An accident Tuesday took two lives on an oil platform in the Campeche Sound in the Gulf of Mexico, the second time in five weeks that Mexico's offshore oil industry has been rocked by a lethal accident.

The state oil giant, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, said emergency boats evacuated 101 workers from the Troll Solution rig after "a failure of one of its legs" caused a partial collapse.

By midafternoon, photos posted to Twitter showed the rig listing heavily, partially underwater and leaving an oil slick. Pemex said it was not in danger of sinking. The magnitude of the oil leak was not clear.

Pemex did not give nationalities for the two fatalities but said both were employees of the rig's owner, Typhoon Offshore, a subsidiary of Mexico's Grupo Salinas, a conglomerate with interests in banking, retail, media and telecommunications. The subsidiary owns only the single rig, built in 2010 in China.

In its own statement, Typhoon said 10 employees had been treated for injuries.

The incident raised new questions about the safety of Mexico's offshore drilling industry at a time that Pemex is seeking international investment for the first time since the oil industry was nationalized in 1938.

What we have heard rumoured, or more than rumoured, is now pretty much official. The attitude of Georgia's Western "friends" to the country has been laid bare by the announcement that the Republic of Georgia is fast becoming the testing ground for a wide range of new vaccines and questionable treatments.

Is there something intrinsically superior about the Georgian people, their European DNA, who would provide the testers with important scientific data? Or is it more likely that no one wants to risk treating their own nationals with these experimental medicines, but no one minds murdering a few Georgians in the name of better health in the West?

Anti-vivisectionists, those against operating and experimenting on animals, will doubtless applaud this move. "Better than testing on defenseless animals", they will say. Things are only tested on animals because no one knows if they are safe for humans. Now Georgians are being treated like those animals, and their government is doing nothing about it - indeed, abusing its own people is very probably a price imposed upon the Georgian government for continuing to receive Western support.

At least 115 enlisted military personnel deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been convicted since 2005 for committing theft, bribery, and contract rigging crimes which have totaled more than $52 million in damages.

All soldiers who have been convicted had little to no criminal histories and are currently serving sentences ranging from three months to over 17 years.

One of the massive scams that was uncovered involved soldiers selling US military fuel to citizens in Afghanistan and pocketing the money. The fuel thefts alone have totaled at least $15 million since the start of the war, the Center for Public Integrity reported.

Shock has caused to the Greek society the death of four-year Annie from Bulgaria at the hands of her father. The little girl whose disappearance had been declared on April 24 by her parents, was murdered by her 27-year old father, a national of Bulgaria, according to the Greek Police (ELAS).

A friend of the couple told the police: "The father of the 4-year old told me that when he recovered from drug use, he found his daughter dead. When he saw the lifeless body on the floor, he began slicing it into several pieces and then told me that he boiled the pieces of the child. Then, on different occasions, he threw the pieces into rubbish bins near his home. He told me that lately he used to hit the child often. He later informed his wife and they both agreed to say she disappeared".

The case was solved by the Attica Police by combining facts obtained both from the testimony of a person from the close environment of the 27-year old perpetrator and from genetic material that was found, as well as a series of other indications that leave no doubt to the competent officers for the fate of the unfortunate girl.

The case began to be investigated by the police after the disappearance statement made by the 25-year old girl's mother, also a national of Bulgaria, who initially claimed that the girl had been kidnapped by a woman she knew, but then changed her story.

The officers assigned to the case, during the preliminary investigation, had arrested the 27-year old father, who is a drug user, but he did not confessed, and due to the lack of evidence, let him go free.

Criminal networks using cover of rescue effort to target poor rural communities in country from which an estimated 15,000 girls are trafficked a year, warn NGOs

Tens of thousands of young women from regions devastated by the earthquake in Nepal are being targeted by human traffickers supplying a network of brothels across south Asia, campaigners in Kathmandu and affected areas say.

The 7.8-magnitude quake, which killed more than 7,000 people, has devastated poor rural communities, with hundreds of thousands losing their homes and possessions. Girls and young women in these communities have long been targeted by traffickers, who abduct them and force them into sex work.

The UN and local NGOs estimate 12,000 to 15,000 girls a year are trafficked from Nepal. Some are taken overseas, to South Korea and as far as South Africa. But the majority end up in Indian brothels where tens of thousands are working in appalling conditions.

"This is the time when the brokers go in the name of relief to kidnap or lure women. We are distributing assistance to make people aware that someone might come to lure them," said Sunita Danuwar, director of Shakti Samuha, an NGO in Kathmandu. "We are getting reports of [individuals] pretending to go for rescuing and looking at people."

Senior western aid officials in the Nepalese capital are also concerned. "There is nothing like an emergency when there is chaos for opportunities to ... traffic more women. There is a great chance that everything that is bad happening in Nepal could scale up," said one.

Sita, 20, told the Guardian how she had been taken from her village in Sindhupalchok, the hill area north of Kathmandu, to the Indian border town of Siliguri where she was sold to a brothel owner, repeatedly beaten, systematically raped by hundreds of men and infected with HIV. "I do not have nightmares about my time there. I have erased it from my memory," she said.

