According to Wikileaks.org, Snowden has also submitted asylum requests to Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Venezuela Ecuador and Iceland. 

CBS News reports on some of his rejections:

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The statement in full:

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.

Edward Joseph Snowden

Monday 1st July 2013

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If Snowden wants to stay in Russia he "must stop his work aimed at harming our American partners".

Snowden "is not a Russian agent", Putin said, repeating that Russian intelligence services were not working with the fugitive American, who is believed to remain in the transit area at a Moscow airport eight days after arriving from Hong Kong.

He said Snowden should choose his final destination and go there.

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Officials in St. Petersburg deemed that Saturday's rally, which took place in a space designated for public demonstrations, violated the law.

The statute prohibits public displays of homosexuality.

About 200 nationalists also gathered at the rally, chanted slogans such as "Sodomy will not pass," and threw eggs and rocks at the gay-rights activists, who numbered about 40.

The state-run Itar-TASS news agency quoted an unnamed police official as saying police arrested dozens of people, including eight nationalists.

Russia's parliament passed a law banning "gay propaganda" earlier this month. St. Petersburg was one of several cities to pass similar laws at local level before that.

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The "gay propaganda" ban would impose fines of up to 100,000 roubles (more than $3,000) on individuals found guilty of "promoting non-traditional relations to minors," a provision that is so broadly defined that it effectively turns being gay and out in Russia into a serious legal liability. (To say nothing of jeopardizing the safety of gays and lesbians in the country.)

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Snowden is in the transit zone of a Moscow airport and has not passed through Russian immigration, Putin said, meaning he is not technically in Russia.

After arriving Sunday on a flight from Hong Kong, Snowden booked a seat on a Havana-bound flight from Moscow on Monday en route to Venezuela and then possible asylum in Ecuador, but he didn't board the plane.

Snowden's whereabouts since then have been a mystery, and Putin's comments were the first time Russia has made clear it knows where he is.

Speculation has been rife that Russian security agencies might want to keep Snowden in Russia for a more thorough debriefing, but Putin denied that.

"Our special services never worked with Mr. Snowden and aren't working with him today," Putin said at a news conference during a visit to Finland.

Putin said that because there is no extradition agreement with the U.S., it couldn't meet the U.S. request.

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Snowden left Hong Kong earlier this week, where he had been staying in "a safe place" when he was charged with espionage by the US government. Snowden then reportedly flew to Moscow, and from Moscow to Havana, Cuba. But when journalists boarded a flight they suspected that he was on, there was no Snowden. The media then reported on the fact that Snowden was nowhere to be seen. "They were literally reporting on nothing," joked Oliver.

"Stop guessing," where he is, exclaims Oliver. "News is not a game show!"

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On a conference call with reporters Monday, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Snowden had left Moscow yesterday with a "safe pass," bound for Ecuador where he has applied for asylum. Assange would not say, however, where Snowden is now. The U.S. has charged Snowden with espionage related to his leaks.

Assange said Snowden may have also applied to other unspecified countries for asylum.  (Assange has received asylum from Ecuador as well and has been living in the country's London embassy for the last year.)   Here are a few questions about his thriller-esque journey:

What did Snowden do in Moscow?

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Schumer appeared on "State of the Union" just as news broke that Snowden's flight had arrived in Moscow, and the senator told Candy Crowley that there may be "serious consequences" in store for Russia:

SCHUMER: What’s infuriating here is Prime Minister Putin of Russia aiding and abetting Snowden’s escape. The bottom line is very simple. Allies are supposed to treat each other in decent ways, and Putin always seems almost eager to put a finger in the eye of the United States, whether it is Syria, Iran, and now, of course, with Snowden. That’s not how allies should treat one another, and I think it will have serious consequences for the United States-Russia relationship. [...]

CROWLEY: And just could you tell me a couple of what those — what serious consequences?

SCHUMER: Well, who knows? We have all kinds of relationships with Russia, and in some ways it works out pretty well. We’re trying to mutually reduce the number of nuclear arms that each country has. But there are many different kinds of relationships that are political, economic. And I don’t think we can shrug our shoulders and say this is how Putin is.

