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Abbott Government Gives $4 Million To Danish Climate Contrarian

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Meet the controversial author who just received millions in education funding from the coalition for a new research centre.

The government has confirmed it will contribute $4 million over four years to set up a think-tank run by prominent Danish "climate policy skeptic" Bjorn Lomborg at the University of Western Australia.

The government has confirmed it will contribute $4 million over four years to set up a think-tank run by prominent Danish "climate policy skeptic" Bjorn Lomborg at the University of Western Australia.

The prominent political scientist is best known for his bestselling 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he argues that the problems of global warming and declining energy resources are overblown.

Lomborg was accused of scientific dishonesty by a group of environmental scientists after its publication, and he was called a "performance artist disguised as an academic" by author Howard Friel, who fact-checked the book.

In 2006, Lomborg established the Copenhagen Consensus Center with funding from the Danish government, but they withdrew funding in 2012, and Lomborg was forced to set up the institute as a non-profit organisation in the United States.

Adrian Dennis / Getty Images

A spokesperson for education minister Christopher Pyne told The Guardian the government was contributing a third of the total funding to "bring the Copenhagen Consensus Center methodology to Australia".

A spokesperson for education minister Christopher Pyne told The Guardian the government was contributing a third of the total funding to "bring the Copenhagen Consensus Center methodology to Australia".

The newspaper reports the establishment of the Australia Consensus Centre surprised senior staff in the university's business school, who didn't know about it until the announcement this month.

Adrian Dennis / Getty Images

Mr Lomborg says the centre will "help inform the national and international conversation on setting the most effective priorities."

Mr Lomborg says the centre will "help inform the national and international conversation on setting the most effective priorities."

copenhagenconsensus.com


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Can You Guess The Cartoon Character Based On Their Silhouette?

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WARNING! This quiz may blow your mind.

Etsy Almost Doubles In IPO, Valued At $3.3 Billion

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The online craft marketplace has emerged as a small but fast-growing competitor to e-commerce giants like eBay and Amazon.

Mark Lennihan / AP

hine / Via flic.kr

About $213 million of that will go directly to Etsy, giving the company a big war chest for expansion. The rest will go to some of the company's early investors.


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This News Presenter's Climate Change Throw Down Is Absolutely Perfect

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“Not only are the people this affects not watching and not voting - they’re not even born yet.”

Presenting a segment on the Australian current affairs show, The Project, Waleed Aly delivered a crushing piece on the way the Australian goverment is dealing with climate change.

Presenting a segment on the Australian current affairs show, The Project, Waleed Aly delivered a crushing piece on the way the Australian goverment is dealing with climate change.

Channel Ten

He broke down the way jobs have increased globally while they decrease in Australia, a result of the government's resistance to agree on a stance on renewable energy goals.

He broke down the way jobs have increased globally while they decrease in Australia, a result of the government's resistance to agree on a stance on renewable energy goals.

Channel Ten

And mentioned Dick Warburton, ex-chairman of oil giant Caltex and now the Chair of the Australian government's review of the Renewable Energy Target.

And mentioned Dick Warburton, ex-chairman of oil giant Caltex and now the Chair of the Australian government's review of the Renewable Energy Target.

Channel Ten

Channel Ten


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19 Disney Characters Spotted At Sydney Fashion Week

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“Who is that girl I see staring straight back at me?”

Aladdin walking the runway for Ashkar Line.

Aladdin walking the runway for Ashkar Line.

Getty Images / Disney

Mulan walking the runway for Tome.

Mulan walking the runway for Tome.

Getty Images / Disney

Flora, the Sleeping Beauty fairy, walking the runway for Bondi Bather.

Flora, the Sleeping Beauty fairy, walking the runway for Bondi Bather.

Getty Images / Disney

Minnie Mouse, spotted on Street Style wearing a Chanel brooch and a Louis Vuitton purse.

Minnie Mouse, spotted on Street Style wearing a Chanel brooch and a Louis Vuitton purse.

Getty Images / Disney


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This Guy Torments His Friend And Delights Us All With A Bunch Of Cheesy Puns

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One man’s nuisance is the internet’s treasure.

Jayme Pena has a lot of puns, and he wants to share them all with his buddy, Joey. It might annoy the hell out of Joey, but it will amuse the crap out of you.

