At least 14 people have died and 24 others have been injured in a bus crash on the outskirts of Mexico City.

The accident took place on a highway that links the Mexico state capital of Toluca to Mexico City's northwestern suburb of Naucalpan at around 6:38 am local time (1130 GMT) on Friday.

The bus, which was packed with morning commuters, hurtled down a hillside and left 14, including a child, dead.

"There wasn't a collision with another vehicle, but instead the bus veered off the asphalt and plunged down the mountainside about 100 or 120 meters," Miguel Angel Contreras, the attorney general of the State of Mexico said at a press conference following the accident.

Two helicopters and a number of ambulances arrived at the scene as the bus was lying upside down.

Twelve people died on the spot while one victim died of injuries in an ambulance and another in a hospital in Mexico City, officials said.

The cause of the accident is yet unknown.

Road accidents are one of the main causes of death in Mexico. Approximately, 4 million traffic accidents occur in Mexico that claim around 24,000 lives, which amounts to almost double the people who die from drug violence, according to AFP.

We think we're in the 21st century, but all the signs suggest we're living in an earlier and harsher era.

Of course they shut the Federal government down. Tea Party Republicans long for the days when there were no government authorities to enforce laws and restrain the power of unchecked wealth, the days when there was no Justice Department, no SEC, no other agencies protecting Americans from the misdeeds of bankers and corporate titans.

But it already seems as if our entire country has secretly been transported back in time. We may think we're living in the 21st century, but all the signs suggest we're living in an earlier and harsher era.

Here are seven signs the United States of America has returned to the 19th century.

1. Wall Street can "send your man around to see my man" again.

Shocked by newly elected President Teddy Roosevelt's moves against Wall Street, J. P. Morgan went to the White House. "If we have done anything wrong," said Morgan, "send your man to my man and they can fix it up."

"That can't be done," said Roosevelt. "We don't want to fix it up," his Attorney General added, "we want to stop it." The year was 1902, and 19th-century privilege was over for Wall Street. Now it's back, and so are the "men" - and as the recent foot-dragging over female Fed chair candidate Janet Yellen highlights, they almost always are men.

The chief architects of deregulation in the 1990s included Sen. Phil Gramm, President Bill Clinton and Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. That deregulation cost millions of Americans their jobs and millions more their life savings. But the parties behind it did just fine.

Gramm went to work for UBS bank immediately upon leaving the Senate in 2002, and is now vice-chairman of its investment banking division. Robert Rubin eventually headed up Citigroup, the megabank whose creation was made possible when his Treasury Department pushed for a then-illegal merger between Travelers and Citibank. Rubin was to become deeply implicated in the fraud and scandal which led to the 2008 crisis, although he claimed ignorance of his own bank's doings and never faced prosecution.

Larry Summers has made millions from Wall Street banks. Bill Clinton made tens of millions "advising" two investment funds belonging to billionaire Ron Burkle. Exactly how much isn't known, but a very public falling out involved Burkle's alleged "stiffing" of Clinton on a final $20-$25 million payment. Clinton went on to serve as an advisor of Teneo Capital until February 2012.

Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs was George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary. Barack Obama's first Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, is now collecting huge fees on Wall Street. Obama's second Secretary, Jack Lew, was an executive at Citigroup. His former economic advisor, Peter Orszag, has traded places with Lew and is now at Citigroup. Obama's former Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, broke the Democratic mold by working at JPMorgan Chase.

White House visitor logs, which are woefully incomplete, show that Wall Street's top dogs were frequent guests, especially at the height of the bank bailout. Despite massive fraud and tens of billions in fines and settlements, not one senior banker has been indicted for the crimes which brought down the economy.

Teddy Roosevelt's legacy has been undone. Bankers can "send their man" to see the president's man - and he's frequently the same man.

Large chunks of the National Weather Service--the group of scientists partially responsible for predicting extreme weather events, among many other important weather-related duties--are still working despite the government shutdown debacle. They're just doing it without that whole "pay" detail. Upsetting.

ABC affiliate station meteorologist Mike Masco apparently found a hidden message to Congress, venting that frustration, buried in some standard weather alerts. (You can see the alert here. As of writing, it's still there. Scroll down a bit.)

Ha! Clever.

But seriously. They need to get paid.

Two European men have been burnt to death in Madagascar by protesters who suspected they trafficked the organs of a missing child for witchcraft rituals.

Witnesses say a local man suspected of involvement was also lynched hours later on Nosy Be, a tourist island resort in Madagascar's north-west.

It is believed he may be the person questioned by police over the child's disappearance on Wednesday.

His detention prompted riots outside a police station and the ensuing unrest.

"Rioters launched a manhunt and killed the Europeans" in the early hours of Thursday morning, the deputy commander of the paramilitary police, Gen Guy Randriamaro Bobin, told the AFP news agency.

He said an eight-year-old boy's lifeless body was found on Thursday morning, without genitals and without a tongue, the agency reports.

Officials initially said the men were French nationals, but residents on Nosy Be say one of the men may have been Italian.

"Two foreigners died, we have confirmed that one of them was French," AFP quotes France's foreign affairs spokesman Philippe Lalliot as saying.

Several hours later witnesses, including an AFP correspondent, saw a man dragged from a vehicle and thrown on a fire on the popular palm-fringed Ambatoloaka beach.

A Nosy Be resident told the BBC the man was the suspect questioned by the paramilitary police on Wednesday, who was later released.

