A Galveston man is under arrest following a bizarre incident in a woman's apartment over the weekend.

Lyle Bensley, 19, is accused of breaking into a woman's apartment in the 7800 block of Seawall Boulevard early Saturday morning. According to Galveston Police Captain Jeff Heyse, Bensley, who was wearing only boxers at the time, hissed and growled at the resident while biting her. The woman managed to get away and called 911.

Bensley was arrested a short time later and reportedly told police he was a vampire. He has been charged with burglary of a habitation, intending to commit a felony. Bond has been set at $40,000.

Captain Heyse said Bensley was referred to a deputy who handles mental health issues.

A Louisiana man has been arrested for decapitating his 7-year-old disabled son and leaving his head by the side of a road for his mother to see, cops said.

Jeremiah Lee Wright, 30, told police he did it because he was tired of taking care of the boy, who suffered from cerebral palsy and required a wheelchair and feeding tube, authorities told The Daily Comet newspaper.

The grisly slaying was discovered Sunday afternoon when a passing motorist spotted Jori Lirette's severed head lying by the side of a road in Thibodaux, La., the paper reported.

A few months ago, a friend in the entertainment industry told me of a new business model in Hollywood: hoarding videotapes. Apparently, the earthquake in Japan knocked offline a Sony factory that makes certain types of tape. That factory was also in the tsunami zone, so now there's a serious tape shortage threatening the television industry. The NBA scrambled to get enough tape to broadcast the NBA finals; one executive told the Hollywood Reporter, "It's like a bank run."

In the last few years, economists have spent a lot of time and energy thinking about bank runs. A bank run happens when depositors think a bank is weak and scramble to get their money out before it collapses. "Tight coupling" of financial institutions, like when banks are overly dependent on each other, can create a cascading series of problems for the system itself. We saw this with Lehman Brothers when it went bankrupt. Its AAA-rated debt instruments lost value unexpectedly; that caused money market funds that held those presumably safe bonds to suddenly lose value. A shadow bank run was the result, as investors rushed to withdraw from the money market funds.

Worryingly, there's been very little consideration of how systemic collapses can happen in another, perhaps more dangerous realm - the industrial supply system that keeps us in everything from medicine to food to cars to, yes, videotape. In 2004, for instance, England closed one single factory, which caused the United States to lose half of its flu vaccine supply.

Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation has been studying industrial supply shocks since 1999, when he noticed that global computer chip production was concentrated in Taiwan. After a severe earthquake in that country, the global computer industry nearly shut down, crashing the stocks of large computer makers. This level of concentration of the production of key components in a globalized economy is a new phenomenon. Lynn's work points to the highly dangerous side of globalization, the flip side of a hyper-efficient global supply chain. When one link in that chain is broken, there is no fallback.

Belarus is relying on support from Russia and Kazakhstan, with which it is building a customs union, to overcome the consequences of U.S. sanctions, Prime Minister Mikhail Myasnikovich said on Monday.

"Russia has always supported the republic of Belarus," he said at a meeting of the Council of Ministers of the Union State of Russia and Belarus. "A united position will make our integration associations even firmer and more reliable. A friend in need is a friend indeed."

The U.S. and the EU imposed sanctions against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, as well as against other officials and companies over a crackdown on the opposition. On August 11, the U.S. imposed additional sanctions against four major Belarusian state-owned enterprises.

Our leaders have asked for "shared sacrifice." But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as "carried interest," thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they'd been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It's nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill - the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf - was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income - and that's actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine - most likely by a lot.

Six people, including three children, were murdered in a knife massacre on Jersey yesterday.

The victims, who are members of two Polish families, suffered horrific injuries during the attack.

Two of the children who died were aged five and six, according to neighbours. Two women and a man were also killed.

After having life-saving surgery, a 30-year-old man was arrested in hospital on suspicion of murder. He had apparently tried to kill himself.

The Polish embassy confirmed that the victims were all members of two families.

Neighbours said they lived together in a large, rented Victorian flat in St Helier, the Channel island's capital.

Witness Andre Thorpe said he saw police shouting at a woman leaning from a window ledge as they desperately tried to get into the property.

Mr Thorpe, 50, said: 'As I was heading past, two ambulances and four police cars all came racing towards me. They all jumped out of the cars and were trying to get into one property, with some officers trying to get around the back.

The designated leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union in Schleswig-Holstein has resigned after intense internal party pressure over his love affair with a 16-year-old girl.

Christian von Boetticher, 40, who was set to lead Chancellor Angela Merkel's party in its fight to retain power the north German state next May, stood down from that position on Sunday night after a more than two-and-a-half hour meeting with his state party leadership.

"Yes it is true, I fell in love with a young woman in the spring of 2010, and was with her for several months," he told a press conference.

"It was quite simply, love," he said, in tears, admitting that at the time the girl was just 16 years old.

"I would like to apologise with all my heart to all those people who I have disappointed and who placed great hope in me."

San Francisco's mass transit system prepared for renewed protests Monday, a day after hackers angry over blocked cell phone service at some transit stations broke into a website and posted company contact information for more than 2,000 customers.

The action by a hacker group known as Anonymous was the latest showdown between anarchists angry at perceived attempts to limit free speech and officials trying to control protests that grow out of social networking and have the potential to become violent.

Anonymous posted people's names, phone numbers, and street and email addresses on its own website, while also calling for a disruption of the Bay Area Rapid Transit's evening commute Monday.

BART officials said Sunday that they were working a strategy to try to block any efforts by protesters to try to disrupt the service.

"We have been planning for the protests that are said to be shaping up for tomorrow," BART spokesman Jim Allison said. He did not provide specifics, but said BART police will be staffing stations and trains and that the agency had already contacted San Francisco police.

A restaurant owner in Vermont held a contest to help Canadians buy passports so they cross the border for a meal. A fire department can't depend on help from a few miles away. A short drive to pick up milk can bring unpredictable delays.

A decade after 9/11, tightened security measures have divided communities on the northern border, where for centuries, people crossed back and forth to shop, work or visit relatives. Where the Green Mountains of Vermont begin to give way to the broad plains of Quebec's St. Lawrence valley, residents acknowledge the need for enhanced security, yet many are frustrated. Most agree life will never be as it was, but they're adapting.

"It used to be real simple. We just went across the border. Sometimes I wouldn't even take my wallet," said Paul Martin, 59, the fire chief in Richford, a Vermont town of about 1,300 near the border.

Now, Martin said, he crosses the border two or three times a week to see his girlfriend in Quebec. He never knows how difficult it will be to come back, an uncertainty that illustrates the disruption of a small-town way of life that had pervaded even across international lines.

"If I get somebody I went to school with, I don't have a problem," he said. "If you get somebody new, they have to inspect everything. It all depends on what kind of a day the inspector is having."

A pregnant San Francisco area woman was killed by one of her pit bulls, her mauled body found by her husband, police said on Friday.

The 32-year-old woman was pronounced dead on Thursday afternoon at the couple's home in the seaside village of Pacifica, south of San Francisco, Pacifica Police Capt. Dave Bertini said.

Authorities withheld the names of the victim and her husband.

Bertini said the woman's husband told police he came home from work at around noon on Thursday to find one of the couple's pit bulls standing, bloodied, over his wife's mauled body.

First responders to the scene found the woman unresponsive in a front room of the home with massive trauma to her upper body, Bertini said.

A second pit bull was found cowering in the corner.