Jayme Pena / Via youtube.com

Jayme Pena

youtube.com


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Ohio Man Charged With Traveling To Syria To Train With Terrorists

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A grand jury charged Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, 23, of Columbus, Ohio, with providing material support to terrorists.

Franklin County Sheriff's Office / AP

Mohamud was charged on one count of providing material support to a terrorist organization and one count of lying to the FBI in an indictment returned in the Southern District of Ohio.

The 23-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen left for Syria in April, 2014. He bought a one-way ticket to Greece, but during a layover in Turkey, he got off the flight and traveled to Syria via Turkey, federal prosecutors said.

According to the FBI's criminal complaint, Mohamud joined terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda in Syria known as Jabhat al-Nusrah. They taught him to shoot firearms, break into houses, and create explosives in a "military-type training camp."

"Mohamed also stated that, after completing this training, he was instructed by a cleric in the organization to return to the United States and commit an act of terrorism," prosecutors said. Mohamud returned to the United States on June 8, 2014. He was arrested on Feb. 21.

"Mohamud's plan was to attack a military facility, and his backup plan was to attack a prison," according to the criminal complaint. "He wanted to go to a military base in Texas and kill three or four American soldiers execution style."

Each charge carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison if convicted. Mohamud will soon be transferred to a federal holding facility.

Read the criminal complaint here:


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Would You Survive Marrying King Henry VIII?

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Divorced, beheaded, died, and all that jazz.


19 Photos That Sum Up Australia This Week

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Some sport. Some fashion. And plentiful animals.

Funny face

Funny face

Designer Gary Bigeni poses for a portrait as Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia Marks 20 Years.

Ryan Pierse / Getty Images

Disgruntled neighbour

Disgruntled neighbour

A security guard escorts a protester from the runway at the Ellery Sydney Fashion Week runway. The man crashed the show to protest the noise in his neighbourhood.

Don Arnold / WireImage

Light my fire

Light my fire

Western Sydney Wanderers fans cheer from the stands at the team's A-League match against the Central Coast Mariners.

Tony Feder / Getty Images

Rip and ready

Rip and ready

Michael Walters of the Dockers breaks through the banner before the round two AFL match between the Geelong Cats and the Fremantle Dockers.

Darrian Traynor / Getty Images


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Why Nick Clegg Isn't Sorry About Tuition Fees

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Sitting in the back of the Liberal Democrat battlebus as it trundles along a dual carriageway through Dorset, Nick Clegg is strangely upbeat for the leader of a party on track to lose half of its MPs in just a few weeks' time.

The deputy prime minister looks exhausted around the eyes, and seems drained following several days of non-stop travel around marginal constituencies. But he's also having fun: In the first two weeks of the campaign he's been to hedgehog sanctuaries, met Joey Essex, and took a campaign break with journalists and staff to go zipwiring through a forest.

"Did you see my perfect landings?" he asks BuzzFeed News. "All three of them. I think that says something quite significant. I can't quite work out what it is."

Clegg comes across as the sort of dad who'd get stuck in at the barbecue, possibly wearing a comedy apron before playing some football with the kids. In short, as someone who might seem better suited to a life outside of Westminster. But he pushes back against this kind of psychoanalysis.

"For as long as I can remember people have been saying, 'Ooh, he looks sad,'" he says. "I'm constantly reading about what I'm supposed to think and feel."

Still, time and time again, Clegg says he's desperate to get away from politics, making constant references to how his friends don't work in Westminster, and how it's just the day job.

He insists he reads novels rather than keeping up with the evening news. He half-quotes W.H. Auden when attempting to sum up his approach to blocking unsavoury content online, saying that "private faces in public spaces are better than public faces in private spaces".

And he's probably most animated when talking about how he tracked down secret Prince gigs while studying in Minneapolis in the early 1990s.

"I saw [Prince] recently at Koko a month or two ago and it was the first time I'd seen him for 25 years," he says. "The amazing thing is that he's barely changed. The clothes, the energy. It was so, so thrilling to see him again.

"When I was in Minneapolis, it was completely extraordinary, because before he went on world tours he'd leave Paisley Park [Prince's studios] and go to little clubs, and the trick if you were a Prince fan was to guess where he might go.

"I remember there was a phase when he was about to go on a world tour and my flatmate and I would go from one bar to another. There was one bar we left at 1am, and he turned up half an hour later to play to 15 people."