The BBC's Tim Healy in the capital, Antananarivo, says Nosy Be is the jewel in the crown of Madagascar's tourist industry and has been used to encourage tourists to return to the Indian Ocean nation following several years of political unrest.

Chicago - During Monday rush hour this week, a Blue Line train that was scheduled for repairs did a very mysterious thing: it took off without a conductor on board. After quietly and slowly maneuvering its way around the curves of the Forest Park train yard after being parked there for a week, the rogue machine passed through the Forest Park station, headed eastbound on a westbound track and climbed a hill before ramming into another train at Harlem station and injuring 30 people. The media is calling it "the ghost train" and investigators are completely baffled.

The incident is unlike any "veteran city rail workers say they have seen" reports The Chicago Tribune, as multiple failsafes that should have stopped the train didn't. Robert Kelly, the president of the local rail union, told CBS Chicago he's never heard of anything like this in 27 years and called it a "great concern" considering "we have people working in these yards 24 hour a day, seven days a week." To add more to the intrigue, the cameras facing the ghost train when it was parked in the yard the morning of were not working. No one saw anyone leave the train after the collision, not the conductor in the train that was rammed or the Forest Park station supervisor that ran after the rogue train while radioing ahead.

It's a puzzle investigators have been stuck on for days now, perhaps because they were originally looking in the wrong place. Nowadays, if you want to do something remotely, you can do so via the Internet of Things (loT) where everything, including refrigerators, is becoming connected to the web. The rise of this machine-to-machine industry prompted Wired's Andrew Rose to write in January "the IoT will unveil unprecedented security challenges: in data privacy, safety, governance and trust."

In keeping with Rose's prediction, Forbes journalist Kashmir Hill "haunted a complete stranger's home" this July by turning the lights on and off in a "smart home." A month earlier, University of Texas researchers took control of a yacht in the Mediterranean via GPS. At this year's DEFCON, the annual hacker convention, two security researchers showed off their ability to disable the brakes in two cars, a Toyota Prius and a Ford Escape. While it's not as easy as using your iPad to move a model train on a track, hacking a public transit train is certainly within the realm of possibility.

A man reportedly set himself on fire on the National Mall this afternoon. Police were called to respond to the emergency at 4.24pm and the fire was put out. The man has not been named, but DC Police reportedly said that he was conscious and breathing.

The man's exact motivations have not been reported but the chosen location hints that it was a demonstration of sorts.

The Mall is a national park, making it one of the hundreds of such sites across the country that have been closed as a result of the government shutdown.

U.S. Park Police sources told MailOnline that the shutdown didn't play into the rescue.

'There is no indication that the government shutdown impacted the way anyone responded to this. DC Fire/EMS had people on the scene in, literally, three minutes, and a helicopter transport was there minutes later,' the source told MailOnline.

Vo Nguyen Giap, the legendary general who masterminded the defeat of the French military at Dien Bien Phu and led North Vietnam's forces against the US has died aged 102 at a military hospital in Hanoi.

Giap, whose victory at Dien Bien Phu triggered France's departure from Indo-China was a self-taught leader regarded as one of the great military geniuses of the post-second world war era.

He remained as the commander of the North's forces supporting the Viet Cong throughout the subsequent Vietnam war, being credited with the 1968 Tet offensive.

Giap, known as the Red Napoleon, was a national hero whose reputation was second only to Ho Chi Minh.

While some - such as the American journalist Stanley Karnow regarded him as a strategist in the mould of Wellington - others, including the US general William Westmorland, believed his success was down to his ruthlessness.

Indeed, Westmorland complained to Karnow in his history of the Vietnam War: "Any American commander who took the same vast losses as General Giap would have been sacked overnight.

One biker was struck by the car and may be paralyzed for life

A 28-year-old motorcyclist was charged Wednesday with reckless driving in an encounter with the driver of an SUV who was later beaten after a high-speed chase by dozens of bikers that was captured on videotape.

Christopher Cruz, of Passaic, N.J., was also charged with unlawful imprisonment. His attorney, H. Benjamin Perez, said Cruz denied all the allegations. "He will come back to fight this case and clear his name," he said.

Cruz has had previous criminal cases in New Jersey including one in which he pleaded guilty to theft, the Associated Press reports.

A second suspect, Allen Edwards, 42, surrendered to police on Tuesday but was released on Wednesday pending further investigation.

One of six Atlantic City police officers recorded on video beating a 20-year-old Linwood man this summer was the subject of at least three prior allegations of excessive force and civil rights violations.

Court records show K-9 Officer Sterling Wheaten has appeared as a defendant in at least three civil cases filed in the past three years.

Surveillance footage obtained via subpoena from Tropicana Casino and Resort show the officers tackling David Connor Castellani to the ground about 3:10 a.m. June 15, followed by a succession of blows from clubs and the officers' knees.

The incident occurred off Pacific Avenue near South Morris Avenue, after Castellani was removed from Tropicana. It was unclear Saturday why he was removed.

Less than a minute later, a K-9 vehicle drives into frame. Within seconds, the K-9 is seen biting Castellani's neck and dragging him to the curb.

The accident happened when a fire broke out on board a boat packed with an estimated 500 Eritrean and Somali refugees as it neared the end of its journey from the Libyan coast and approached Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost scrap of territory.

The boat's engine stopped working and it began to take on water, prompting some of the passengers to burn a sheet in order to summon help from the island.

But that started a fire on board and terrified migrants rushed to one side of the 65ft-long boat, causing it to capsize about half a nautical mile off the coast.

The Italian coast guard managed to rescue about 155 people but another 220 were still missing.