Ghoulish allegations of harvesting organs from deceased children in Texas without consent of families has sparked a criminal investigation and lawsuit against a pair of former Calgary medical examiners.

Dr. Sam Andrews and Dr. Evan Matshes, who both quit the Calgary medical examiner's office in March 2011, were named last week in a $1-million lawsuit by a former employee of Lubbock County's coroner's office, who accused the duo, and their California-based pathology company NAAG Pathology Labs, of firing her after she raised concerns about inappropriately harvesting organs and tissue from children without informing their families.

According to the lawsuit, filed last Wednesday in the state's 72nd District Court, former Lubbock medical examiner's office worker Tita Senee Graves alleges Matshes removed organs and tissue from children during autopsies and sent them to National Autopsy Assay Group (NAAG) in San Diego. She also accused Matshes of performing the procedures without a licence to practise medicine in Texas, as well as telling staff that he needed to collect more tissue from children than in the past for "research."

NAAG Pathology Labs has denied any wrongdoing.

At a news conference last week, Graves told local media she was horrified at the new direction taken by the former Calgary pathologists, who allegedly told staff when they took over the office late last year that they needed to collect organ and tissue samples from children who died naturally to create a control group for research into fatal abuse cases.

"On these children, it didn't matter what the cause of death was. They took the brains, the spinal cords, the spinal columns from the neck, sometimes parts of ribs, sometimes parts of legs, the heart, the lungs, the eyeballs - all shipped to San Diego," she told reporters.

"When you're doing it on children that you don't need to have the tissues they're taking to determine the cause of death, it's not right in any sense of the word."

Attorney Kevin Glasheen, who's representing Graves, said in addition to the financial award, the lawsuit is also calling on the county to let her return to work.

"Ms. Graves is a hero for exposing these California body snatchers who have taken over the Lubbock County Medical Examiner's Office," he said in a news release.

"Of course, they immediately fired her for doing so - and now we are going to make them pay."
Lt. Bryan Witt with the Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed to Postmedia that Texas Rangers, who investigate major crimes in the state, are investigating Lubbock's medical examiner's office, but declined to discuss details.

"I would not be able to discuss any of the facts surrounding the case due to it being an ongoing investigation but I can confirm that the Texas Rangers are investigating allegations made against the Lubbock Medical Examiner's Office at the request of the Lubbock County District Attorney's Office," Witt wrote in an email Monday.

"Once the Rangers complete the investigation, all investigative findings will be turned over to the Lubbock County District Attorney's Office."

Local media report the Texas Medical Board is also investigating the allegations.

A statement released by NAAG on Tuesday expressed confidence in Andrews, who was named chief medical examiner for the county last year, while denying the allegations, none of which has been proven.

"Both Dr. Andrews and NAAG Pathology Labs strive to carry out all of their services according to the highest of national and international standards," the statement read.

"We strongly deny that either NAAG Pathology Labs or Dr. Andrews have acted in any manner that is contrary to the best interest of the public. NAAG Pathology Labs stands behind the work of Dr. Andrews, and we will vigorously defend against every allegation that has been made. We are confident that we will be exonerated of all claims of wrongdoing."

When reached at their corporate offices in San Diego on Tuesday, the company, which also purports to have a Canadian office just west of Calgary, did not make anyone immediately available to comment.

Matshes remains embroiled in a $30-million lawsuit, filed in 2014, against both the Alberta government and former Alberta chief medical examiner Dr. Anny Sauvageau, charging both with conspiring to ruin his career by spreading false information about him.

Shortly after his departure, Matshes' work during his 13 months serving in Calgary's medical examiner's office had been called into question, prompting an investigation by Alberta Justice into 14 of his cases, which found his conclusions "unreasonable" in 13 of them. However, a Court of Queen's Bench judge would later quash the panel's findings after determining the process used was unfair and the investigators were given incomplete information.

