theweaselking | Mar. 7th, 2008

Mar. 7th, 2008

Guy in the front? Ben Stiller.
Guy in the back? Jack Black.
Guy in the middle, with the inset closeup? Robert Downey Junior.

Related, this.

Taken from

foto_arxiv

Gay Iranian student is at college in the UK. He learns that his boyfriend back home has been arrested, interrogated, and hanged - and that the boyfriend outed *him* before he die.

This means that if he goes home to Iran, he will be executed, because that's what happens to gays in Iran.

So he applies to asylum in the UK, on the grounds that if he returns to Iran, he will be killed.

The UK government has not only denied it, but they simultaneously:
A) acknowledge that gays in Iran are executed by the government for being gay,
and
B) claim that there is no repression of gays in Iran.

He's fled to Holland and claimed asylum status from the UK, at the moment.

EDIT:

lafinjack brings this:

The mayor of an Arkansas town resigned on Wednesday, claiming he was abducted and brainwashed by Satan worshippers nearly three decades ago.

Cat-killer arrested, taken to jail, but cuts plea bargain so that he can pursue his dream of joining the military and doing it to humans instead.

Bonus points: US Military happily makes exceptions, re-arranges schedules so that he can join up.

Herd of elephants rescues herd of antelope from captivity

Quoth Phil Plait:

A new paper just published by a team of planet-hunters shows that theoretically speaking, not only can Alpha Centauri have planets, it should have them.

A bit of background: Alpha Cen is actually a binary star, with one star much like the Sun (called Alpha Cen A) and the other a bit cooler (Alpha Cen B). A third star, Proxima Centauri, orbits very far out from the central binary.

Alpha Cen is the closest star system to the Sun that we know of, at a distance of 4.3 light years, or roughly 40 trillion km (24 trillion miles). Since it’s close, it’s one of the most common stars used in science fiction.

Planet formation around one star in a binary can be tricky; the disk from which the planets form can be disrupted by the presence of another star. However, a team of astronomers including Javiera Guedes and Greg Laughlin used computer simulations to see how planets could form in the Alpha Cen system specifically. They did what’s called a Monte Carlo test, running the simulation over and over again with slightly different input parameters every time (like, disk density, composition, and so on).

Remarkably, what they found is that they got a terrestrial (rocky) planet about the size of Earth orbiting Alpha Cen B every single time, and in many cases was at the right distance from the star to have liquid water.