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According to a report from a reservations agent at the Russian airline Aeroflot, Snowden is on his way to Moscow, though it appears the capital city may just be a temporary stop en route to his final destination, as the New York Times reports:

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Apart from avoiding worldwide destruction, there was one other silver lining to the Cuban Missile Crisis: it persuaded the two nuclear superpowers that they had to find a better way to communicate.

Even though the idea of a proscribed diplomatic communication system had been discussed in the past, especially in the years since Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, it took the Crisis itself to bring the idea to fruition. Both nations were inspired to reduce the risk of another confrontation; picking up a phone seemed like a good idea. Such technology was not available, however. The best that could be done was the installation of two terminal points with teletype equipment, a full-time duplex wire telegraph circuit and a full-time radiotelegraph circuit. To allow for this system, Soviet and American negotiators produced a memorandum, “Regard the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link.”

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Now, however, Kraft says that Putin stole the ring. According to the New York Post, Kraft told the full story when speaking at Carnegie Hall’s Medal of Excellence gala at the Waldorf-Astoria on Thursday:

Kraft explained the incident happened while Sandy Weill and other business execs were in St. Petersburg. “I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’ ” Kraft told the crowd at Carnegie Hall’s Medal of Excellence gala at the Waldorf-Astoria.“I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

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In May 1925, at the meeting of the Second Congress of Russian Pathologists, Bryukhonenko demonstrated the fruits of three years’ labour in the lab: the original heart-lung machine that he had built for his dogs’ heads. Using two electric pumps, the primitive life-support system drew exhausted blood from the head and deposited it in a glass chamber where it was warmed and oxygenated, then pumped back into the animal. In these early days, this “autojektor” was not hermetically sealed, and eventually the blood supply would coagulate and the system would fail. Nevertheless, Bryukhonenko could keep a dog’s head alive for about one hundred minutes. His results were met with little fanfare, however, and failed to provoke any mention in the popular press. The following year he again demonstrated the autojektor, outlining the progress he and his colleague Sergei Chechulin had made in prolonging the lifespan of their test subjects. Again, there was no coverage.

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As does Yahoo tech columnist and potential matchmaker Virginia Heffernan, who made this supercute Pinterest celebrating the two of them.

And since Deng is apparently not sleeping with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, why not? It's like a match made in a Tarantino movie.

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More on the bill from the Guardian:

Russia's anti-gay law, whose text was softened to remove explicit referrals to "homosexual propaganda", introduces fines of up to 100,000 roubles (£1,975) for individuals who have used the media or internet to promote "non-traditional relations". Organisations can be fined up to 1m roubles and closed down for up to 90 days.

The bill, which must be signed by Putin to become law, also says foreigners can be detained for up to 15 days and deported, as well as fined up to 100,000 roubles, for breaking the law.

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While Snowden is not known to have made any asylum requests, a spokesperson for Vladmir Putin came forward to say the Kremlin would consider such a request. It's a transparent jab at the U.S., given that Russia itself is well-known to have a governmental surveillance apparatus on par with the American system against which Snowden has spoken out.

Via The Guardian:

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Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the action movie star may head up an international marketing campaign to promote the Degtarev arms plant, Russian news agencies reported. He accompanied Seagal on a visit there Tuesday.

"You're ready to fight American (manufacturers) with your teeth and your intellect, and if Americans are prepared to promote and support you, that says we're learning new ways to work on corporate warfare markets," Rogozin said.

Russian officials are big fans of Seagal, who met President Vladimir Putin in March and claimed to have set up a meeting with Rogozin for a Congressional delegation last week.

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The Soviet Union may be a thing of the past, but its domain isn’t. Think of it as a clubhouse for the new Russian kleptocracy.

.SU, assigned to the then-Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) in 1990, a year before its dissolution, is now a refuge for criminal hackers, according to the AP’s Raphael Satter.

The domain has “turned into a haven for hackers who've flocked to the defunct superpower's domain space to send spam and steal money.”

The migration to .SU began in 2011, when the officials overseeing Russia’s .RU domain tightened their rules.

Group-IB, a Russian Internet watchdog agency has found the number of malicious websites hosted on .SU doubled that year, then again in 2012, “surpassing even the vast number of renegade sites on .ru and its newer Cyrillic-language counterpart.” Perhaps the most well-known site is Exposed.su, which allegedly published credit records belonging to Michelle Obama, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, Beyonce and others.

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