dallsaobserver - A man from Lancaster spent Monday night in a nature preserve 75 miles east of Dallas trying to lure Bigfoot to his black Toyota sedan, police say.
Mineola Police Capt. Jack Newman tells Unfair Park he responded to a trespassing call Tuesday morning to find the man camped out in his car along the Sabine River, with bait on the roof of the car he said was meant to draw the reclusive forest giant out of hiding.
"He had some pieces of orange and a piece of steak and some nuts right on the top of his car," Newman says. Next to a tree about 20 yards away, he says, the man had scattered a few more orange pieces. "I don't know if he'd been trying to coax him over to the car or what."
"He'd heard something about Bigfoot down around the Sabine River," Newman says, though as far as he knows, the biggest wildlife draws around the preserve are deer and wild hogs. Fanning the flames of mystery, Newman says he can't release the name of the man, who he says left the scene when asked. "He didn't know he wasn't supposed to be in there," Newman says.
A report from KMOO radio in Mineola, though, says there have been fresh rumors of a Bigfoot sighting on private property near the preserve. One possible explanation: the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy held its annual conference in nearby Tyler in late October, though as Noah Bailey pointed out after hearing me on the phone this afternoon, Mineola has been a hotbed of Sasquatch activity for years.
Buster Green, a Mineola Nature Preserve caretaker who works for the city, says he spotted the man Tuesday morning and spoke to the would-be hunter briefly before calling police. "He was rolled up there sleeping in his vehicle when I come by," he says. Green says the man had a camera in his car; KMOO reports he was otherwise unarmed. "He said he'd come down here on kind of a whim," Green says.
"He was a big boy. He's over six-foot, 230-ish," Green says. "He didn't need nothing to be hunting Bigfoot. He could've gone down there with just a switch."
**********
Swiss Bank to Choose Employee Underwear
dw-world - Those Swiss bankers, always showing up for work in faded t-shirts and stone-washed jeans.
Well, no more. The sartorially challenged, or simply clueless, finance professional now has a new dress code bible that gives definitive answers to all those pesky grooming and dressing issues.
Swiss banking giant UBS this week release its new guidelines that leave little to chance, covering employees' appearance pretty much from head to toe, from hair dyes (a no-no for men) to socks (leave the Mickey Mouse-themed ones at home).
The rules are exhaustive, ranging from fairly obvious prohibitions against tattoos, piercings and ankle chains (who wears those anymore?), to more esoteric guidelines, such as the one stating that ties that do not match the "morphology of the face" should not be worn.
It's all about "irreproachable behavior," the dress code says, which "implies having an impeccable presentation." UBS has been trying to rebuild its reputation since enduring record losses during the financial crisis and getting a multi-billion euro bailout.
If its employees are exquisitely groomed automatons, the thinking appears to be, the profit graph will once again start trending upward.
The bank said the suggestions are only meant for a small number of employees in five pilot branches in Switzerland, but could be expanded. A UBS spokesman said staff had reacted positively to the rules.
She's got the look?
"Well, appearance is of course important for every professional sector," Andreas Koehler, founder of the Germany-based company The Image Consultants, told Deutsche Welle. "It has been since the Middle Ages and before."
He says he can understand a company wanting to keep up its image, since perception is often king. And he points to the US Civil War, where if you didn't have the right kind of beard, you could be suspected of being with the enemy, and shot.
"But of course, that a company makes such detailed suggestions for its dress code is a little embarrassing," he added.
Women need to take it easy on the perfume, and ideally apply it after a hot shower, and then only after applying body lotion while the skin's pores are open.
They should also avoid wearing "flashy" jewelry or skirts that are "too tight behind." Underwear must not be "visible against clothing or spilling out of clothing." Rather, they should be "skin-colored under white shirts."
Men need to trim their fingernails to 1.5 millimeters, and only wear a pair of lace-up shoes on alternate days, so as to allow the leather to breathe and recuperate.
And for God's sake, "do not wash, nor ever iron your shirts yourself."
**********
Black Magic Protests After Girl's Death in India / Witchcraft Burnings in South Africa
ndtv - Mangalore: The mysterious death of a three-year-old girl here, today led to protests by locals claiming that she died due to a suspected act of witchcraft, police said.
According to police, Priyanka the victim was yesterday taken by her neighbour Kamalaksha (72), a suspected black magic practitioner and his foster daughter to their house on the pretext of a religious ceremony.
