Police in Washington could have avoided shooting dead a woman pursued by officers in a car chase that led to the lockdown of the Capitol this week, the driver's sister, former New York police sergeant Valarie Carey, said late on Friday.

The family of Miriam Carey, whose one-year-old daughter Erica was in the car with her during the encounter with police on Thursday, has said she suffered from post-natal depression.

Carey, 34, a resident of Stamford, Connecticut, tried to drive her black Infiniti coupe through a barrier near the White House, then sped toward Capitol Hill, leading police on a high-speed chase that ended when her car got stuck on a median and police shot her.

"My sister could have been any person traveling in our capital," Valarie Carey told reporters outside her Brooklyn home.

"Deadly physical force was not the ultimate recourse and it didn't have to be."

The chase and shooting came at a time of high political tension in the U.S. capital with Congress debating how to resolve the shutdown of the federal government. The Capitol was locked down after the shots were fired.

In another incident that caused alarm in Washington, a man appeared to have set himself on fire at the National Mall on Friday. He was listed in critical condition at a hospital.

Mbabane - An extensive black market in human body parts has been uncovered in Swaziland's second-largest hospital.

Demand is strong in the country for human ingredients for use in traditional potions. Even the water used to wash corpses in the hospital mortuary is being sold to traditional healers.

"If they are selling parts from the hospital, they can steal from someone who has just died or is about to die," said Reverend Grace Masilela, a Nazarene Church preacher who said she was once a traditional healer.

Masilela revealed this at the weekend to a Swazi newspaper, but the practice of selling human organs from the mortuary at Raleigh Fitkin Memorial Hospital in the central commercial hub of Manzini is an open secret.

Traditional healers come to town to purchase herbs at the Manzini market and end their trip with a visit to the mortuary.

A human brain costs R1 000. Other parts, from internal organs to body fat, fetch from R400 to R1 000.

Body parts are roasted and pulverised into an ash, and mixed with herbs for a potion that is either drunk, ingested or in some cases rubbed into the blood through a razor cut to the skin. The user is then endowed with supernatural power, according to belief.

"Children's parts are favoured because they are considered pure. An elderly person's parts are liked because the consumer takes on the person's wisdom," said Charles Mngomezulu, a traditional healer, who added that he does not dabble in muti.

In ancient Rome, when times were tough and the plebs were restless the rulers would often resort to two time-proven techniques to hold on to power: bribery and distraction. By meeting the basic needs of the people by bribing them with money or food, and distracting them with the entertainment of various sorts of spectacles, the rulers of Rome ensured the loyalty, or at least the passivity, of the people.

Of course, providing bread (panem) and spectacle games (circenses) did nothing to address the underlying issues inherent in Roman society, and in fact exacerbated them by diverting time, money, and effort that might have been better spent actually fixing problems instead of ignoring them. For a number of reasons, including the politics of bread and circuses, the Roman Empire, one of the greatest of its or any time, eventually fell apart under its own weight.

Many people like to draw parallels between the Roman Empire and modern-day America. While these comparisons are often trite and over-simplified, modern comparisons to the "bread and circuses" tactics of ancient Rome warrant closer examination. This is because there are direct parallels between the "then" of ancient Rome and the "now" of American society.

Social "entitlement" programs in modern America are a direct parallel to the bread and money handouts of ancient Rome. Originally envisioned as a means to protect those not capable of working and to provide a temporary "safety net" for able-bodied, welfare and related programs in modern America instead have become a snare that is useful only in ensuring a steady stream of generations of voters utterly dependent upon government handouts for their survival.

With so many people on the public dole, and with many of the trappings of the middle class given to them for nothing, there is no real financial or social incentive for the poor to put in the work required to actually move into the middle class. Over time, politicians compete to see who can provide the greatest excesses from the public coffers to the most people possible, in order to ensure those politicians remain in power. And we all know what happens to a democracy soon after it reaches this point.

District judge denies appeal of Sister Megan Rice, 83, and two other activists, citing their intent to 'disarm' Oak Ridge. An octogenarian Roman Catholic nun, jailed for breaking into a nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee, is facing up to 30 years in prison after losing her plea for the most serious charge to be dropped.

Sister Megan Rice, 83, and two fellow peace activists staged a non-violent protest to symbolically disarm the Oak Ridge Y-12 nuclear weapons facility, home to the nation's main supply of highly enriched uranium, in July. They were initially charged with trespassing, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison, but felony charges quickly followed. They were eventually convicted of interfering with national security and damage to federal property.

