Free Republic

Pauline Hoffmann resigned her post as dean of St. Bonaventure University's communication school, but says she did it under pressure. She also claims the school denied her a promotion to provost, the university's highest academic position. Why? Hoffmann says it is because she is a woman and Wiccan. In a lawsuit filed in Buffalo federal court, the St. Bonaventure professor – she is still on the faculty there – claims her religion and gender played a role in her forced resignation as dean and her failure to win a promotion she feels she deserved. She is seeking her job back,...

Early risers and people who plan to party until dawn -- take notice. The United States has prime seats for a lunar eclipse set to take over the skies early Saturday morning, marking the third in a tetrad, a series of four eclipses. The lunar spectacle will be the shortest in a century, lasting four minutes and 43 seconds.

Boko Haram insurgents believe the ghosts of their victims are coming back to murder them in the form of killer bees and snakes. Nigerian newspaper Vanguard is reporting that several Boko Haram insurgents were arrested after fleeing a Nigerian forest because unremitting bee stings and snake bites had become too unbearable. The captured militants claimed they were “mystical bees” and “mysterious snakes” that had killed many of their fellow insurgents. “We were told that the aggrieved people who had suffered from our deadly mission, including the ghosts of some of those we killed, are the ones turning into the snake...

Plans to build a new road in Iceland ran into trouble recently when campaigners warned that it would disturb elves living in its path. Construction work had to be stopped while a solution was found. From his desk at the Icelandic highways department in Reykjavik, Petur Matthiasson smiles at me warmly from behind his glasses, but firmly. "Let's get this straight before we start - I do not believe in elves," he says. I raise my eyebrows slightly and incline my head towards his computer screen which is displaying the plans for a new road in a neighbouring town. There...

South Africa's president Jacob Zuma has told how he used to practise witchcraft against white people. Speaking in his native Zulu language at a pre-election rally in the country's rural north, he told a crowd of his voodoo past. 'I used to practise witchcraft around here, bewitching the Boers during apartheid', Zuma reportedly said.