bias.

“This signature makes this a historic date for our country,” Fox said. “It’s historic because it establishes that nobody should be excluded from their social well-being because of their ethnic origin, gender, age or religion.”

The measure that passed Monday first sought only to ban discrimination in the public sector, but after several months of debate it was vastly expanded and approved by both houses of Congress in April.

The law cancels out several smaller proposals that would have banned discrimination against women and Indians, or forbade employers from firing elderly employees or women who become pregnant, among other things.