And his favourite Prince song? "I've always liked 'When Doves Cry'. Very sparse."

But there's no time to dwell on such memories: He's got a campaign to fight, which he describes as a chance to talk "without Paul Dacre constantly saying what I'm supposed to think".

And on that score, he understands that people might be mistrustful of him.

"What I accept – and that's a fact – is that the left have wanted to portray the Liberal Democrats, and therefore me, as quislings who have sold their soul and principles," he says. "Then the right have wanted to portray us as sly and Machiavellian types who are depriving the Conservatives of their birthright to run this country."

The Lib Dems are haunted most by their 2010 manifesto pledge to abolish tuition fees. Instead, they allowed them to be raised to £9,000 a year.

Despite his earlier (and much-mocked) apology for the U-turn, Clegg is willing now to defend the policy – and even to promote it as a success, on the grounds that it has not slowed the rise in poor students going to university.

"Notwithstanding the political embarrassment, it's been much more successful than the critics at the time said," he insists. "It's fantastic news that more BME kids are going to uni than before, a higher proportion of poor kids than before.

"I understand that people in their own memories think that in 2010 we put tuition fees on the front of our manifesto – we didn't. They might think I talked about it every day – I didn't. There's no point in challenging that the way people remember or re-remember things is up to them, but it doesn't actually conform to reality."

Was it hard to take the surge of popularity of Cleggmania, when the Lib Dems briefly led the national polls during the 2010 campaign, and the sudden crash that came with going into government and seeing his support plummet? He pauses. "I'm not going to pretend to you that I'd seek out being vilified."

Rob Stothard / Getty Images

By joining the Tory-led government, the Lib Dems lost swathes of left-wing supporters, former Labour types who had drifted to Clegg's party in the Blair/Brown years. Clegg suggests that a lot of those voters don't understand the true nature of Ed Miliband's party: "You have very few Lib Dems from the north who have any romantic notions about Labour. Metropolitan Labour in the north is a nasty animal; they are brutal, unscrupulous, and have all the arrogance of southern Tories who think they've got a god-given right to run things."

Instead of tuition fees, this time the party is focusing on mental health and drugs reform. Clegg says the drive on mental health issues did not stem from anyone close to him, but that "institutionalised discrimination against people with mental health issues" is something that has come up in constituency surgeries.

"Shortly after I was first elected in Sheffield Hallam, the parents of a girl that had just turned 18 and suffered from anorexia were in floods of tears in my office," he recalls. "It was so, so moving to hear what had happened to this girl as she moved from being treated as a child to being treated as an adult; it was Dickensian.

"In 20 years' time we'll look back and ask what were we doing. In effect we're warehousing large numbers of people with mental health or drug addiction problems, shunting them aside out of public view. It's so irrational, unfair, inhumane."

He's not convinced by full legalisation of drugs ("You sound like Russell Brand … No country anywhere has proven it works"), but he does want to stop locking people up for possession and start treating it as a health issue: "I've lost count of the number of Labour and Tory politicians who say privately that we're right. It's not even the papers [holding back reform] any more; even The Sun is a major advocate of drugs reform.

"I genuinely think the British public are so far ahead of the political elite in terms of drugs reform. Even if you asked an elderly couple here in beautiful sunny Dorset, they will probably know someone: a friend, a niece, a nephew who has had drug problems."

Carl Court / Getty Images

As for future coalitions, he wouldn't step down as leader in order to allow a Lib Dem-Labour deal – but he stands by the principle that the party with the most MPs should have first dibs at forming a government.

Yet this is still a man facing the loss of dozens of MPs, who's even pulling resources from seats the party currently holds: "What you know is that centrally, because we don't have infinite budgets like the Tories, we are being ruthless in terms of where we target those resources. But we haven't completely abandoned them. Internally our ambitions on a good day are so far in excess of what people predict."

Still, Clegg keeps coming back to his interests outside of politics. At university he played "a singularly insignificant part" in a play directed by Sam Mendes, whom he's kept in touch with. And he went to school with Gwen Stefani's husband, Gavin Rossdale, and Helena Bonham Carter.

He pauses. "All these people and I'm sitting on a bus. But I'm so, so chuffed with what I've been allowed to do. Like everything in life, I know I'm not going to do it forever, so I just enjoy it."


Which "Ghostwriter" Team Member Are You?

