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Trump issues Earth Day message without mentioning climate change

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump issued on Monday an Earth Day proclamation that omitted any mention of climate change or the cavalcade of environmental threats posed by deforestation, species loss, and plastic pollution. The president chose instead to praise the benefits of a “strong market economy.”

In response, one leading climate scientist said Trump’s environmental policy was “in many cases the antithesis of protection.” The executive director of the Sierra Club said Trump was “the worst president for the environment our nation has ever had.”

Trump praised the “abundant beauty and life-sustaining bounty” of the American environment but did not echo growing warnings from scientists over rising temperatures or the precipitous decline of many species.

“Environmental protection and economic prosperity go hand in hand,” Trump said in his message for Earth Day, a global event held to support environmental protection annually since 1970.

“A strong market economy is essential to protecting our critical natural resources and fostering a legacy of conservation. My administration is committed to being effective stewards of our environment while encouraging opportunities for American workers and their families.”

Trump added: “At the same time that our nation is experiencing historic economic and job growth, our air and water quality ranks among the highest in the world.” He stated that his administration has “expanded support for conservation of land, water and wildlife.”

Last year, U.S. government scientists issued a 1,000-page climate change assessment that warned the country faces hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses due to rising temperatures, flooding, and wildfires. Thousands of Americans are expected to die in worsening heatwaves, with diseases such as West Nile, dengue fever, chikungunya, and Lyme set to expand in range as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns change.

“The fact that they’re not mentioning what many consider to be the gravest existential threat facing humanity is a good indication of the priorities of this administration,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.

“The clear priority of the administration is extracting unsustainable short-term profits from the environment, which is in many cases the antithesis of environmental protection. This is not surprising.”

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, called Trump “the worst president for the environment our nation has ever had,” adding: “He has regularly and consistently prioritized the profits of corporate polluters over clean air, clean water and the health of our communities.

“The fact that he continues to ignore the climate crisis endangers the nation and will be viewed by history with scorn.”

Trump has routinely disparaged climate science and has attempted to dismantle every major policy aimed at lowering planet-warming emissions, favoring a watered down alternative his administration admits would cause an extra 1,400 deaths a year from air pollution. In June 2017, he announced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris climate deal.

The administration has thrown open vast tracts of public land and almost all U.S. waters to oil, gas, and coal mining, removed protections from some prized landscapes, and scrapped rules that stopped mining waste being dumped into rivers.

Trump, who recently erroneously claimed that wind turbines cause cancer, has repeatedly stated that the U.S. has some of the cleanest air and water in the world.

In fact, while the U.S.’s air is generally far healthier than growing economic powers such as China and India, the American Lung Association has pointed out that 4 in 10 Americans still live in counties with harmful levels of smog.

Millions of Americans are also exposed to drinking water containing industrial chemicals, while lead in water remains a widespread issue five years after the notorious contamination in Flint, Michigan.

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Trump issues Earth Day message without mentioning climate change

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Is the Arctic Really Drunk, Or Does It Just Act Like This Sometimes?

Mother Jones

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Just when weather weary Americans thought they’d found a reprieve, the latest forecasts suggest that the polar vortex will, again, descend into the heart of the country next week, bringing with it staggering cold. If so, it will be just the latest weather extreme in a winter that has seen so many of them. California has been extremely dry, while the flood-soaked UK has been extremely wet. Alaska has been extremely hot (as has Sochi), while the snow-pummeled US East Coast has been extremely cold. They’re all different, and yet on a deeper level, perhaps, they’re all the same.

This weather now serves as the backdrop—and perhaps, as the inspiration—for an increasingly epic debate within the field of climate research. You see, one climate researcher, Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, has advanced an influential theory suggesting that winters like this one may be growing more likely to occur. The hypothesis is that by rapidly melting the Arctic, global warming is slowing down the fast-moving river of air far above us known as the jet stream—in turn causing weather patterns to get stuck in place for longer, and leading to more extremes of the sort that we’ve all been experiencing. “There is a lot of pretty tantalizing evidence that our hypothesis seems to be bearing some fruit,” Francis explained on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast. The current winter is a “perfect example” of the kind of jet stream pattern that her research predicts, Francis added (although she emphasized that no one atmospheric event can be directly blamed on climate change).

Francis’s idea has gained rapid celebrity, no doubt because it seems to make sense of our mindboggling weather. After all, it isn’t often that an idea first published less than two years is strongly embraced by the president’s science adviser in a widely watched YouTube video. And yet in a letter to the journal Science last week, five leading climate scientists—mainstream researchers who accept a number of other ideas about how global warming is changing the weather, from worsening heat waves to driving heavier rainfall—strongly contested Francis’s jet stream claim, calling it “interesting” but contending that “alternative observational analyses and simulations have not confirmed the hypothesis.” One of the authors was the highly influential climate researcher Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who also appeared on Inquiring Minds this week alongside Francis to debate the matter.

