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A Papua New Guinea man described as a vampire has been arrested after allegedly murdering his young daughter by biting her neck, eating her flesh and drinking her blood, a report said Friday.

Police called the grisly incident that occurred on Wednesday at a settlement near Lae 'an act of cannibalism'.

The PNG Post Courier cited local councillor John Kenny, who was one of the first on the scene, as saying the three-year-old child and her mother were visiting the father when he grabbed the girl and ran off into nearby bushes.

Kenny said the man allegedly held the toddler close to him, bit deep into her neck, ate the flesh and sucked her blood.

Two boys who were climbing a coconut tree nearby saw him and ran quickly to raise the alarm.

'He was just laughing at the boys and continued eating the flesh and sucking the blood,' Kenny told the newspaper.

'The boys were scared and ran quickly to alert the people.'

When people arrived to investigate the man reportedly dumped the body in the bushes and ran away before being caught and turned over to police.

PNG is a sprawling nation where black magic, sorcery and cannibalism sometimes occur.

Last year police arrested dozens of people linked to an alleged cannibal cult accused of killing at least seven people, eating their brains raw and making soup from their penises.

There have been several other recent cases linked to cults, witchcraft and cannibalism, with a man in 2011 reportedly found eating his screaming, newborn son during a sorcery initiation ceremony.

 American troops have captured a senior leader of the Pakistani Taliban, a US official said Friday, in what could prove a major blow to the group amid moves to boost peace efforts in Afghanistan.

“I can confirm that US forces did capture… terrorist leader Latif Mehsud in a military operation,” State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said, describing him as a senior commander in the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

She gave no details of the operation and did not say where or when his capture took place, as the news filtered out during a surprise visit to Kabul by US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Pentagon officials, however, said Mehsud was still inside Afghanistan, without specifying where.

“As part of the armed conflict against Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, authorized by Congress in the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, Mehsud was captured and is being lawfully held by US military forces in Afghanistan,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Commander Elissa Smith.

The Washington Post reported, however, that he had been seized recently in eastern Afghanistan, and was snatched away from Afghan intelligence operatives who had been trying to recruit him as a possible go-between for the struggling reconciliation efforts between Kabul and the Afghan Taliban.

US officials would not immediately comment on the report.

The TTP, which is based in the lawless areas along the Afghan border in Pakistan, is closely linked to both Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, a separate group led by Mullah Omar, which was toppled from power in Kabul in the 2001 US-led invasion.

Mehsud’s capture will be “helpful” for US-Pakistan relations as Islamabad has been “calling for more help in going after the TTP in Afghanistan,” said Seth Jones, a former adviser to US special forces and analyst at the RAND Corporation think tank.

“For regional cooperation, the US picking up a TTP commander in Afghanistan has got to be looked at in a positive way in Islamabad,” Jones told AFP.

News of the capture came as Kerry landed in Kabul for difficult talks about leaving a residual US force behind in Afghanistan after international forces withdraw by the end of 2014. The US has imposed a deadline of October 31 to secure the bilateral security deal.

A US official said Friday’s meeting between Kerry and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who said earlier this week that he was prepared to walk away if Kabul was not satisfied, were “constructive.”

“It is fair to say that the differences that exist were narrowed on the vast of majority of the outstanding issues,” the official said.

It was unclear whether Karzai had raised the issue of Mehsud’s capture, after reports that he had been angered by the incident.

“The Americans forcibly removed him and took him to Bagram,” a Karzai spokesman, Aimal Faizi, told the Post.

Bagram air base is a military base that includes a detention facility where the United States continues to hold more than 60 foreign fighters among about 3,000 detainees.

Mehsud had only agreed to meet with agents from Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security after months of conversations, he said.

“Mehsud is a senior commander in TTP and served as a trusted confidante of the group’s leader Hakimullah Mehsud,” Harf told reporters, adding the group had claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing of Times Square, New York, in 2010.

The group “had also vowed to attack the US homeland again,” she said.

It was not immediately clear if Latif Meshud is related to Hakimullah Mehsud, who took over as the commander of the Pakistani Taliban in 2009 after his predecessor was killed in a US drone strike.

Botched efforts by the United States in June to launch peace talks with the Afghan Taliban infuriated Karzai when the Taliban briefly opened up an office in Qatar.

Pakistan’s tribal districts near the Afghan border are rife with homegrown insurgents, Al-Qaeda agents and Taliban, who are understood to use rear bases in Pakistan to plot attacks in neighboring Afghanistan.

