Saudi switches to Fri-Sat weekend
Oil powerhouse Saudi Arabia is switching its weekend to Friday-Saturday to better serve its economy and "international commitments", the official SPA news agency reported on Sunday quoting a royal decree.
Saudi Arabia becomes the last of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council - which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and United Arab Emirates - to abandon the Thursday-Friday weekend to be closer to the world's Saturday-Sunday weekend.
The decision takes effect in ministries and government departments from next week, while it will be implemented by schools and universities from the start of the next academic year.
According to the decree the change was made to better serve "the Saudi economy and its international commitments" and coordinate with the working days in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world.
It will "reduce the negative repercussions on economic and financial activity in the kingdom and make up for lost economic opportunities", said the decree.
Riyadh's stock exchange, the biggest in the Arab world, is open for five days a week, but until now only three of these coincided with the working week in the world's major financial centres.
Saudi Arabia is the world's largest oil exporter and a member of the G20 group of the globe's biggest economies.
The move had been previously rejected by clergymen in the kingdom, which follows the ultra conservative Wahhabi school of Islam, on the grounds that Saturday is the religious weekend for Jews.
Oman became the fifth GCC member state to make the switch several years after the other four members.
New leaks emerge from Snowden documents
The claims, published on Saturday by The Guardian newspaper, sparked a fresh outcry from privacy campaigners and surfaced as the United States filed criminal charges against 30-year-old Snowden and asked Hong Kong, where he has fled to, to detain him.
In a sign of growing international tensions, Germany said on Saturday that Europe would need Britain to clarify the latest allegations.
Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who made the comments, added that the accusations would be a "catastrophe" if they are true.
A US justice department official meanwhile confirmed that a sealed criminal complaint has been lodged with a federal court in the US state of Virginia and a provisional arrest warrant has been issued.
Snowden faces charges of theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information, and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorised person. Two of the charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.
The Guardian reported that Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has started processing vast amounts of personal information, ncluding Facebook posts, emails, internet histories and phone calls, and is sharing it with its US partner the National Security Agency (NSA).
In reaction, however, GCHQ said it was "scrupulous" in its compliance with the law and declined to comment further.
The Guardian reported that GCHQ was able to tap into and store data from the cables for up to 30 days, under an operation codenamed Tempora.
"It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the newspaper.
"They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."
Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong in May, has since proceeded to leak details of secret US intelligence programmes to international media outlets.
Tempora
The Guardian claimed Tempora had been running for 18 months and GCHQ and the NSA were able to access vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people.
It also said that the intelligence-gathering directly led to the arrest and jailing of a British terror cell, the arrests of others planning acts of terror, and three London-based people planning attacks prior to the city's 2012 Olympic Games.
The Guardian said the documents it had seen showed that by last year, GCHQ was handling 600 million "telephone events" each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.
The two main components of GCHQ's surveillance programme are called "Mastering the Internet" and "Global Telecoms Exploitation", the daily said, adding that the operations were all being carried out "without any form of public acknowledgement or debate".
The Guardian added that it understood NSA staff and US private contractors had access to GCHQ databases.
Hong Kong officials remained tight-lipped on Saturday as to whether Snowden had been approached by the law enforcement authorities or was still a free man.
Police commissioner Andy Tsang told reporters it was "inconvenient" to disclose details of the case.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Britain-based human rights pressure group Liberty, expressed shock at the latest revelations.
"I'm shocked but not surprised. Clearly they (GCHQ) are exploiting the fact that the internet is so international in nature," she told the BBC.
"And I'm pretty sad in a democracy when all that appears to be holding back the secret state is its physical and technological capability, and not its ethics or a tight interpretation and application of the law."
However, former foreign and defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind, the chairman of parliament's intelligence and security committee, told the BBC that all agencies like GCHQ used the latest technology to gain intelligence.
But he added: "If GCHQ wants to know the content of your or my email, they have to go through exactly the same legal procedure of getting a warrant from the secretary of state, regardless of whether they are going to intercept the emails themselves, or whether they are going to ask the NSA or someone else to do it."
US revokes NSA leaker Snowden's passport
The United States has revoked former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's passport, a source familiar with the case said on Sunday.
