By Louise Flanagan

Witches are not criminals, but have religious and spiritual rights too.

That’s the argument the South African Pagan Rights Alliance (Sapra) wants to use to protect the belief of witchcraft against a newly proposed bill. (more…)

Before playing Tituba, the alleged conjurer and caster of spells from Barbados, one year in the class play at Parkview High, the most mileage I’d logged was a summer road trip’s distance between Little Rock and Baton Rouge. This was during a time when an authentic Caribbean clip was hard to hear in my Arkansas hometown.

Ignorant, I affected an accent I’m certain was astonishingly off kilter, though the drama teacher seemed hardly to have noticed. She gave me wide berth. Down on my knees onstage, I begged for mercy in some dreamt-up voice of a black woman who, in real life and in Arthur Miller’s border-shattering play “The Crucible,” was enslaved on a Barbadian sugar plantation, then carted by the plantation owner, a London-born Harvard grad and self-appointed preacher, into servitude in his Puritan household in Salem, Mass. Based on accusations by the owner’s young daughters, Tituba was the first woman tried in the famous Salem witch trials of four centuries ago. (more…)

Mocksville, NC - William Russell Shaver never thought that the MySpace page he shares with his wife would get him into trouble.

But it did.

Last year, he lost his job as a high-school bus driver for Davie County Schools and was asked to leave the Cooleemee Volunteer Fire Department, where he was a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician. (more…)

A witch who worked in a school told pupils she could teach them spells, an employment tribunal heard today.

Sommer De La Rosa, 34, a practising white witch of the Wiccan faith, is claiming unfair dismissal after being sacked from the Dorothy Stringer school in Brighton, East Sussex. (more…)

A woman who was sacked from her job as a teaching assistant claimed today that she was given the boot because she is a witch.

Sommer De La Rosa, 35, told an employment tribunal that she had been unfairly dismissed from her job after school chiefs raised fears that she would indoctrinate students with her pagan religion. (more…)

Detroit, MI - An Oakland County judge threw out Thursday portions of a man’s statement implicating himself in the death of a 19-year-old woman whose nude body was found floating in the Huron River at Proud Lake State Recreation Area in April.

Judge Nanci Grant said police should have stopped interrogating John J. Anderson, a 24-year-old Wixom man who is accused of murdering Natalie Miller and dumping her body in the river, after he tried to stop the interrogation after several hours. The ruling means that many details — including information police say they have on why he would have killed Miller — will be lost to a jury. (more…)

It is a certainty in the United States that no one knows or cares to know the exact value of the ecclesiastic demesne. We can, however, guess. In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant said that taxable church property amounted to $1 billion. One hundred and one years later, in a 1976 study that has never been replicated or updated, researchers Martin A. Larson and Rev. C. Stanley Lowell found that total ecclesiastical property by 1906 came to about $1.3 billion. According to Larson and Lowell, by 1936 it was $3.8 billion. By 1964, it had risen to a spectacular $79.5 billion. When Larson and Lowell tallied their figures for 1976, real church wealth amounted to at least $158 billion, with churches the owners of an estimated 10 percent of all U.S. property. The figure adjusted for inflation today comes to at least $560 billion, likely the greatest non-profit wealth expansion in history (with the real value likely much greater). The reason for the accumulation transcends the giving of the flock: It is due, rather, to a systemic political bias in the form of the generous tax exemption traditionally afforded religious property and income, an arrangement that in Western history is as old as the Sumerian kings and the pharaohs of Egypt. (more…)

Schertz, TX – The night wind pushes Don Larsen’s green robe against his lanky frame. A circle of torches lights his face.

“The old gods are standing near!” calls a retired Army intelligence officer. (more…)

San Antonio, TX - A 51-year-old woman was arrested Thursday for felony stalking.

Cynthia Myers, a self-proclaimed witch, is accused of threatening and harassing a woman she used to work with. (more…)

Central Islip, N.Y. — Taking the stand in United States District Court here on Wednesday, Lauren Berrios — with a stylish white blouse, black slacks, coiffed hair, no pointy black hat — hardly looked like a witch.

But Ms. Berrios, a former reading teacher at Hampton Bays Elementary School, said the public school was being run by born-again Christians intent on converting students to “fundamentalist Christianity.” She testified that this religious fervor culminated in her being run out of the school over accusations that she was practicing witchcraft and teaching it to children. (more…)