June 17, 2008. A teacher's assistant reported to the Children's Aid Society in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, that one of her autistic pupils was being sexually abused. Her evidence? Her psychic told her there was a girl whose name started with a "V" who was being abused by a young man. The mother of the child says a Children's Aid official who visited her home called the report "ridiculous." The mother has removed the child from the school and is considering legal action.

May 21, 2008. Eight women and three men between 80 and 96 years old were accused of being witches and burned to death by a mob in the west of Kenya. The witch-killers apparently found a book at a local school that they interpreted as the minutes of a witches' meeting.

May 12, 2008. Bringing democracy to Iraq has proved impossible so far. One reason might be that some of the people follow ideas that were popular a thousand years ago, such as the idea of honor. Rand Abdel-Qader of Basra was stamped upon, suffocated, and stabbed by her father for violating a rule against meeting with men in public.  A total of 47 women died in so-called honor killings in Basra alone last year. "You are in a Muslim society and women should live under religious laws," said a law-enforcement officer as he congratulated the killer for his honorable deed. According to the Observer, "nowhere in the Koran or Hadith (traditions about the life of Muhammad) is there a scripture or text that legitimises 'honour' killing, and Muslim leaders say it is forbidden."

The victim was a 17-year-old whose capital offense was falling in love with a British soldier she met while working on an aid program.

April 7, 2008. According to the Guttmacher Institute,10,000 women die every year in Nigeria from unsafe abortions and account for one sixth of the total number of women who die worldwide from procedures carried out by untrained people in unsanitary conditions. Worldwide, 48% of all induced abortions are unsafe. Worldwide, an estimated five million women are hospitalized each year for treatment of abortion-related complications, such as hemorrhage and sepsis. Approximately 220,000 children worldwide lose their mothers every year from abortion-related deaths. In 2003, there were approximately 41.6 million abortions worldwide. There were probably about 80 million births worldwide in 2003.* According to Ben Stein, the deaths are due to evolution and the births to intelligent design.

April 7, 2008. In the "advanced" civilizations it is the psychics who dupe people into believing they can relieve them of "curses" and multiply their wealth. In the "backward" civilizations it is the traditional healers who dupe people into believing they can relieve them of curses and multiply their wealth. Police in Pretoria, South Africa, arrested several Ugandan herbalists who have been operating in the city and duped customers into thinking that ancestors would multiply money left in their (the herbalists) care. The ancestors must be on strike.

April 4, 2008. Father Francesco Saverio Bazzoffi, founder of the House of the Sainted Archangels in Florence, Italy, is under investigation for defrauding believers of $6.5 million by performing fake exorcisms.

He's accused of doing stage-act exorcisms before crowds and collecting donations from the faithful. Last year, the archbishop scolded Bazzoffi for being a bad boy and told him to stop it.

March 29, 2008. An 11-year-old diabetic girl died from complications of her disease because her parents believed prayer was all she needed. They even prayed for a resurrection over their daughter's dead body. The parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann of Wausau, Wisconsin, told authorities that they are not "crazy religious people." They blame themselves for their daughter's death, though. They believe the fault was their lack of faith, not their lack of common sense for failing to get medical help for their child.

The parents will probably not be prosecuted because in Wisconsin religion gets a free pass to kill children, as long as the killing is passive, not active. The state has a law against failing to act to protect children from bodily harm but the law exempts "treatment through prayer."

The Neumann's have three other children.

update: May 1, 2008. The parents were charged with second-degree reckless homicide.*

March 18, 2008. Tarot card reader bilks clients with curse removal scam. According to the local sheriff, "Tracy Tan would convince the customers that they had a curse on them and (that) she was the only one who could fix their problems." Tan had some great testimonials posted on her website along with the claim that she'd been giving psychic advice online since 1981. There is reason to believe that she was not telling the truth, the whole truth, or anything like the truth. Tan, 37, has been charged with eight felonies, including theft, forgery, and possession of fraudulent identification. Her husband Eric was also arrested and charged with possession of fraudulent identification.

The Tan couple are being held in lieu of $750,000 bail in Naperville (near Chicago), a very high and unusual bail for psychics. Let's hope this becomes a precedent for other jurisdictions.

March 16, 2008. Mercy Ministries, said to have direct links to Gloria Jean's Coffees and the Hillsong Church, has been deceiving troubled young women, many mentally unstable, into signing up for Bible studies and exorcisms. Three former residents have blown the whistle. They claim that they entered the program as independent young women and left broken and suicidal, "as Mercy staff had told them repeatedly that they were possessed by demons and that Satan controlled them." The women claim it took several years of psychiatric care to bring them "back from the edge."

update: June 6, 2008: according to the Sydney Morning Herald, "Mercy Ministries, the Gloria Jeans and Hillsong-supported religious program under investigation for its controversial use of exorcism to treat mental illness, has announced its Queensland home will close."

March 14, 2008. It is perfectly legitimate for a priest to solicit 40,000 euros from an elderly woman with mental problems to help support the church. It is illegal, however, for a man to fake being a priest to solicit 40,000 euros from an elderly woman with mental problems. The latter happened in Genoa, Italy, where a man with a criminal record posing as Fr. Filippo convinced a woman he had ties to the Vatican and needed money for a "long-distance exorcism" of "obscure presences." [Something may have gotten lost in the translation here.] The fake friar got caught by Italy's postal and telecommunications police who, for some reason, were looking at the woman's payments to various credit card companies. A news report says he was charged with "taking advantage of the woman and her 'mental incapacity'."

March 12, 2008. A man from Blacktown in New South Wales was sent to prison for 19 years for strangling a woman he had told "he had psychic powers and could remove her evil spirits by having sex with her." The man's common law wife was also sent to prison as an accomplice. The three friends liked to dabble in the occult.

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