After a rocket-propelled grenade struck Army Sgt. Patrick Dana Stewart’s helicopter Sept. 25, 2005, in Afghanistan, his widow, Roberta, faced religious prejudice.

Roberta applied to have the symbol of her husband’s faith placed on his grave marker in Nevada, but the Department of Veterans Affairs refused. The VA does not recognize Stewart’s religion, Wicca, often called witchcraft. (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…)

A 200-year-old tree at the centre of worship by druids and witches has been chopped down to size after it became diseased.

The 80ft beech at Winterbourne Abbas has been reduced to a 10-metre stump by English Heritage because of fears it would die and fall over. (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…)

Sydney, Australia - On A darkened hilltop, against a rolling backdrop of electric storms, a group of Sydney pagans gather to celebrate the full moon.

Dressed mainly in black, some in hooded cloaks, one in top hat and suit, these adherents of one of Australia’s fastest growing religions, stake out their church by placing candles at four compass points, and invoke the four elements of earth, water, fire and air. (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…)

John J. Anderson, charged with murder in the strangulation of Natasha Miller, 19, whose nude body was found floating in the Huron River in April, wants his hours-long taped confession thrown out.

And what a strange confession it was. (more…)