Police in Chile have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing five tonnes of ice from the Jorge Montt glacier in the Patagonia region to sell as designer ice cubes in bars and restaurants.

Local media reported that last Friday police intercepted a refrigerated truck with an estimated £3,900 worth of illicit ice allegedly bound for whiskies, rums and cocktails in the capital Santiago. Authorities have accused the driver of theft and are considering adding violation of national monuments to the charge sheet.

The amulet and mask were a 13-year-old boy’s virtual possessions in an online fantasy game. In the real world, he was beaten and threaten with a knife to give them up.

The Dutch Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the theft conviction of a youth who stole another boy’s possessions in the popular online fantasy game RuneScape. Judges ordered the offender to perform 144 hours of community service.

Only a handful of such cases have been heard in the world, and they have reached varying conclusions about the legal status of “virtual goods” — and whether stealing them is real-world theft.

The suspect’s lawyer had argued the amulet and mask “were neither tangible nor material and, unlike for example electricity, had no economic value.” But the Netherlands’ highest court said the virtual objects had an intrinsic value to the 13-year-old gamer because of “the time and energy he invested” in winning them while playing the game.

Researchers have discovered that the seemingly erratic behavior of the “Rostov Ripper,” a prolific serial killer active in the 1980s, conformed to the same mathematical pattern obeyed by earthquakes, avalanches, stock market crashes and many other sporadic events. The finding suggests an explanation for why serial killers kill.

Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, electrical engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles, modeled the behavior of Andrei Chikatilo, a gruesome murderer who took the lives of 53 people in Rostov, Russia between 1978 and 1990. Though Chikatilo sometimes went nearly three years without committing murder, on other occasions, he went just three days. The researchers found that the seemingly random spacing of his murders followed a mathematical distribution known as a power law.

When the number of days between Chikatilo’s murders is plotted against the number of times he waited that number of days, the relationship forms a near-straight line on a type of graph called a log-log plot. It’s the same result scientists get when they plot the magnitude of earthquakes against the number of times each magnitude has occurred — and the same goes for a variety of natural phenomena. The power law outcome suggests that there was an underlying natural process driving the serial killer’s behavior.

Simkin and Roychowdhury hypothesize that it’s the same type of effect that has also been found to cause epileptics to have seizures. The psychotic effects that lead a serial killer to commit murder “arise from simultaneous firing of large number of neurons in the brain,” they wrote.

Presumably sick of all the bleeding heart liberals whining about civil rights, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has devised an elegant solution to sidestep the controversy over his department’s stop and frisk policy. Speaking at a State of the NYPD breakfast this morning, Kelly announced that the NYPD is developing a kind of infrared technology that will enable police officers to detect whether individuals are carrying guns under their clothing. Sure, it’s not as badass as shooting down a plane, but at least cops will finally be able to see what’s under our clothes without having to get out of their cars.

The mechanism, which the NYPD is developing with help from the U.S. Department of Defense, currently only works at a short range of three or four feet. But Kelly thinks they can improve it to scan citizens from a distance of up to 25 meters away. He announced this morning that the gadget will be mounted on NYPD vans with “the infrared rays shooting up the street at the person,” as the Post puts it.

The device detects the radiation emitting from a person’s body, and it can’t penetrate metal, so a concealed gun can be spotted from the image captured by the detector’s lens …

Read More: Gothamist

Microsoft Corporation is taking heat for a patent it filed for what is being called the “Avoid Ghetto” GPS App. The app esentially links up with your GPS or Smartphone and when you are approaching an area that, based on crime statistics or racial make-up, is deemed undesirable it gives you directions around it.

Sarah E. Chinn, author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism, made an interesting point where she stressed that even though it may give people less of a nervous feeling to not get lost and wind up in a really bad neighborhood, the vast majority of crime is committed by people that know each other so this app would not really improve driver safety.

A Lexington man is accused trying to use a fake $1 million bill to pay for his purchases at a Walmart.