Jennifer Francis and Kevin Trenberth.

“I applaud Jennifer for raising the issue,” Trenberth said on the show, but he argued that much more research is needed, adding that “I’m suspicious that the outcome will not be quite the way in which Jennifer would like.” Trenberth just doesn’t buy the seemingly counterintuitive idea of global warming making winters seem worse, although he is more than willing to cite other recent events, such as dramatic heat in Australia, Alaska, and Brazil, as the kind of extreme weather that climate change should produce. “At least with regard to global warming, it’s on the right side of things,” said Trenberth of these heat waves. “It’s much harder to see how cold can be caused by global warming.”

What’s going on here? In climate science, too many of the “debates” that we hear about are fake, trumped up affairs generated by climate skeptics who aim to sow doubt. But that’s not the case here: The argument over Francis’s work is real, legitimate, and damn interesting to boot. There is, quite simply, a massive amount at stake. The weather touches all of us personally and immediately. Indeed, social scientists have shown that our recent weather experience is a powerful determinant of whether we believe in global warming in the first place. If Francis is right, the very way that we experience global warming will be vastly different than scientists had, until now, foreseen—and perhaps will stay that way for our entire lives.

What Happens in the Arctic…

To understand Jennifer Francis’ big idea, you first have to understand what’s happening with the Arctic. It’s the part of the climate system that Francis has spent her career studying, and it’s the part that has changed the most, and the most rapidly, over the past decade. The rate of warming in the Arctic has been twice that of the mid-latitudes, and that warming has been punctuated by some truly shocking moments, such as the year 2007 and its unprecedented sea ice decline (since surpassed by the year 2012). 2007 “literally smashed the all-time record low for the summer minimum extent,” says Francis. And as she watched it happen, she knew that “the system as we knew it had fundamentally changed.”

What happened next is that Francis in effect crossed the streams: She combined together her expertise on the Arctic with some new thinking about the dynamics of the atmosphere. “Those momentous changes that we started to see happening got me thinking, and this kind of got me going back to my roots in meteorology,” Francis says. “And I realized that this rapid warming happening up there, and the ice loss we were witnessing, must have an effect on the large-scale circulation system, or the atmospheric patterns, beyond the Arctic.”

The result was a now famous 2012 paper titled, “Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes,” co-authored with Stephen Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In it, the two researchers presented evidence that the Arctic’s rapid warming, which they termed “Arctic amplification,” was having a major atmospheric effect by reducing something called the “poleward thickness gradient.” That sounds pretty wonky, but it simply refers to the difference in the atmosphere’s thickness as one progresses from south to north. We all know that hot air rises, and thus, the atmosphere is thicker nearer to the equator than it is at the poles. But with a rapidly warming Arctic, the thickness difference between south and north should decline, because the Arctic atmosphere would increase in thickness more rapidly than the atmosphere to the south. And that, in turn, changes the jet stream, whose motion is driven by these thickness differences.

You can watch Francis give a more thorough scientific explanation of the idea here, complete with an impressive video animation of the jet stream:

“We know that as the Arctic warms much faster, it will weaken this temperature difference between the north and the south,” Francis explains. “And because that temperature difference is one of the drivers of the west to east winds of the jet stream, we expect to see the west to east winds get weaker, as that temperature difference gets smaller. And we know that when the jet stream gets weaker, it is more easily deflected.”

That, in turn, leads to extreme weather—or so the theory goes. As Francis and Vavrus put it in their 2012 paper, a slowing down of the jet stream “causes more persistent weather conditions that can increase the likelihood of certain types of extreme weather, such as drought, prolonged precipitation, cold spells, and heat waves.” That sounds an awful lot like a recipe for what we’ve recently seen in California, the UK, the East Coast, and Alaska/Sochi. So no wonder this idea has gotten so much attention lately. The jet stream this winter, says Francis, has been “pretty much locked in place since December, until very recently.”

The Case for Skepticism

Francis’s idea is surprisingly simple, once you get down to it, so much so that as the polar vortex descended upon the US in early January, pop culture references abounded. One particularly popular Internet meme declared, “Go home, Arctic, you’re drunk,” a line that even made its way onto to NPR’s popular program “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.” The meme isn’t just funny: It captures the basic idea that weather is staggering around in a way that it doesn’t normally do, a bit out of its wits of late due to the jet stream.

