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?

The Connecticut woman who led police on a high-speed chase near the U.S. Capitol before being shot dead was a loving mother who had dreams of being a teacher and a dentist - not a criminal, her sisters told ABC News.

Miriam Carey, 34, of Stamford, was killed by police Thursday after trying to ram her black Infiniti into a White House gate and leading cops on a chase down Pennsylvania Avenue with her 1-year-old daughter in the car. The toddler was uninjured and placed in police custody.

But Carey's sisters said the woman they knew was not violent. Instead, Miriam Carey was suffering from post-partum depression with psychosis.

"She had no political agenda. She didn't hate her country. She wasn't a terrorist," Amy Carey Jones, a registered nurse, told ABC News. "She was on medication."

While police did not find weapons in Carey's car, her sister, Valarie Carey, said Miriam's illness may have influenced her erratic behavior. But the incident raised questions as to whether police handled the situation appropriately.

89-year-old peace advocate Audrey Tobias objects to Lockheed Martin work on census


An 89-year-old Toronto woman who is a Second World War veteran will return to court next week to hear the verdict in a case where she has been charged with refusing to fill out the 2011 census form.

Audrey Tobias faces a criminal charge under the Statistics Act, which makes refusing or neglecting to fill in the census form an offence punishable by a $500 fine and up to three months in prison.

Her case began Thursday morning inside a packed Toronto courtroom. Supporters greeted Tobias with applause when she took the stand.

The CBC's Charlsie Agro reported that Tobias arrived wearing her best suit and was adamant that she would not pay a

A man reportedly set himself on fire on the National Mall this afternoon and was airlifted to a hospital.

Police were called to respond to the emergency at 4.24pm and the fire was put out. The latest reports say that the man is in critical condition but his identity has still not been released.

The man has not been named, but DC Police reportedly said that he was conscious and breathing.

Witnesses said that they saw him sitting on the Mall, dousing himself with gasoline which he had in a gas canister.

Some reports say that two male bystanders initially tried to put the fire out using their own shirts while others put the number of Good Samaritans at closer to five or six people.

'I didn't hear a word from him,' witness Adam Stifel told CNN.

'He had already doused himself with gasoline, I saw his gas can.'

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.