Michael Anthony Fuller, 53, of 3 Parker St., walked into the Walmart on Lowes Boulevard in Lexington on Nov. 17. He shopped for a while, picking up a vacuum cleaner, a microwave oven and other merchandise, totaling $476, an arrest warrant says.

Fuller was later charged with attempting to obtain property by false pretense and uttering a forged instrument, both felonies, court records show. A warrant says of the fake million-dollar bill: “There is no such thing.” The largest bill in circulation is a $100 bill.

Lexington police Sgt. Shannon Sharpe said the case is unusual. “It is kind of strange,” Sharpe said.

Police continued a search for clues Wednesday in a mystery that began Tuesday morning when Canadian tourists found a severed human leg behind a waterfront home. The leg washed ashore near the Bay Vista Recreation Center. Police believe it was in the water for a day or two. They believe it was a right leg that may have belonged to an overweight white female who was dismembered.

Two marine units on Wednesday searched waters from Tierra Verde to the Tropical Shores area, said St. Petersburg police spokesman Mike Puetz. Officers did not find any other body parts, he said.

Puetz also said police investigated a tip Wednesday from a person who reported seeing an item that resembled a foot floating off St. Pete Beach.

Hope you have a Merry Christmas, America, because you’ve been extremely naughty at the mall this year. After surveying retailers in the U.S., the Global Retail Theft Barometer says that shoppers pinched $1.8 billion worth of merchandise during the four weeks leading up to Christmas, reports the AP. $1.8 billion! For context, $1.8 billion is a 6 percent increase from 2010.

Like a modern day Dr Frankenstein, Enrique Gomez De Molina creates hauntingly stunning hybrid sculptures made from the stuffed parts of dead animals. But it…could land the Miami artist in jail for up to five years and see him forking out $250,000 in fines.

He pleaded guilty to illegally importing parts from endangered species to make his beloved mythical creatures. He smuggled in the parts, skins and remains, from whole cobras, pangolins, hornbills, and the skulls of babirusa and orangutans from areas all over the world including Bali, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and China.

There’s been a sharp increase in recent decades in the number of young Americans who report they’ve been arrested at least once, researchers report in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

While in the mid-1960s about 22 percent of Americans reported having been arrested by the time they turned 23, researchers estimate that the “prevalence rate” for arrests by that age now lies “between 30.2 percent and 41.4 percent.”

Increasingly, “arrest is a pretty common experience,” Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and one of the study’s authors, tells USA Today.

According to ABC News, “Brame and his colleagues analyzed responses to a national survey of more than 7,000 young people between 1997 and 2008. … Not all of the young people remained in the study for all 11 years, accounting for the uncertainty reflected in the wide ranges of the study’s findings…

[continues at NPR]

Walter White

​Missouri has once again been ranked as the nation’s biggest meth-producing state based on the number of drug labs busted last year.

According to Missouri Highway Patrol figures published in the Post-Dispatch, law enforcement seized 1,774 meth labs in 2009 — up 20 percent from the 1,487 confiscated in 2008.

Missouri outpaced the No. 2 state — Indiana — which had 1,096 meth lab busts in 2009. Jefferson County, Missouri, led the state with 227 labs confiscated last year.

The news comes as Missouri legislature considers a bill that would require pseudoephedrine — the key ingredient for meth — to be sold only as a prescription.

Read More: Riverfront Times

US financial regulators charged a father and son in Utah state with operating a $220 million property investment Ponzi scheme which targeted fellow members of the Mormon church.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Wendell Jacobson and his son Allen Jacobson, of Fountain Green in central Utah, with selling shares in their purported real estate business and using the funds from some investors to pay returns promised to others.

It said that since 2008 the two had solicited investments into their business of ostensibly buying, rehabilitating and then renting out properties.

They appeared to use the memberships in the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — the Mormon church — “to make connections and win over the trust of prospective investors,” the SEC said.

Securities in their businesses were sold to investors without registering with the SEC as required by law.

Read More: AP via Google News

When architect Felipe de Jesus Corona built Mexico’s most powerful drug lord a 200-foot-long tunnel under the U.S.-Mexican border with a hydraulic lift entrance opened by a fake water tap, the kingpin was impressed. The architect “made me one [expletive] cool tunnel” Joaquin (Shorty) Guzman said, according to court testimony that helped sentence Mr. Corona to 18 years in prison in 2006.