Greg Laden/ECMWF

No wonder, then, that Francis’ ideas have gotten so much media attention. At a time when all of us are searching for some explanation for mind-boggling winter weather, along comes a scientist who seems to explain it all to us clearly, and also to link it to climate change.

So why don’t scientists like Kevin Trenberth accept it?

On Inquiring Minds, Trenberth outlined a number of scientific criticisms. One of them is simply that there is a great deal of change in the jet stream anyway, and more wavy patterns just happen from time to time. “The main counterargument to Jennifer at the moment is that a lot of this can simply happen through natural variability,” Trenberth explained. As he noted, there have been winters in the past with wavy jet streams and very cold mid-latitude “polar vortex” excursions. “In some years, the Arctic air gets bottled up, and it doesn’t penetrate into middle latitudes much,” says Trenberth, “and in other years, it has more waviness, outbreaks of cold occur.”

And there’s an additional reason for skepticism. Trenberth thinks that if a process as important as the one described by Francis were occurring, then climate models—complex computer simulations of the atmosphere under climate change—would have picked it up. But when scientists run these models, he says, “it takes a really long time, 50 years or something like that, to see a big change in the atmospheric circulation in association with climate change.” Francis is thus postulating a change much more rapid than what the models show.

In response to such criticisms, Francis fully admits that her idea is new, not fully accepted by all scientists, and requires further testing. One problem, she notes, is that the Arctic change has been so fast that there aren’t many years of jet stream behavior that you can even study to prove or disprove her ideas. “The rapidly warming Arctic has really only been a detectable signal in the system really in the last decade, maybe decade and a half,” she says. “And so literally we only have maybe 15 years where we might be able to detect any response of the atmosphere to this rapidly warming Arctic.”

That’s How Science Works

Stepping back and surveying this exchange, what one sees is a model of how science works when it is working well, in the way that it is supposed to. It’s the utter opposite of politicized “debates” in which skeptics go to the media to raise issues that are red herrings or already resolved by researchers, and most scientists don’t even bother to respond.

By contrast, here we have a scientist (Francis) who has reason to believe she’s uncovered something new and unexpected in the climate system, who publishes that idea, and who cites a combination of physical reasoning and (admittedly limited) observations. But other scientists (like Trenberth) are, as yet, unconvinced that the new idea meets the burden placed upon ideas of its kind when they are first introduced. Nor are they able to fit the argument easily into the context of what they already know, as encoded in the climate models whose equations represent our state-of-the-art physical understanding of the climate system.

So what happens now? Well, every year is more data, which means that every year is an additional scientific test for Francis. Scientists simply have to watch the Arctic, and the atmosphere, and see how they match what Francis has postulated. And given the amount of attention the idea has received, there are a lot of them out there now, paying very close attention.

“I think in the next few years, we’re going to get a lot of answers,” says Francis. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may not have to wait for scientists to publish those answers: You’ll probably feel them first.

To listen to the full Inquiring Minds debate between Jennifer Francis and Kevin Trenberth, you can stream here:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion about Indre’s new 24-lecture course, “12 Essential Scientific Concepts,” which was just released by The Teaching Company as part of the “Great Courses” series.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Is the Arctic Really Drunk, Or Does It Just Act Like This Sometimes?

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Convincing grass seed farmers to grow staple foods instead

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Codex: Adepta Sororitas – Games Workshop

The Adepta Sororitas, also known as the Sisters of Battle, are an elite sisterhood of warriors raised from infancy to adore the Emperor of Mankind. Their fanatical devotion and unwavering purity is a bulwark against corruption, heresy and alien attack, and once battle has been joined they will stop at nothing until their enemies are utterly crushed In this b […]

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Codex: Inquisition – Games Workshop

The Inquisition is the most powerful organisation within the Imperium. Bound by no Imperial law or authority, its agents – Inquisitors – operate in a highly secretive manner and answer only to themselves. Inquisitors use whatever means are necessary in order to safeguard the Imperium from heretics, mutants and aliens. It is not without good reason that Inqui […]

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Itty-Bitty Hats – Susan B. Anderson

Beautifully rendered, heartbreakingly adorable, and wonderfully wacky knitted caps for newborns and toddlers Thirty-eight million Americans knit, and that number grows every day. The baby hat is the perfect project for knitters of any level, with enchanting patterns that are easy enough for rank beginners but also interesting enough for the most accomplished […]

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Index Chaotica: Plague Marines – Games Workshop

