Free Republic

The names of the tech workers in this story have been changed.Ten thousand miles from Silicon Valley, in a room near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov dreams of money. At night, while the rest of Odessa sleeps and cocaine smugglers drift in and out of the port under cover of darkness, Yegor logs onto FaceTime and talks to a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Her name is Sally Faubion, and five months ago she recruited Yegor from the freelancer marketplace UpWork to code her apps. She believes "divine intervention" brought them together; for Yegor, it was likely $20 per hour...

Authorities revealed Tuesday afternoon that the suspect who allegedly shot dozens of people at a parade on Monday had a history of run-ins with law enforcement officials. “I’m going to relay some information from two prior instances that occurred here in Highland Park,” Christopher Covelli, Lake County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Officer, said at a press conference. “The first was in April of 2019. An individual contacted Highland Park Police Department a week after learning of [the suspect] attempting suicide. This was a delayed report, so Highland Park still responded to the residence a week later, spoke with [the suspect],...

The 51-year-old Ozone Park woman gunned down in her own home was a tarot card reader who cops believe was slain by a disgruntled customer who thought she was a “witch” who had cursed him, sources said. Guiseppe Canzani, 41, who is facing murder charges in the broad-daylight shooting of 51-year-old Anna Torres on Wednesday, had gotten into a dispute with her outside the Queens home in recent days, the sources told The Post. He told cops he shot Torres “because she was a witch” and that she had put a spell on him and cursed him, one source said....

Within the high plains and Rocky Mountains of Colorado lies the world’s epicenter of COVID-19. New Jersey and New York have experienced enough COVID deaths per million citizens to place them first and second on the list of countries hardest hit by the virus if they were independent nations (each has experienced around 1,700 COVID deaths for every 1,000,000 citizens). Even so, they’re nothing compared to Colorado. Italy, at near 600 deaths per million, would be a welcome relief relative to the devastation that awaits Colorado. This is because, in Colorado, the governor and his advisors say their policies are...

Will John McCain receive more electoral votes than Obama? The One Card spread is the most concise of all spreads, intended to provide a quick take on a situation, or to reduce it to a single point of meditation. The Golden Tarot is a modern celebration of late medieval artwork. This deck is the choice of scholars, for it evokes images of elegance amid barbarism, and the light of virtue in dark times. If you would like your own copy of the Golden Tarot, you can buy it now! The card represents the critical factor for the issue at...

Just for fun I decided to do a tarot reading to bring some clarity to the madness surrounding the current presidential election. While most polls are currently calling it an easy victory for Barack Obama on November 4th, the McCain campaign has shown signs of a late-stage comeback. Now, let’s see what the cards say to the question “What will be the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election?”

The myth of Egyptian origins of Tarot, while once common, has long been debunked by later scholars. There is also no record of Tarot cards being used for the occult or divination prior to the 18th century. The Tarot card readings popular at Renaissance Fairs are a creative license taken with historical fact and should not be viewed as authentic. Contrary to popular belief, conventional playing cards were not derived from Tarot decks and the Fool is unrelated to the Joker of conventional playing cards. The Joker was created in the USA during the 19th century originally for the card...

Miguel Antonio Garcia Garro of Coon Rapids billed himself as "The Maestro," the man who could help a struggling teenage couple smooth out their rocky relationship with the girl's father. But after conducting a Tarot card reading with the couple in his Minneapolis office, authorities say, the man charged them $750 for more "help" — then told them to have sex on his desk and apparently videotaped the whole thing. That's the story as laid out in a criminal complaint filed Monday in Hennepin County District Court. The couple, a 16-year-old girl and her 19-year-old boyfriend, told police they answered...

After applying and getting denied twice, the Boston University Nemeton Wicca Student Group was approved by the Religious Life Council as a new religious organization on campus Wednesday afternoon at Marsh Chapel. The RLC denied the group, which applied as a pagan organization the first two times, because paganism is not formally recognized as a religion. But, last semester the organization changed its affiliation to Wicca, which is considered a religion, changing its name to the Wicca Student Group this year. Nemeton President Aubrey Hooser said renaming the group was not an issue. "The majority of the group follows Wicca,...

The United States last week delivered a secret ultimatum to Baghdad, a warning not to use non-conventional weapons on any account in the coming conflict. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources have learned that a secret high-level emissary entered Iraq under cover to put Baghdad on notice that if non-conventional weapons were wielded by Iraq, the US would not hesitate to level its cities with a nuclear bomb. Washington acted after discovering that Iraq had smuggled two or three nuclear devices at least into the United States for detonation by sleeper cells planted by Iraqi intelligence. The American ultimatum included a demand...