Well, better late than never.

In the wake of the outrage that stemmed from the placement of a poster promoting Naomi Watts' movie Diana near the entrance to the Paris tunnel where Princess Diana died, the 4-foot by 6-foot ad has been taken down.

"It was requested that the poster be removed Monday afternoon, and we received confirmation that it had been removed Monday evening," a spokesperson for French distributor Le Pacte told The Hollywood Reporter.

The sign, featuring Watts dressed as Diana, had been prominently displayed by the Pont de l'Alma tunnel, just feet away from the gold Flame of Liberty statue, which has become known as an unofficial memorial for the Princess of Wales.

A tourist captured the moment a man saluted the Capitol before deciding to set himself alight on Washington's National Mall on Friday,

Javier Soto was visiting the tourist hotspots with his camera snapping shots of the Smithsonian, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Then he went to see the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and the White House.

Finally, returning to the National Mall and, just before 4:30 p.m., he aimed his camera east, toward the Capitol and saw a man pouring gasoline over his body from a canister.

Mr Soto says the man gave the Capitol building a crisp military salute, before igniting the fuel with a lighter

Can the government use civil forfeiture to take your money when you have done nothing wrong - and then pocket the proceeds? The IRS thinks so.

For over 30 years, Terry Dehko has successfully run a grocery store in Fraser, Mich., with his daughter Sandy. In January 2013, without warning, the federal government used civil forfeiture to seize all of the money from the Dehkos' store bank account (more than $35,000) even though they've done absolutely nothing wrong. Their American Dream is now a nightmare.

Federal civil forfeiture law features an appalling lack of due process: It empowers the government to seize private property from Americans without ever charging, let alone convicting, them of a crime. Perversely, the government then pockets the proceeds while providing no prompt way to get a court to review the seizure.

On September 25, 2013, Terry and Sandy teamed up with the Institute for Justice to fight back in federal court. A victory will vindicate not just their right to be free from abusive forfeiture tactics, but the right of every American not to have their property wrongfully seized by government.

Caller ID isn't always what it appears, and increasingly, criminal telemarketers are taking advantage of that. Aggressive phone sales operators have pretended to be the IRS, and they've pretended to be charities, but apparently they've developed a new tactic recently - impersonating teachers, calling parents at home during the school day.

A flurry of calls starting last week arrived at consumers' homes with "Teachers Phone" shown in the Caller ID displays. But those who answer don't hear about a sick or misbehaving child, recipients say.

"It was a prerecorded message from 'credit card services,'" wrote one victim on a telemarketing calls complaints page.

"There was a prerecorded female voice claiming to be from my credit card company saying that there was a limited-time offer to get a new credit card with a 6.9% APR," said another.

The calls come from a telephone number that is allegedly in Brooklyn, N.Y., though that number could also be spoofed. Calls placed to it produce only a busy signal.

One Killeen boy had to learn a lesson the hard way at Ft. Hood Street and W. Veterans Memorial Boulevard today. A 4th grader spent the afternoon holding a sign that says "I am a bully. Honk if you hate bullies."

His father, Jose Lagares, says he came up with the punishment after his son got in trouble for bullying several times at school.

"Bullying is also a form of public humiliation. Maybe he understands that when he humiliates someone publicly that doesn't feel good," said Lagares,

"Hopefully he'll take that with him so the next time he tries to bully someone he'll think about it twice."

Lagares says most passerbys gave him positive feedback.

The family of Miriam Carey, the mentally disturbed woman who was shot by police up on Capitol Hill last week, has been on TV demanding answers about why she was shot.

Ms Carey, 34, died in a hail of gunfire after she led police on a high speed car chase from the White House up to Congress, failing to stop at least twice when officers pointed their guns at her. Here 18-month-old daughter was in the back of the car when her mother was killed.

You could argue, that anyone who behaves like that in an area as sensitive as Capitol Hill gets what's coming to them, but if you're mentally disturbed (she to have believed Barack Obama was stalking her) then by definition you are not rational.

This woman did not have a gun. She did not wave anything that looked like a gun at police, so far as we know - and if she had, you can bet the police would have made a big deal of it. She certainly did not fire at the police. And yet they still gunned her down.

Was this really necessary? Was there really no other way to stop that car? Clearly it needed to be stopped, as this woman was a danger to pedestrians, if nothing else.


Given the concrete barriers that protect access to the Capitol buildings themselves, she was never going to get in there so what about deploying a "stinger" - one of those spiky thing that shreds a car's tires? Or using other cars to ram her off the road?