Plague Marines are Chaos Space Marines who have pledged their allegiance to Nurgle. Though some go to war as part of the Death Guard Legion, others fight as separate warbands. All Plague Marines are are blighted by decay, and their armour and weapons are corrupted by foul diseases. About This Series: Though the Chaos Space Marines were once heroic defenders […]

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Codex: Inquisition (eBook Edition) – Games Workshop

The Inquisition is the most powerful organisation within the Imperium. Bound by no Imperial law or authority, its agents – Inquisitors – operate in a highly secretive manner and answer only to themselves. Inquisitors use whatever means are necessary in order to safeguard the Imperium from heretics, mutants and aliens. It is not without good reason that Inqui […]

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Cesar’s Way – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

“I rehabilitate dogs. I train people.” —Cesar Millan There are at least 68 million dogs in America, and their owners lavish billions of dollars on them every year. So why do so many pampered pets have problems? In this definitive and accessible guide, Cesar Millan—star of National Geographic Channel’s hit show Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan —reveals what do […]

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The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

For more than thirty years the Monks of New Skete have been among America’s most trusted authorities on dog training, canine behavior, and the animal/human bond. In their two now-classic bestsellers, How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks draw on their experience as long-time breeders of German shepherds and as t […]

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Topsy-Turvy Inside-Out Knit Toys – Susan B. Anderson

Susan B. Anderson’s fifth book–her most enchanting yet–turns the spotlight on “reversibles”: knitted projects that are two toys in one. This collection of a dozen delightful toys features a dog in a doghouse, a chrysalis with a fluttery surprise inside, a tiny hidden fairy, a vintage toy with a fabled theme to boot, pigs in a blanket, and mu […]

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw […]

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Index Chaotica: Noise Marines – Games Workshop

Noise Marines are Chaos Space Marines dedicated to the Chaos God Slaanesh. They are Slaanesh’s foot soldiers, and are infamous for using devastating sonic weaponry as part of their frenzied assaults. About This Series: Though the Chaos Space Marines were once heroic defenders of Mankind, each has sold his allegiance to the Dark Gods in return for surre […]

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Convincing grass seed farmers to grow staple foods instead

Posted in alo, Bunn, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, Oster, Pines, PUR, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Convincing grass seed farmers to grow staple foods instead

New Study Says Conservatives React More Strongly to Insults Than Liberals

Mother Jones

Via Henry Farrell, here’s something that won’t surprise you at all. Lafayette College professor Elizabeth Suhay ran an experiment recently that tested the effect of incendiary blog comments. As you can see in the chart below, when the test included obnoxious liberal comments, it didn’t have much effect on liberals compared to a control group. But conservatives reacted pretty strongly. The comments pissed them off and their views became even more conservative than before:

Like I said, this is no surprise. You’d expect conservatives to react more strongly than liberals to liberal insults.

But here’s the surprise: Another version of the test included obnoxious conservative comments. And the results were the same. Liberals pretty much shrugged off the insults, but conservatives reacted strongly compared to a control group. When they read nasty comments from their fellow conservatives, it fired them up to be even more conservative than before:

Now, there are a few reasons to take this with a grain of salt. First, it’s only one study. There may be problems with methodology or question wording or a dozen other things. Second, this is pretty much what we liberals would like to believe, isn’t it? That should give us pause before we get too self-righteous over this. Third, the study was done using volunteers recruited via Mechanical Turk, and I’ve had some pretty uncomplimentary things to say about MT before.

Still, it’s intriguing and certainly deserves some follow-up. I presume this result is related in some way to the fact that conservatives tend to have higher in-group loyalty than liberals, but that’s just an armchair guess. Maybe further research could dig into that.

From a political point of view, I guess the big question this study raises is: What fires up liberals? We have a pretty good idea of what fires up conservatives, but what gets us lefties going?

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New Study Says Conservatives React More Strongly to Insults Than Liberals

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Obamacare Premiums Are Lower Than Expected

Mother Jones

When California announced its healthcare premium rates under Obamacare, state officials cheered and detractors detracted. (What about the young men?!?) When New York announced its premiums yesterday, state officials cheered and detractors pointed out that the apparently low premiums were low only compared to New York’s previously sky-high premiums. So who’s right?

