Texas

Death investigated for mad cow link

The family of a Beaumont woman is waiting for test results to find out whether she died from a form of an affliction connected to mad cow disease.

Burnell Baize, 71, died Oct. 16 of the rare Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the Beaumont Enterprise reported Sunday.

There are two forms of the disease: One type is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and is linked to mad cow disease. It can be contracted by humans if they eat infected beef or nerve tissue.

The more common type of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is responsible for about one in 10,000 U.S. deaths each year, and its cause is unknown 85 percent of the time.

Florida

Siberian tiger injures handler at county fair

The owner of a wildlife sanctuary was injured by a 350-pound Siberian tiger that was startled by a 14-year-old boy at a county fair, officials said Sunday.

Curt LoGiudice jumped between the tiger and the boy, who was knocked to the ground with LoGiudice.

St. Johns County Sheriff’s deputies had to shoot the animal twice with stun guns to get it to release LoGiudice, who kept his grip on the tiger’s leash and was able to calm it down and take it back to his sanctuary before driving himself to a hospital.

LoGiudice, owner of the Catty Shack Ranch at Jacksonville, had been displaying his animals at the St. Johns County Fair and was walking the tiger back to his truck late Saturday.

The boy walked up and “made a sudden move,” and the tiger knocked both LoGiudice and the boy to the ground and bit and clawed at them, according to a report by Deputy Jerry Montague.

Phoenix

9-11 memo author talks about intelligence failure

The FBI agent who wrote a memo warning that terrorists were training at flight schools before the 9-11 attacks said concerns about racial profiling might have prevented officials from acting on his intelligence.

“If you look at the world prior to 9-11, we were prevented from doing certain things. We were victimized by our own restraints,” Ken Williams told The Arizona Republic in his first interview since writing the memo in July 2001.

Williams’ findings were based on investigations of Arizona aviation students tied to al-Qaida. At the time, he recommended the State Department coordinate with the FBI to provide information on flight students from Middle Eastern countries.

His memo was ignored by supervisors until after the attacks.