Les Leech, Fremont Beef's president, says that his company would have struggled without immigrants.

ECONOMIST: A small city passes a controversial immigration ordinance

Or it's about being successful enough for others to leech off of you.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Government debt is difficult to curb because politicians often choose to leech more tax money rather than face tough choices.

FORBES: New Year's Resolutions for the Country

The capital, they lament, is less a beacon of reform than a blood-sucking leech drawing off talent and money that should be spread around the country.

ECONOMIST: Russia’s capital: beacon or bogey? | The

It is a fact that Roman bread and circuses produced a large leech class at a time when desperately needed manpower and resources for the Legions was scarce.

FORBES: Which Party is Responsible For Debt Impasse?

In this year's winner of the Man Booker prize, a shy Henry James-loving leech moves into the house of a Tory politician and immerses himself in gay sex.

ECONOMIST: Books of the year 2004

On meeting a buckyball, a free radical grabs at the bounty of electrons smeared across the bucky's surface, but cannot break it—so the radical stays stuck to it like a leech.

ECONOMIST: Carbon balls to a radical rescue

If it grows less picky in future, its candidates would leech votes from the Democrats, perhaps giving a clearer run to Pua Thai, which is backed by the red shirts and the exiled former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

ECONOMIST: A vote in the capital, despite a state of emergency

Another researcher, Mark Siddall, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has used barcoding to show that purported examples of Hirudo medicinalis (the medicinal leech approved by America's Food and Drug Administration as a prescription medical device for stopping blood clots) are sometimes another leech entirely.

ECONOMIST: Taxonomy