The Houston Chronicle has a positive profile of Santeria, describing a day in the life of a Botanica. Articlers like these often attempt to identify these shops as sellers of "religious supplies" or as herbalists, but what they really are is magic shops, where one can buy not only saints, but ingredients for spells, where one can go to have curses removed. There are botanicas anywhere there is a significant Hispanic population. At present, they exist on the fringes of mainstream awareness- but as the Hispanic population in the US gains in size and economic influence, I imagine the Botanica will be a commonplace sight. Will we see pickets of these shops, like we do of Wiccan shops, or will the Christian extremists be more accepting of Christianized magic?

Everything about the very, very weird case of the Hosanna Church in Louisiana screams typical bad TV movie: a woman flees a once popular fundamentalist Church, making accusations of child sexual abuse. People are arrested, computers seized, and it looks like it's shaping up to be a full scale attack of Satanic Panic when police tell of finding half scrubbed pentagrams on the floor, evidence of child rape, bestiality and animal sacrifice. But the kicker is- it's all true, according to confessions given by the Pastor (whose confession of serial child abuse and bestiality was given so matter-of-factly that police believed he was expecting to walk away afterward) and several other members arrested, including a Sheriff's Deputy who warned fellow officers they'd find child pornography on his computer. More on this story