Snowden, who is wanted on US espionage charges, flew to Moscow from Hong Kong on Sunday and is seeking asylum in Ecuador, according to the foreign minister of the South American country.
The source declined to provide any further details of the US move to revoke Snowden's passport.
Ecuador has been sheltering WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its London embassy for the past year.
On its Twitter feed WikiLeaks said Snowden "is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks".
"Mr Snowden requested that WikiLeaks use its legal expertise and experience to secure his safety. Once Mr Snowden arrives in Ecuador his request will be formally processed," it added.
Snowden was charged with espionage by the US authorities last week after revealing details about a vast National Security Agency programme of phone and internet surveillance.
Snowden eludes the US, flees to Russia
Former US spy Edward Snowden on Sunday arrived in Russia from Hong Kong, reportedly on his way to Venezuela, escaping the clutches of US justice at least for now in a shock development sure to infuriate Washington.
Snowden, the target of a US arrest warrant issued on Friday after he blew the lid on massive secret surveillance programmes, arrived in Moscow on a direct flight operated by Russian flag carrier Aeroflot.
The Hong Kong government said earlier it had "no legal basis" to prevent Snowden leaving because the US government had failed to provide enough information to justify its provisional arrest warrant for the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor.
Snowden, 30, landed at Sheremetyevo airport in the north of Moscow at 17:05, but there was no immediate official confirmation of where he would head next, an AFP correspondent at the airport said.
Russian media reports citing sources within Aeroflot said he would fly to Cuba on Monday and then board a flight to the Venezuelan capital Caracas.
"Russian law enforcement agencies have nothing against him and we have no orders to detain him," one law enforcement source told the state news agency Ria Novosti.
Relations between Russia and the United States remain frosty because of discord over a raft of issues including the Syria conflict, reflected in a tense meeting between Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland last week.
'Snowden left Hong Kong legally'
Julian Assange's WikiLeaks operation claimed credit for helping to arrange asylum for the man behind one of the most significant security breaches in US history.
"Mr Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower who exposed evidence of a global surveillance regime conducted by US and UK intelligence agencies, has left Hong Kong legally," WikiLeaks said in a statement.
"He is bound for a democratic nation via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks," it said without revealing his final destination.
Snowden's latest interview on Sunday contained new revelations about US cyber-espionage against Chinese targets, drawing a stinging response from China's official news agency which branded Washington an espionage "villain".
The South China Morning Post, which has carried exclusive interviews with Snowden in Hong Kong, said Moscow would not be his final destination, and suggested that Iceland or Ecuador, which is currently giving Assange asylum in its London embassy, may be his ultimate port of call.
Snowden abandoned his high-paying job in Hawaii and went to Hong Kong on 20 May to begin issuing a series of leaks on NSA eavesdropping of phones and computer systems, triggering concern from governments around the world.
Obama's administration has insisted on the legality of the vast surveillance programme and said it has foiled a number of extremist plots.
Snowden's departure from Chinese territory could result in US retaliation against Hong Kong, but more broadly the affair is a shock to the Obama administration, which on Friday unveiled charges including theft and espionage against him.
White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon had said on Saturday that the charges presented a "good case" for Hong Kong to extradite him and that "we expect them to comply with the treaty in this case".
Washington an espionage 'villain'
The government of Hong Kong, a special administrative region (SAR) under Chinese rule that has maintained its own British-derived legal system, said it had informed Washington of Snowden's exit after determining that the documents provided by the US government did not fully comply with Hong Kong legal requirements.
"As the HKSAR government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong," it said in a statement.
It also pressed Washington for answers "on earlier reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by US government agencies".
China's official Xinhua news agency attacked the United States as an espionage "villain" after Snowden detailed new allegations of NSA activity targeting mainland and Hong Kong interests.
In the latest revelations in the South China Morning Post, Snowden said the NSA was hacking Chinese mobile phone companies to gather data from millions of text messages.
He said US spies have also hacked the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, home to one of six "network backbones" that route all of mainland China's Internet traffic -- and the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet, which operates one of the Asia-Pacific region's largest fibre-optic networks.
"These, along with previous allegations, are clearly troubling signs," Xinhua said in a commentary. "They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.