Built below a pool table in his lawyer’s home, the tunnel was among the first of an increasingly sophisticated drug transport system used by Mr. Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel. U.S. customs agents seized more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine that had allegedly been smuggled along the underground route.

In the past five years, a crackdown on drug smugglers in Mexico and tighter U.S. border security above ground has led to a dramatic increase in the use, and the sophistication, of tunnels under the border.

There have been more than 100 tunnels discovered during President Felipe Calderon’s five years in office, double the number found over the previous 15 years. Officials suspect most recently found tunnels belong to the Sinaloa cartel, which has been perfecting its technique for two decades using specialized technology and a cadre of trained builders.

That tunnel, replete with a hydraulically controlled steel door, elevator and electric rail tracks, was built by the Sinaloa cartel, which controls the California-Mexico border area where the bulk of subterranean passages are, he said.

To burrow deep and long – one tunnel stretched four kilometres – smugglers employ powerful machinery, some of which can bore a small hole deep in the soil and create a walled shaft without having to send anyone below ground. “It’s super fast, it’s really actually scary,” said Tim Durst, assistant special agent in charge of ICE’s San Diego office. “You can have a tunnel done in a couple of weeks.”

The drilling equipment costs between $50,000 and $75,000, and officials say they have no way to stop cartels from obtaining the high-powered gear.

Tulsa Police say a woman tried to make a meth lab inside a south Tulsa Walmart.

According to police, Alisha Halfmoon, 45, began taking items used to make meth off of shelves at the Walmart located at 81st and Lewis in south Tulsa. She then began trying to make the drug while still inside the store.

When officers took the items outside the store, some spilled. One officer suffered a minor burn to his hand. No customers were injured.

You won’t see the talking head presttitutes discussing the fact that former Governor Rob Blagojevich was arrested exactly one day after he announced he was “…asking all Illinois government agencies to suspend business with Bank of America” …

Here’s Rod Blagojevich uncensored on We Are Change Chicago:

Olivine basalt collected by Apollo 15. Photo: Wknight94 (CC)

Dan Vergano writes in USA Today:

NASA hauled back loads of rocks and dust from the moon, but apparently hasn’t kept good track of those samples on Earth. The space agency has lost or misplaced more than 500 pieces of the lunar rocks and other space samples, NASA’s inspector general reported Thursday, making the case for better inventory controls.

Astronauts on the Apollo moon landings from 1969 to 1972 returned 842 pounds of lunar rock and soil to Earth. The space agency now loans samples, along with meteorite and comet dust, to about 377 researchers worldwide.

The space agency now lists 517 moon rock samples as missing or stolen. However, the inspector general audit suggests much more is missing, based on inquiries to a sample of 59 scholars loaned moon rocks, comet dust or meteorites. The audit found 19% could not locate all of their samples.

It isn’t a new problem. NASA Administrator Thomas Paine threatened “waving heavy cudgels” at researchers who lost samples in a 1970 Congressional hearing…

[continues at USA TODAY]

HONOLULU — Jay Yano didn’t have the day after Thanksgiving off, so he planned to take his two young children to work with him. As his kids loaded into his truck, parked right outside their McCully home, Yano left the vehicle running as he quickly walked to the truck’s rear.

“That’s when I noticed the guy walking from across the street, coming over,” said Jay Yano.

Yano said within a split second, his truck began to pull forward, with his 9-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son inside. He ran to the driver’s side door.

“(When) I opened the car (door), I saw my son holding the guy down with his left hand,” said Yano. “I just grabbed his shoulder and started punching his face, telling him to get out of the truck,” said Jonah Yano.

Jonah Yano said he wasn’t scared — his younger sister was in trouble and he needed to help her. Despite being much smaller than the 35-year-old man, Jonah gave his father enough time to pull the suspect out of the truck.

