Free Republic

A prominent New York financier and art collector, Ezra Merkin, has been charged with a $2.4bn fraud for collecting money from clients under false pretences and secretly handing it to the jailed fund manager Bernard Madoff. New York's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, has accused Merkin of acting as a middleman for Madoff and using the proceeds to fill his apartment with $91m worth of art. Merkin has one of the world's largest collections of Mark Rothko paintings. The charges came as French authorities seized a $7m yacht, Bull, moored near Madoff's Mediterranean villa in Cape d'Antibes. Bailiffs threw a chain...

An astonishing revelation regarding UFOs is being reported in some initial media reports relating to the very recent Japanese false alarm regarding an alleged North Korean missile attack. The entire population of Japan is in a state of utter panic and anger and an international crisis might well all be the result of irresponsible actions of extraterrestrial tourists flying a UFO from North Korea to Japan on a sightseeing expedition. As the story initially unfolded the remarkable information emerged that the highest levels of the Japanese defence establishment conceded that their most advanced radar system has picked up, in the...

Detainees may be leaving the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, but a host of exotic inhabitants—giant snakes, "banana rats," nesting sea turtles—are there to stay, protected by the same razor-wire fences that keep "enemy combatants" in. Best known for its controversial role in the U.S. "war on terror," the site of the military prison known as Gitmo, seen above in a November 2008 file photo, is also an important refuge for wildlife pressured by Cuba's tough economic conditions, ecologists say. "There are laws that protect [animals] on paper, but in general there is not a lot of enforcement" outside...

A FEARSOME mutant fish has started killing people after feeding on human corpses, scientists fear. They reckon that a huge type of catfish, called a goonch, may have developed a taste for flesh in an Indian river where bodies are dumped after funerals. Locals have believed for years that a mysterious monster lurks in the water. But they think it has moved on from scavenging to snatching unwary bathers who venture into the Great Kali, which flows along the India-Nepal border. The extraordinary creature has been investigated by biologist Jeremy Wade for a TV documentary to be shown on Five....