A mysterious crime in Peru revives a vampire legend that's more than 400 years old.

Meanwhile, politicians remind us that we're 4.6 billion pounds overweight, at a cost of $147 billion to the health care system—and 1 billion gallons of gasoline. (By those calculations, that's about $65 for each one-liter bottle of fat.) Now they say we can raise money by stripping the fat from our bones. Like a pishtaco, they'd make their extractions from the bodies of the poor and dispossessed, with junk food taxes and punitive insurance premiums.

Never mind that these " cost of obesity" numbers make no sense at all. The fattest people in the United States tend to have the fewest resources; they're black and Latino; they die young; they leave the smallest carbon footprints. Yet technocrats wielding pencils and scales would render their bodies for dollars and cents.

Fat is money. Some things never change.