Read more: KITV News:

People resort to the black market for all sorts of stolen goods: cellphones, watches, cars, babies. But used cooking oil? According to the Washington Post, that’s a thing too.

Thieves are now moving into the green market by stealing used cooking oil from the back of restaurants. They sell the sludge to recyclers, who then process it into biodiesel. The oil can go for as much as $4 per gallon on the down low.

Since this is a pretty new criminal enterprise, police aren’t entirely sure what to do with the perps — or how to stop the theft from happening. In some states it’s a misdemeanor. Meanwhile in Virginia, two men caught greaselifting were charged with grand larceny. Serves you right for those sticky, err, slippery fingers.

Read More: Gizmodo

A Star Wars fan was yesterday jailed for life after murdering his wife in an alleged revenge attack for smashing up his cherished toy collection.

Rickie La-Touche, 30, told a court that his Thai wife Pornpilai Srisroy, 28, had damaged his precious Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker memorabilia. He later suffocated her during a row and then ran sobbing to his mother who lived nearby.

La-Touche later told police his wife had smashed up his Star Wars collection as part of a campaign to “make his life hell”. He also claimed he “flipped” when she threatened to leave him to go back to Thailand.

“Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared like ghoulish despots at a Roman Coliseum, reveling in their Libyan gladiators’ butchery.”

Last week the whole world saw, and every decent soul recoiled, at the true face of NATO’s answer to the Arab Spring. An elderly, helpless prisoner struggled to maintain his dignity in a screaming swirl of savages, one of whom thrusts a knife up his rectum. These are Europe and America’s jihadis in the flesh. In a few minutes of joyously recorded bestiality, the rabid pack undid every carefully packaged image of NATO’s “humanitarian” project in North Africa – a horror and revelation indelibly imprinted on the global consciousness by the brutes’ own cell phones.

Nearly eight months of incessant bombing by the air forces of nations that account for 70 percent of the world’s weapons spending, all culminating in the gang-bang slaughter of Moammar Gaddafi, his son Mutassim and his military chief of staff, outside Sirte. The NATO-armed bands then displayed the battered corpses for days in Misurata – the city that had earlier made good on its vow to “purge Black skin” through the massacre and dispersal of 30,000 darker residents of nearby Tawurgha – before disposing of the bodies in an unknown location.

The saner sections of America’s psychological operations machinery – including their collaborators in the corporate media – were doubtless as horrified as anyone at the Libyan jihadis’ insistence on revealing so graphically to the entire planet the barbaric character of the “revolution.” The months of gushing, ad nauseam press reports of near-universal jubilation in Tripoli and elsewhere at rebel “victories” – always under cover of NATO bombs – now made great sense. Who but those in search of instant martyrdom would voice displeasure at the NATO-jihadi triumph, with murderous fiends such as this roaming the streets?

“In a few minutes of joyously recorded bestiality, the rabid pack undid every carefully packaged image of NATO’s “humanitarian” project in North Africa.”

The United Nations Human Rights Office and Amnesty International found themselves compelled to ask for investigations into Gaddafi’s death – as if the immediate circumstances were not excruciatingly apparent to anyone with eyes and ears. Although the same U.S. domination of the UN that enabled NATO’s regime-change operation will ensure that the neocolonial powers escape legal liability for the results, the world still sees the executioners, correctly, as monsters in league with Washington, Paris, London and Riyadh. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who gave a snarling thumbs down to Gaddafi just days before his death, appeared like ghoulish despots at a Roman Coliseum, reveling in their Libyan gladiators’ butchery. Their hands and gums ooze blood – a lasting impression on decent world opinion.

The assault on Libya began as a desperate bid by the West and Persian Gulf royalty to bludgeon their way into the dangerous (for them) dynamic of the Arab Spring. The “rebels” (now, ludicrously, the “revolutionary” government) are their guys, just as the Afghan “mujahidin” were the foot soldiers of the Saudis and Washington from 1979 through the Eighties and (for the Saudis) beyond. Here lies the certainty of catastrophic “blowback.” As Trinity College political scientist Vijay Prashad points out, Tripoli may soon resemble 1996 Kabul, a place of mass carnage between rival warlords.