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He’s a ghost, and he writes to us. Ghostwriter!

Sesame Workshop

16 Extremely Beautiful Reasons To Go To Soul Cycle

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It starts with David and ends with Beckham.

In case you're in the market for a new type of workout, I have a recommendation for you. It's called Soul Cycle — and this beautiful, beautiful man is a truly great reason to go.

In case you're in the market for a new type of workout, I have a recommendation for you. It's called Soul Cycle — and this beautiful, beautiful man is a truly great reason to go.

Pablo / Pablo/Stoianov/FAMEFLYNET PICTURES

Hi. Yes. This is David Beckham and he's an avid cycler.

Hi. Yes. This is David Beckham and he's an avid cycler.

Stoianov / Stoianov/FAMEFLYNET PICTURES

And it could be *you* sweating alongside next to him with his glorious biceps bulging out from under his drenched tee.

And it could be *you* sweating alongside next to him with his glorious biceps bulging out from under his drenched tee.

Avenger / Avenger/FAMEFLYNET PICTURES

These glistening, breathtaking biceps that will make your heart skip a beat.

These glistening, breathtaking biceps that will make your heart skip a beat.

Pablo / Pablo/Stoianov/FAMEFLYNET PICTURES


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The Only Way To Actually Use A Hand Saw

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Want to play a musical instrument but the only thing you have lying around is an old hand saw? You’re in luck! We have just the video for you…

BuzzFeed Blue / Via youtube.com

16 Awesome New Books To Read This Spring

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Spring into reading a new book.

Jarry Lee / BuzzFeed

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

Knopf

Toni Morrison

Patrick Kovarik / Getty Images


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Victoria Beckham's Mid-2000s Style Was Iconic

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Let’s celebrate her birthday in style.

Victoria Beckham is a style icon. The woman we know today is a mother, fashion designer, and businesswoman.

Victoria Beckham is a style icon. The woman we know today is a mother, fashion designer, and businesswoman.

Moses Ng / Getty Images

Her style is impeccable.

Her style is impeccable.

Leon Neal / Getty Images

But the flawless Vicky we see today was quite different in the mid-2000s.

But the flawless Vicky we see today was quite different in the mid-2000s.

Suhaimi Abdullah / Getty Images

This particular era of Victoria Beckham — 2005 through 2008 — introduced us to a different Vicky: post-Spice Girls, doing her own thing, being swarmed by paparazzi.

This particular era of Victoria Beckham — 2005 through 2008 — introduced us to a different Vicky: post-Spice Girls, doing her own thing, being swarmed by paparazzi.

perezhilton.tumblr.com


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14 Times Yik Yak Was Out Of Control

People Are Upset With Michael Bublé After He Posted A Photo Of A Girl In Short Shorts

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#BeautifulBum. UPDATE: Bublé has issued a statement saying he did not mean for the picture to be offensive.

Bublé responded to the criticism on Facebook, saying in part, "I regret that there are people out there who found the photo offensive." Read the full statement below:

View Video ›

facebook.com

Original story below:

Earlier this week, Canadian singer Michael Bublé uploaded a photo on Instagram that stirred up controversy over social media.

instagram.com


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29 Reasons "Troop Beverly Hills" Is A Cinematic Masterpiece

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It’s khaki wishes and cookie dreams.

First and most importantly, this movie gave us a true iconic queen in the form of Phyllis Nefler.

First and most importantly, this movie gave us a true iconic queen in the form of Phyllis Nefler.

Columbia / Via piperelizabeths.tumblr.com

Shelley Long slays as this hilarious, fashion-forward, unapologetic, and savvy woman. To watch her in this movie is to watch a comedic master at work.

Shelley Long slays as this hilarious, fashion-forward, unapologetic, and savvy woman. To watch her in this movie is to watch a comedic master at work.

Columbia / Via bubblerighted.tumblr.com

It also stars a wonderful and young Jenny Lewis...

It also stars a wonderful and young Jenny Lewis...

Columbia / Via airali-p.tumblr.com

...and a baby Carla Gugino!

...and a baby Carla Gugino!

Remember when Chica's parents went to Monte Carlo and left her alone...ON HER BIRTHDAY?!

Columbia / Via snakkle.com


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If Lorde's Tweets Were Motivational Posters

32 Tattoos That Will Make You Want To Travel The World

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