Snowden's claims about Pacnet followed a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper in which he claimed the British government's electronic eavesdropping agency GCHQ had gained secret access to fibre-optic cables carrying global Internet traffic and telephone calls, and was sharing the information with the NSA.
The charges against him include theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information, and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorised person.
Two of the charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.
Canada's oil capital shut for days
Southern Alberta braced for more disruption on Saturday from floods that killed at least three people, forced about 100 000 from their homes and blacked out the centre of Canada's oil capital, Calgary.
Communities to the south and east of Calgary were on high alert as flood waters moved across the region. But with rainfall easing, a few residents began returning to damaged homes and authorities were hopeful that the worst might be over.
"It's morning in Calgary! Sunny, water levels are down, and our spirit remains strong," Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi said on Twitter. "We're not out of this, but maybe have turned (the) corner."
The floods followed about 36 hours of unusually heavy rainfall - some communities received six months of their normal rainfall in under two days.
Evacuations started on Thursday in Calgary and in smaller cities. Utility Enmax switched off power to central Calgary on Friday afternoon lest water damage its downtown facilities, and the area was still without power and closed to cars on Saturday.
Eerily quiet
A few tourists and residents strolled in the carless streets of the city's core, but the area was eerily quiet.
Officials were unable to say how much it would cost to repair flooded homes and rebuild roads and bridges washed away by the murky brown floodwater.
Canada's main oil-producing region in the north of the province, was not affected, although some farmland was flooded, which will likely weaken crops that include wheat and canola.
Police said three bodies had been found near High River, south of Calgary. A fourth person may still be missing.
"A lot of Albertans have faced disasters the likes of which the majority of us could never imagine," Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths told a news conference.
In Calgary, authorities said water levels were expected to drop in the coming days. But the Bow River was still flowing at around five times its normal rate.
Essential operations
Nenshi said downtown could be off limits until the middle of next week "at the earliest," forcing companies to work from alternative sites.
A spokesperson for Imperial Oil, Canada's second-largest producer and refiner, said the company was working on plans to maintain essential operations, including allowing employees to work from other locations.
It was not clear when trading in Canadian crude oil would resume after little if any occurred on Friday.
Shorcan Energy Brokers, which provides live prices for many Canadian crude grades, operated out of Toronto on Friday rather than from Calgary, although no trades in Western Canada Select heavy blend or light synthetic crude took place.
Net Energy Inc, the other main Calgary crude broker, was closed on Friday and no trading took place.
Many roads and bridges remained closed, and the city banned the use of tap water for car-washing or other outside activities because treatment plants take more time to process the sludgy water. But Nenshi said Calgary water was still safe to drink.
Hillary Clinton wants a female president
Hillary Clinton has fed speculation that she might run for the White House in 2016 by telling an audience in Canada that she would like to see a woman president in the United States in her lifetime.
"Let me say this, hypothetically speaking, I really do hope that we have a woman president in my lifetime," Clinton told a private audience in Toronto. "And whether it's next time or the next time after that, it really depends on women stepping up and subjecting themselves to the political process, which is very difficult."
Clinton, a Democrat who was secretary of state under President Barack Obama, a former senator from New York and is the wife of former President Bill Clinton, is said to be undecided whether to seek the presidency in 2016.
Many Democrats and Republicans in the United States are expecting her to run, although the 65-year-old Clinton has said she needed to rest after four years as a globe-trotting secretary of state.
Polls have indicated she is far and away the most popular potential Democratic candidate for 2016, and that most Americans would prefer her to several possible Republican contenders.
Clinton picked up an endorsement on Tuesday from Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, who announced she is supporting a group encouraging Clinton to run for the White House.
McCaskill, who backed Obama over Clinton in the Democratic primaries in 2008, became the first member of Congress to announce her support for Clinton.
She praised the political action committee called Ready for Hillary for using the Internet to build support in the hope that Clinton will run.
Last week Clinton started her official Twitter account, describing herself as, among other things, a "wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate." She alluded to her future as "TBD" - to be determined.
In her speech in Toronto, delivered on Thursday and posted on YouTube on Friday, Clinton said electing a woman president would "would send exactly the right historic signal to girls, women as well as boys and men. And I will certainly vote for the right woman to be president."
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