Last month's quake killed more than 3,000 people in Sindhupalchok, and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

"The earthquake will definitely increase the risk of abuse," said Rashmita Shashtra, a local healthworker. "People here are now desperate and will take any chance. There are spotters in the villages who convince family members and local brokers who do the deal. We know who they are."

Are you ready for rioting, looting and mindless violence in major U.S. cities all summer long? According to a brand new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 96 percent of all Americans believe that there will be more civil unrest in America this summer. That leaves only 4 percent of people that believe that everything will be just fine. In this day and age, it is virtually impossible to get 96 percent of Americans to agree on anything. So the fact that just about everyone agrees that we are going to see more civil unrest should really tell you something.

The anger that has been building under the surface for so many years in this country has finally started to erupt. If you have been following my website for a while, you know that this is something that I have been warning about for a very long time. Many people may have thought that I was exaggerating when I talked about the civil unrest that was coming to American cities. But I was not exaggerating at all. In fact, if anything I was downplaying it. In the years to come, we are going to see things happen in our cities that are going to absolutely shock the world.

A man in Florida is suing a local hospital for emotional distress after his amputated leg ended up in a dumpster with his name tag still attached to it.

The lawsuit comes after the family of 56-year-old John Timiriasieff was contacted by detectives to tell them his leg, removed in October at Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables, had been found. They were investigating whether he had been the victim of foul play.

"Rather than properly disposing of the plaintiff's limb as expected and as required by Florida law, Doctors Hospital threw [it] into the garbage, with tags indicating it belonged to the plaintiff," the lawsuit, filed on Wednesday on behalf of Timiriasieff in Miami-Dade County Circuit Court, reads.

Furious and anxious to find out what happened, the Timiriasieff family asked the hospital about violation of procedures regarding disposal of amputated parts. The procedure requires the compulsory incineration of amputated limbs.

Yet the hospital offered "no explanation for what had occurred," the lawsuit said, adding it couldn't discuss the incident in detail because of patient privacy.

"However, we can say when Doctors Hospital was notified of this situation, hospital leaders took immediate and appropriate measures to address it," Doctors Hospital said in an emailed statement, Reuters reports. "Proper procedures have been reinforced at the hospital to prevent similar situations from happening in the future."

Disposing of the amputated limb in such a way is "outrageous and beyond the bounds of human decency," Timiriasieff stated in the lawsuit, adding it must be seen as "odious and utterly intolerable."

An Oregon bill expanding background checks to encompass nearly all gun sales in the state made it through the Legislature on Monday, overcoming obstacles that stymied two previous attempts to pass similar laws.

The measure now heads to Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, who has indicated support. Her signature would make Oregon the eighth state to require screening before firearms could be transferred between private, unrelated owners. No other states have passed such legislation this year, advocates said.

Oregon's effort is the latest after the long-running debate over gun rights intensified following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Last year, Washington state passed a ballot initiative requiring background checks on all gun sales and transfers, and Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said the group has the signatures for a similar ballot initiative in Nevada.

Supporters have tried twice before to expand background checks in Oregon, saying it closes a loophole that allows people to purchase firearms online without a review. Neither attempt made it past a Senate vote, but Democrats managed to increase their majorities in both chambers after last year's election, partially because key candidates in the Senate were backed by billionaire Michael Bloomberg's gun control group, Every town for Gun Safety.

Would you find it frightening— perhaps even downright Orwellian — to know that a DNA swab that you sent to a company for recreational purposes would surface years later in the hands of police? What if it caused your child to end up in a police interrogation room as the primary suspect in a murder investigation?

In an extremely troubling case out of Idaho Falls, that's exactly what happened.

Police investigating the 1996 murder of Angie Dodge targeted the wrong man as the suspect, after looking to Ancestry.com owned Sorensen Database labs for help. The labs look for familial matches between the murderers DNA and DNA submitted for genealogical testing after failing to find a match using traditional methods.

One can easily see in the emerging information and cyber war that a nation having its own IT infrastructure, its own hardware, and its own versions of social media platforms is quickly becoming a matter of national security. Without control over these assets, a nation must depend on foreign suppliers for their computers, peripheries and software. Already, this dependence has opened nations up to now evident threats including malware embedded into hardware and software that is otherwise impossible to detect until the damage is already done.

Likewise, a nation's food supply can and has throughout history, been a source of vulnerability in times of conflict. The inability to grow one's own food invites blockades and their modern equivalent, sanctions, undermining a nation's strength and stability and eventually setting the stage for its ultimate demise. Iraq is an example of this.

In the long-term, a nation's food supply controlled by foreign corporations, particularly in the realm of genetically engineered organisms, can have disastrous effects. As a nation's wealth is slowly drained from their shores and into the coffers of corporations like Bayer, Monsanto and Syngenta, inferior, expensive and environmentally devastating crops wreak havoc on the very socioeconomic fabric of a nation. India is increasingly becoming an example of this.

And what of healthcare? Surely the same applies. But even as nations and communities are just now understanding the importance of protecting their food supplies from predatory multinational corporations and the hegemonic ambitions they represent, there seems to be some latency in understanding this likewise in regards to healthcare and in particular pharmaceuticals and vaccines.