According to an online biography, Matshes, a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan, is "actively involved in Pediatric Forensic Pathology research, teaching and publishing. He developed a new conceptual model and approach to inflicted head trauma in infants."

News of the chilling allegations have been particularly devastating for Odessa, Texas resident Alyssa Hammontree, who learned this week that her son, Zaydrian - whose death last August is alleged to be a case of fatal child abuse that resulted in a capital murder charge for Marqalo Divonte Flores - may have been one of two children whose cases of inappropriate removal of organs were outlined in the lawsuit.
Hammontree told Postmedia on Tuesday that after her two-year-old son's death, she signed an organ donor card allowing his heart, liver and kidneys to be donated. But she explicitly declined to allow any of her only son's remains to be used for research purposes when she was asked to sign forms in the hospital.

"I just wanted him to rest in peace, but to know about this on top of how he died is horrible," said Hammontree, who described Zaydrian as a smart and loving boy who loved water balloon fights and Paw Patrol.

"I was throwing up all over the place when I found out."

She said she has retained a lawyer and is contemplating legal action, while she continues to wait for the results of an autopsy that was performed seven months ago.

Given the ongoing legal battle with Matshes, the province's justice and attorney general's office declined to comment on the latest allegations, nor address whether it is aware of any similar accusations that would have occurred during his time in Calgary.

During his 13 months in Calgary, Matshes conducted 426 death investigations, including 262 autopsies and 164 external exams.

"As Dr. Matshes work and employment practices falls under the scope of the current litigation between Dr. Matshes and the Government of Alberta (this case is before the courts), we cannot comment further," the ministry said in a statement.

Virtually every piece of hard economic data is telling us that the U.S. economy is slowing down dramatically. Many of the pundits have been warning that we could officially enter recession territory later this year or next year, but these numbers seem to indicate that it could happen a whole lot sooner than that. But the stock market has been surging over the last two months, and at this point stocks are off to their best start to a year since 1987, and as long as stock prices are rising a lot of people are simply not going to pay much attention to the economic alarm bells that are ringing. But everyone should be paying attention, because things are really starting to get bad out there. The following are 18 really big numbers that show that the U.S. economy is starting to fall apart very rapidly...

#1 Farm loan delinquencies just hit the highest level that we have seen in 9 years.

#2 We just learned that U.S. exports declined by 4 billion dollars during the month of December.

#3 J.C. Penney just announced that they will be closing another 24 stores.

#4 Victoria's Secret has just announced plans to close 53 stores.

An 'empowerment' oriented clothing brand has stopped selling its "girl power" T-shirts after a report revealed they were being made by exploited women in a sweatshop in Bangladesh. But at least the cotton they used was organic!

In a case of robbing Patty to pay Pauline, the UK-based F= sold cheap shirts made at DIRD Composite Textiles in Bangladesh in order to raise money for Worldreader, a charity that provides e-books for impoverished children in Africa. The prints themselves were done in the UK.

F= said that there was a "huge demand" for the shirts, even getting celebrity endorsements from TV presenter Holly Willoughby and former Spice Girl Emma Bunton.

Meanwhile, scores of the machinists who actually made the shirts were sacked after they went on strike to protest their paltry wages and horrific working conditions.

Now there is one more place where cameras could start watching you - from 30,000 feet.

Newer seat-back entertainment systems on some airplanes operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Singapore Airlines have cameras, and it's likely they are also on planes used by other carriers.

American, United and Singapore all said Friday that they have never activated the cameras and have no plans to use them.

However, companies that make the entertainment systems are installing cameras to offer future options such as seat-to-seat video conferencing, according to an American Airlines spokesman.

A passenger on a Singapore flight posted a photo of the seat-back display last week, and the tweet was shared several hundred times and drew media notice. Buzzfeed first reported that the cameras are also on some American planes.

After several months of verbal sparring and rumor, the hotly anticipated debate between Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson has been arranged, with the philosophers scheduled to go tete-a-tete later this year.