Today, Sarah Kliff draws our attention to a report from the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS. They gathered the average premiums for silver plans in the eleven states that have announced rates so far, and compared it to the forecast from the Congressional Budget Office. Basically, they took CBO’s estimate of $15,400 for the second lowest-cost silver family policy in 2016, and did a bit of extrapolation to get a forecast rate of $4,700 for an individual in 2014. That’s $392 per month, and due to data limitations, they’re comparing this to the lowest-cost silver plans announced so far, not the second lowest-cost. They figure the difference isn’t likely to be much. Anyway, it turns out that most of the plans so far are coming in under the CBO estimate:

Kliff comments: “What’s striking, to me at least, is that premiums look relatively similar despite wildly different rhetoric across the country….When California announced its rates, the Democrat-led state celebrated how affordable prices came in. When Ohio released data, it derided how expensive health insurance would be under the federal reforms. In actuality though, Ohioans and Californians will see pretty similar premiums on the new marketplaces. There’s a $16 difference between the two states.”

Also, as always, note that these are raw premiums. Anyone with a low income will get subsidies from the government, so the actual price they pay will be even lower. And the prices for bronze plans will be lower yet.

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Obamacare Premiums Are Lower Than Expected

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WikiLeaks: We Know Where Snowden Is, But We’re Not Telling You

Mother Jones

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Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who has been officially indicted by the United States under the Espionage Act, is en route to Ecuador, one of at least two countries in which he is seeking asylum, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said today on a call with reporters. Assange would not provide further details on Snowden’s current whereabouts. The whistleblower arrived in Moscow on Sunday, fleeing Hong Kong after China urged his departure in order to avoid a messy extradition battle with the United States, according to Reuters. Snowden was scheduled to fly to Havana early Monday morning, but he never boarded the plane.

Assange blasted the Obama administration for seeking Snowden’s extradition and interfering with his quest for asylum, which WikiLeaks is assisting with. He said that focusing on Snowden distracts from the sweeping surveillance program that he exposed.

“Snowden has issued an asylum application to Ecuador and possibly other countries,” Assange said from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he is himself avoiding extradition by Sweden and potentially the United States. “We are aware where Mr. Snowden is. He is in a safe place and his spirits are high, but due to the bellicose threats coming from the US administration, we cannot go into further details at this time.” Kristinn Hrafnsson, a WikiLeaks spokesman, added that Snowden is also formally seeking asylum in Iceland, but wouldn’t name other potential countries that he is petitioning for safe haven.

After Snowden arrived in Moscow on Sunday, Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patino Aroca, tweeted that Ecuador had received an asylum request from Snowden. Assange says that the application is being carefully considered.

National Security Council spokesperson Caitlin Hayden issued a statement Monday morning urging Russia to send Snowden back to the United States: “Given our intensified cooperation after the Boston marathon bombings and our history of working with Russia on law enforcement matters—including returning numerous high level criminals back to Russia at the request of the Russian government—we expect the Russian Government to look at all options available to expel Mr. Snowden back to the U.S. to face justice for the crimes with which he is charged.”

Michael Ratner, an attorney for WikiLeaks and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said on the call that it’s troubling to see the United States trying to block asylum for someone who is a “clear whistleblower.” He added, however, that “maybe it’s not so surprising,” given the Obama administration’s history of cracking down on whistleblowers.

Questions have been raised about Snowden’s whistleblower status, particularly since, after disclosing the NSA’s domestic surveillance efforts, he revealed sensitive national security information about US cyberattacks in China, alleging that the NSA hacked the text messages of Chinese mobile phone users. In an online chat with the Guardian, Snowden claimed: “I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets.” According to CNN, Snowden told Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa in a letter that he fears that if he is sent back to the United States, it is “unlikely that I will have a fair trial or humane treatment.”

“The Obama administration was not given a mandate by the people of the United States to hack and spy upon the entire world,” Assange said. “To now attempt to violate international asylum law by calling for the rendition of Edward Snowden further demonstrates the breakdown in the rule of law by the Obama administration, which sadly has become familiar to so many.”

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WikiLeaks: We Know Where Snowden Is, But We’re Not Telling You

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Liberace’s Best TV Moments

Mother Jones

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The King of Bling before it was a thing Alan Light/Flickr

When I met Liberace in 1986, I tried to eat his diamond rings. He was making an appearance at Caldors in Riverside, Connecticut, promoting a coffee table book of photos of one of his fantastic homes. My mom tells me he held me in his famously bejeweled hands and we exchanged grins. I was two.

“He was an absolute sweetheart,” Mom recalled the other day. “Beautiful in his ermine sweater. Big dimples, big diamonds.”

I don’t remember the encounter, but as an “older millennial” I have an awareness of who Liberace was: a flamboyant pianist with a taste for furs and jewels who was the butt of many a terrible late-show joke. Wladziu (Lee) Liberace was a child prodigy born of humble Midwestern roots who gained fame by combining exceptional musical talent with personal charm and a flair for showmanship.

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Liberace’s Best TV Moments

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