Because you really are capable of changing this crappy mean little world that does not really tell the truth about us as human beings.We really should feed them We really should let them know it’s Christmas.Again And again And again.. Rumours that Western aid agencies are collecting human blood in return for food aid in famine-stricken Malawi have spread panic among villagers, who are barricading their homes, fearing attacks by vampires. The anxiety is so great in parts of the south that farm workers in one of Africa’s poorest countries are staying at home. The latest spate spread last week when The Nation newspaper reported that villagers in southern Thyolo had waylaid three Catholic priests whom they suspected of hunting for blood.

A man accused of being a vampire was stoned to death in the same area. A “blood hunter” was reported to have sucked blood from a woman and hurt her son during an attack on their home in a district of Blantyre.The panic might have been fuelled by a BBC World Service report on a blood clinic in Blantyre. Staff working for a local authority were not allowed into one village because they were carrying bags of cement. It is not known why the villagers were suspicious of the cement, which was to be used on a water bore-hole project.President Muluzi denounced the vampire stories as malicious and irresponsible.

“No government can go about sucking blood of its own people,” he told a news conference.The rumours have increased political tensions in the country, one of the 10 poorest in the world, where protests have already broken out over Mr Muluzi’s efforts to stay in office for another five years. He said the rumours were also affecting economic activity in four southern districts as farm workers stayed indoors. He said any opposition politicians found spreading the vampire stories would be punished.. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, bluntly warned North Korea yesterday not to use Washington’s focus on Iraq to press ahead with its own nuclear weapons, saying America had ample resources to wage two wars at once. “We are capable of winning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the .. other. Let there be no doubt about it.”As Mr Rumsfeld spoke, Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, was completing consultations with South Korea, China, Japan and Russia over the growing crisis with North Korea.The North said at the weekend it was reactivating its plant at Yongbyon to generate electricity. But South Korea and the US dismissed the explanation, saying that 8,000 spent fuel rods were of no use for power generation but could serve for the extraction of plutonium.

Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Pyongyang would be able to manufacture “five or six” new bombs within months.Mr Rumsfeld said: “They don’t need a nuclear power plant, their power grid couldn’t absorb that. What’s going on in that country is a tragedy.”Unlike its stance on Iraq, Washington has said that it wants a peaceful resolution with North Korea. Pyongyang admitted in October it had a secret nuclear weapons programme, involving enriched uranium. In response, the United States halted fuel shipments to the impoverished country.. The United Nations is engaging in an urgent behind-the-scenes effort to prepare for the possibility of a humanitarian crisis in Iraq if the country comes under military attack.