“The world still sees the executioners, correctly, as monsters in league with Washington, Paris, London and Riyadh.”

The Libyan jihadis are far more Saudi Arabia’s and Qatar’s brethren, than the West’s. The Arab Spring has both emboldened and frightened the wealthy Persian Gulf despots, who have their own agendas in the Arab world that are not necessarily consonant with the U.S. and Europe (the same applies in Pakistan and elsewhere in the region). All reactionaries are not alike. The oil-rich monarchs are fighting to preserve legitimacy in their own, Muslim milieu, not for Western-based corporate hegemony, and will cause at least as much problems for Washington as the accommodating Gaddafi they set out to depose at the beginning of the Arab Spring.

But that is secondary. As always, U.S. imperialists cannot resist the temptation to overreach.  John Pilger writes, “With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.” It is by no means certain that Libya will remain “secure” or under American sway. And President Obama’s all-out offensive to the south – now centered in East and Central Africa, but soon to become generalized – takes place with the cell phone imagery of Gaddafi’s demise fresh in minds of tens of millions of Africans. Obama may believe the pictures send the message that resistance is futile, but it is likely to have the opposite effect. As Venezuelan President Caesar Chavez said, of the Americans, “The most lamentable thing is that in their determination to dominate the world…they are setting it alight.”

Republished with permission from Black Agenda Report. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

An investigation that started in March with money falling from a hidden compartment in a truck ended last week as apparently the largest drug bust in Indiana history.

More than 5 tons of marijuana and more than $4.3 million are now in law enforcement hands, with four men in the Marion County Jail on charges that could put them in prison for life.

The size of the bust has law enforcement confident that they have, at least for now, halted a large drug distribution operation in Indianapolis and probably affected a Mexican drug cartel …

More in the Indianapolis Star

In 2007, a Swiss woman in her late 20s had an unusually hard time crossing the U.S. border. Customs agents could not confirm her identity. The woman’s passport picture matched her face just fine, but when the agents scanned her hands, they discovered something shocking: she had no fingerprints.

The woman, it turns out, had an extremely rare condition known as adermatoglyphia. Peter Itin, a dermatologist at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland, has dubbed it the “immigration delay disease” because sufferers have such a hard time entering foreign countries. In addition to smooth fingertips, they also produce less hand sweat than the average person. Yet scientists know very little about what causes the condition.

Since nine members of the woman’s extended family also lacked fingerprints, Itin and his colleagues, including Eli Sprecher, a dermatologist at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel, suspected that the cause might be genetic. So they collected DNA from the family—one of only four ever documented with ADG — and compared the genomes of family members with ADG with those of members who had normal fingerprints. The researchers found differences in 17 regions that were close to genes. Then they sequenced these genes, expecting to identify the culprit …

Read More: Science

As words can be the soul’s window, scientists are learning to peer through it: Computerized text analysis shows that psychopathic killers make identifiable word choices — beyond conscious control — when talking about their crimes.This research could lead to new tools for diagnosis and treatment, and have implications law enforcement and social media.

The words of psychopathic murderers match their personalities, which reflect selfishness, detachment from their crimes and emotional flatness, says Jeff Hancock, Cornell professor of computing and information science, and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology.

Hancock and his colleagues analyzed stories told by 14 psychopathic male murderers held in Canadian prisons and compared them with 38 convicted murderers who were not diagnosed as psychopathic. Each subject was asked to describe his crime in detail. Their stories were taped, transcribed and subjected to computer analysis.

Psychopaths used more conjunctions like “because,” “since” or “so that,” implying that the crime “had to be done” to obtain a particular goal. They used twice as many words relating to physical needs, such as food, sex or money, while non-psychopaths used more words about social needs, including family, religion and spirituality. Unveiling their predatory nature in their own description, the psychopaths often included details of what they had to eat on the day of their crime.

Read more here.

