A team including Michael Liu, Debra Fischer, James Graham, and Geoffrey Marcy used the Gemini Observatory to obtain an image of a brown dwarf orbiting closely around another star similar to our sun. The paper isn't available in the arXiv archive at the moment, I'll try to get a link to it when it is. Stories at BBC and space.com. Update: The paper, which will appear in the Astrophysical Journal, is now available.

Defining Terrorism Tricky for Pakistan: are Jaish-i-Muhammad and Lashkar-i-Taiba terrorist or rebel organizations? [via zem]

His noblest fantasy had little to do with elves and wizards : Was Tolkien a Libertarian? [via End the War on Freedom]

The U.S. Embassy in Lima has released a series of documents detailing the American involvement with Vladimiro Montesinos, the former head of Peru's intelligence services. Montesinos is currently in prison facing charges of, among other things, organizing death squads. An archive of earlier U.S. documents on Montesinos is also available from GWU.

Oh good, the Earth may not be swallowed up by the expanding sun when it turns into a red giant in 7.5 billion years. This is per an article published by a Sussex University team, including Robert Smith, in the latest issue of Astronomy & Geophysics (which doesn't seem to be online yet), which argues that the lessened mass of the Sun will cause the Earth to move to a wider orbit and escape the sun's expansion. Another team has looked at the same possibility in a paper in Icarus last year. [via dangerousmeta]