Announcing the intellectual bout in a YouTube video on Thursday, the media-savvy Peterson said he would face off against the reclusive Slovenian Marxist in Toronto's Sony Center on April 19. The topic? Happiness: Capitalism versus Marxism.

The philoso-fight comes after Zizek fired the first shots against Peterson during a Cambridge Union event last November. Labeling the Canadian best-selling author as his "enemy," Zizek went on to slam Peterson's ideas as "pseudo-scientific,"and took umbrage with Peterson's obsession with cultural Marxism.

Virginia's first lady, Pam Northam, has apologized after aggravating the recent racial scandals begun by her husband, the governor.

During a Feb. 21 tour of the Executive Mansion hosted by the Northams for the 2019 class of Senate pages, Pam Northam allegedly handed out raw cotton to two of the three black students present and asked them to imagine being an enslaved cotton-picker.

In a statement, Northam said she has given the same educational tour for months and "used a variety of artifacts and agricultural crops with the intention of illustrating a painful period of Virginia history."

"I regret that I have upset anyone," she wrote. "I am still committed to chronicling the important history of the Historic Kitchen, and will continue to engage historians and experts on the best way to do so in the future."

The governor's office told the Washington Post that the first lady didn't target the black children present but rather just handed the cotton to whoever was nearby her so they could feel its raw texture and imagine how hard it was to handle all day.

IRLI investigation shows state released detained aliens with previous convictions or pending criminal charges

An investigation by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) has revealed that California law enforcement agencies have refused to honor a shocking number of immigration detainer requests for illegal aliens charged with serious felonies, an indictment of the state's deadly and unconstitutional sanctuary laws.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by IRLI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released records regarding law enforcement agencies that failed to honor ICE detainer requests. For a 27 month period ending on December 31, 2017, many California police and sheriff's departments refused to honor over 5,600 immigration holds, of which over 3,400 were classified by ICE as threat level 1 and 2 offenses. These included, but were not limited to, homicide, kidnapping, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, drugs, burglary, and fraud.

The American shipping company has reportedly stopped delivering parcels to a notorious neighborhood in Malmo, Sweden, often labeled a "no-go zone," following a wave of attacks on their drivers.

Providing postal services for Rosengard, a neighborhood in the southern city of Malmo, proved to be too dangerous for UPS, according to local media. The revelation came to light after a local man, Marco Padoan, ordered delivery of business cards to his home address.

Instead, he received a UPS message saying they failed to deliver the parcel to the door and diverted it to the company's office in central Malmo. The company that printed out his business cards explained in an email that UPS stopped servicing the area because the drivers risked being exposed to robberies or other crimes.

The postal service itself did not respond to Padoan's queries. However, Sydsvenskan newspaper did manage to get the following confirmation: "Our drivers have been attacked and therefore we have decided not to hand out packages at [the district]."

Cuba's new Magna Carta reinforces the island's revolutionary model, even as Washington ramps up its efforts against leftist governments in Latin America.

As Cubans lined up to cast their ballots over what is arguably the most significant reform seen by the country in half a century, US officials insisted on dismissing the vote.

"Today, through its forced constitutional referendum, the Communist Party renewed the legal pretext to deny the people of Cuba the change they desire," Kimberly Breier, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, tweeted.

In a densely populated Central Havana neighborhood adjacent to the famed Malecon, Rodolfo Abram begged to differ.

"Voting isn't mandatory, whoever wants to vote, comes of their own volition and votes," said the 57-year-old self-employed worker. "Everyone here votes, for the yes side, for the revolution."

Russia's trade associations have filed a request to the country's antitrust authority on bringing action against international payment systems Visa and Mastercard over alleged abuse of market power in Russia.

The appeal was brought by a group of trade societies, including the Association of Internet Trade Companies, the Retail Companies Association (ACORT), and the Association of Trading Companies and Manufacturers of Electrical Household and Computer Equipment, according to the Federal Antimonopoly Service, as cited by TASS.

The complaint is reportedly focused on interchange fees set by the payment systems.