Photo: BDean (CC)

Nancy R writes on Care2:

Fourteen traditional healers have been brutally murdered in Peru in the past 20 months, allegedly at the urging of a local mayor. The Peruvian government has sent a team of investigators to look into the incidents. While 14 shaman have disappeared, the bodies of only seven have been retrieved so far; the indigenous healers were shot, stabbed or hacked to death by machete.

Protestant Sect Members Suspected: The prosecutor’s office of Alto Amazonas province stated that the alleged murders were carried out by a man known locally at the “witch hunter,” at the behest of his brother, the mayor of the town of Balsa Puerto. A Peruvian government adviser and expert on Amazon cultures alleges that both are members of a Protestant sect that claims shamans are possessed by demons and must be eliminated. The Peruvian Times reports that the shamans had been planning to form an association to share their knowledge.

Irrecoverable Loss: The shamans’ deaths go beyond a brutal crime to represent a loss of unrecoverable knowledge. NGO Amazon Watch’s Peru program director Gregor MacLennan is quoted in the Guardian: “The death of these shamans represents not just a tragic loss of life, but the loss of a huge body of knowledge about rainforest plants and the crucial role shamans play in traditional medicine and spiritual guidance in indigenous communities.”

More on Care2

It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.

Before hospital staff realized how sick he was — the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom — the man died. So did another holiday party-goer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskeys and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

[Full Article at Slate.com]

For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply “the Hacker.” Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device — a stingray — were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest.

Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it’s not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told the Wall Street Journal in response to inquiries.

A stingray’s role in nabbing the alleged “Hacker” — Daniel David Rigmaiden — is shaping up as a possible test of the legal standards for using these devices in investigations. The FBI says it obtains appropriate court approval to use the device.

Stingrays are one of several new technologies used by law enforcement to track people’s locations, often without a search warrant. These techniques are driving a constitutional debate about whether the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but which was written before the digital age, is keeping pace with the times.

Read more: Wall Street Journal

A St. Petersburg man who had dozed off in his motorized wheelchair woke up to find himself being attacked by a woman, according to police. Morton Ellis, 69, said he fell asleep after parking his wheelchair on the porch of a vacant Hooters to escape the rain.

He said the woman, 22-year-old Josephine Rebecca Smith, told him she was a vampire as she bit off chunks of his face and part of his lip.

Ellis managed to fend her off and called police. Officers found Smith at the restaurant, half naked and covered in blood. Ellis required a number of stitches.

Smith, who is from Pensacola, told police she had no idea what happened.

A man claiming to be a 500-year-old vampire was in the Galveston County jail today after attacking a woman over the weekend. “He was begging us to restrain him because he didn’t want to kill us,” Galveston Officer Daniel Erickson said. “He said he needed to feed.”

Lyle Monroe Bensley, 19, covered with tattoos and wearing only boxer shorts, forced his way into the apartment on Seawall Boulevard and made his way into the bedroom of a woman whose name has not been released, Heyse said.

Bensley made growling and hissing noises while biting and hitting the woman in her bed, Heyse said. Bensley then dragged her out of the apartment and she broke free. She ran into the parking lot where she got into a car driven by a neighbor. Bensley beat on the car before it sped away, Heyse said.

The arrest of a Texas man who broke into a woman’s house, threw her against a wall and tried to suck her blood over the weekend has sparked discussion over the impact of vampire books and movies on U.S. youth culture.

Whether pop culture played a role in the attack remains to be seen, as 19-year-old Lyle Monroe Bensley awaits a psychiatric evaluation in jail on burglary charges in Galveston, Texas, southeast of Houston.

Found growling and hissing in a parking lot and wearing only boxer shorts, the pierced and tattooed Bensley claimed he was a 500-year-old vampire who needed to “feed,” Galveston Police Capt. Jeff Heyse said.

Vampires have been a focal point of literature since Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula”. But fascination, particularly among young people, has peaked in recent years with the popularity of the “Twilight” books about teenage vampires and the HBO series, “True Blood.”

“I think the vampire is a metaphor for the outsider and the predator in all of us,” said author Anne Rice, whose Vampire Chronicles series has captured the imaginations of horror fans since the 1970s…

[continues at Reuters]