The mountainous region lies outside direct government control and US drone strikes on militant commanders in the region are a key plank in the US strategy to defeat Al-Qaeda and reverse the insurgency in Afghanistan

 Indian villagers, along with forestry workers, look at the body of an elephant as it lies on the railway tracks after it was struck by a passenger train at Mongpong village, near Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary, some 25 kms from Siliguri on October 11, 2013.

An adult male elephant was Friday mowed down by a train in West Bengal's Darjeeling district, a forest official said.

The incident comes a day after a jumbo with its head chopped off was found also in the same district.

The incident happened in Mongpong, located on the fringe of Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary, when the Siliguri-Alipurduar Express hit the jumbo.

'The incident happened Friday morning. There is a need to further restrict the speed limit of the trains on the Siliguri-Alipurduar stretch. We are discussing on lowering the speed limit to below 25 km,' said Chief Wildlife Warden N.C.Bahuguna.

Since 2004, when the tracks on the 163-km long Siliguri-Alipurduar route were converted to broad gauge, speeding trains have mowed nearly 40 elephants.

Following the spate of mowing down incidents, in 2010 the speed of the trains was been restricted to 50 km.

The railway lines on the stretch pass through five forests-Buxa, Jaldapara, Gorumara, Chapramari and Mahananda.

Chloe Lamb enjoys an electronic cigarette at the Vapor Shark store


Twenty states and Washington, D.C., have legalized the medicinal use of marijuana, and two states (Colorado and Washington) have legalized the substance for recreational use. 

So what's the next logical step? Smoking pot in public?

Perhaps that's pushing the envelope too far too fast, but some marijuana smokers have found a clever way to sidestep that "inconvenience": the electronic cigarette. 
Battery-operated e-cigarettes — which are not federally regulated — have picked up steam (no pun intended) in recent years as a less harmful option for cigarette smokers. The devices are expected to gross up to $1.7 billion in sales in 2013, and it's possible that the sale of e-cigs will surpass the sale of traditional cigarettes by 2047. 
So it's not surprising that some pot smokers are getting a little creative with the portable gadget. It emits an odorless vapor, after all, and — when used for its intended purpose — vaporizes liquid nicotine, not tobacco leaves. When used for marijuana, smokers must use cannabis in wax or liquid form, not flower form. And when someone is "vaping" in public, it's impossible to tell what substance he or she is imbibing.
Liquid marijuana might sound baffling, but it does exist and is a very popular item in Denver and Boulder, Colo., marijuana dispensaries, selling "rapid-fire, everywhere," said Jessica Eileen, manager of Fresh Baked Dispensary in Boulder. And the form of e-cigarettes called vapor pens are commonplace at pot shops,she said. "I think everybody [sells them]," Eileen said.
In fact, Eileen is confident that the overall trend of pot smokers using these convenient gizmos will not burn out any time soon. "It's growing very rapidly, and there are so many other pens that are coming out, too. I kind of think that it's going to be the future of smoking," she said.
Christina Salerno, 28, who splits her time between New York City and Los Angeles, offered to share with Yahoo News a recent run-in she had regarding this trend. 
"I met this dude through OKCupid … and we met for a date in Venice [Calif.] along the beach. After about an hour or two, he stood outside the bar and literally smoked a real cigarette, and then he came back in and pulled out his e-cigarette," Salerno said. "He didn't blatantly say, 'Oh, this is pot.' Just context clues: We were talking about medical marijuana and vapor stores and different vaporizers. Then, he said to me, 'Well, I don't want you to think I'm a pothead … I just like to smoke when I'm doing mundane things.'" While he tried to backtrack, it's needless to say that it was a first and last date for the two, Salerno said.
"I felt like this is a whole different breed of weird I'm going to have to deal with in California, because people smoke e-cigarettes in New York, but I don't think people in New York have caught on that you can put weed in them — at least, in my experience,"she added.
While Salerno's date and many others are repurposing their e-cigarettes for marijuana use, there are plenty of individuals who are not keen on these devices, even for nicotine use much less for marijuana. New York Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal introduced a bill in 2012 to make the sale of e-cigarettes to minors illegal.
"Once you try electronic cigarettes, you can become hooked to them, move on to cigarettes and then move on to other drugs," Rosenthal told NBC last year. New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Maryland have already barred the sale of e-cigarettes to minors.