When she did not return, her parents enquired about her but Kamalaksha told them that he sent the girl back in the evening itself, police said.
Suspecting Kamalaksha of practising black magic a crowd of locals ransacked his house, they said.
Police detained Kamalaksha and his foster daughter and are carrying out further investigations into the incident.
Meanwhile, a crowd pelted stones at the Kadri Police station here protesting the death of the girl, reacting to which the police lathicharged them.
The crowd had gathered in front of the police station shouting slogans against the two arrested, police said.
-----
sowetanlive - Two family members including a woman have been arrested in connection with the burning to death of eight people at Mpola village, outside Marrianhill, on Monday.
Police have also linked the gruesome incident to witchcraft beliefs.
The two, a 21-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman were arrested on Wednesday night by members of the Cato Manor organised crime unit, which had been assigned to probe the deaths of eight Mabhida family members.
Provincial police spokesperson Brigadier Phindile Radebe confirmed the arrests, saying the two would appear in the Pinetown magistrate's court on Monday on eight counts of murder and one of arson.
"After working night and day, police managed to link one of the suspects to the crime, which led to the arrest of the other," Radebe said.
Sowetan established that the family of the suspects has been living in the Mpola area for almost 20 years, while the Mabhidas only arrived in the area two years ago.
Once settled, they Mabhidas asked the father of the suspects for a small piece of land for farming which he granted them.
After some time, the suspects' father fell ill and subsequently died. His family suspected that he had been bewitched by the Mabhidas.
In March, the suspects' family had a cleansing ceremony where they slaughtered a sheep.
But the sheep's skin mysteriously disappeared during the night and this fuelled further tensions.
Police said the elder suspect allegedly told the young suspect to buy petrol and afterwards set the house of the Mabhidas on fire while they were fast asleep at night.
**********
Astronomers Find First Evidence Of Other Universes
technologyreview - There's something exciting afoot in the world of cosmology. Last month, Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford and Vahe Gurzadyan at Yerevan State University in Armenia announced that they had found patterns of concentric circles in the cosmic microwave background, the echo of the Big Bang.
This, they say, is exactly what you'd expect if the universe were eternally cyclical. By that, they mean that each cycle ends with a big bang that starts the next cycle. In this model, the universe is a kind of cosmic Russian Doll, with all previous universes contained within the current one.
That's an extraordinary discovery: evidence of something that occurred before the (conventional) Big Bang.
Today, another group says they've found something else in the echo of the Big Bang. These guys start with a different model of the universe called eternal inflation. In this way of thinking, the universe we see is merely a bubble in a much larger cosmos. This cosmos is filled with other bubbles, all of which are other universes where the laws of physics may be dramatically different to ours.
These bubbles probably had a violent past, jostling together and leaving "cosmic bruises" where they touched. If so, these bruises ought to be visible today in the cosmic microwave background.
Now Stephen Feeney at University College London and a few pals say they've found tentative evidence of this bruising in the form of circular patterns in cosmic microwave background. In fact, they've found four bruises, implying that our universe must have smashed into other bubbles at least four times in the past.
Again, this is an extraordinary result: the first evidence of universes beyond our own.
So, what to make of these discoveries. First, these effects could easily be a trick of the eye. As Feeney and co acknowledge: "it is rather easy to fifind all sorts of statistically unlikely properties in a large dataset like the CMB." That's for sure!
There are precautions statisticians can take to guard against this, which both Feeney and Penrose bring to bear in various ways.
But these are unlikely to settle the argument. In the last few weeks, several groups have confirmed Pernose's finding while others have found no evidence for it. Expect a similar pattern for Feeney's result.
The only way to settle this will be to confirm or refute the findings with better data. As luck would have it, new data is forthcoming thanks to the Planck spacecraft that is currently peering into the cosmic microwave background with more resolution and greater sensitivity than ever.
Cosmologists should have a decent data set to play with in a couple of years or so. When they get it, these circles should either spring into clear view or disappear into noise (rather like the mysterious Mars face that appeared in pictures of the red planet taken by Viking 1 and then disappeared in the higher resolution shots from the Mars Global Surveyor).
Planck should settle the matter; or, with any luck, introduce an even better mystery. In the meantime, there's going to be some fascinating discussion about this data and what it implies about the nature of the Universe. We'll be watching.
