Globe Trot: Reporter promises more leak revelations

The Guardian continued to break stories on NSA’s massive surveillance program, revealing on Sunday along with the The Washington Post that contracted analyst Edward Snowden was behind initial leaks of documents regarding PRISM. Snowden gave both papers permission to reveal his identity.

Daniel Ellsburg, the former military analyst who revealed secrets of the Vietnam war through the Pentagon Papers in 1971, described Snowden’s leak as more important and perhaps the most significant leak in American history.

On ABC’s This Week yesterday, Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who broke the initial story of NSA collecting phone data from millions of Verizon customers, now believed to have been sourced to Snowden, said more revelations would be coming. Greenwald, a constitutional and civil rights attorney who became a journalist and popular blogger at Salon, closely scrutinized wiretapping and surveillance programs under the Bush administration and wrote two books on the subject. He moved to The Guardian a year ago, and lives in Brazil. Snowden has reportedly been in Hong Kong.

Taliban militants launched an attack on Kabul International Airport this morning, forcing cancellation of commercial flights in and out of the airport, which is also hub to the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. A few injuries have been reported and seven militants are believed killed.

In addition to combatant deaths in Afghanistan, conflict-related violence has killed 125 civilians and injured an additional 274 this year—a 24 percent increase from the period a year before.

Record numbers of protesters continued on the streets in Istanbul and Ankara over the weekend, as wide-ranging, anti-government protests of Turkey’s Islamic government continued to grow.

Turkey is at a crossroads, and it’s a good time to ask also, can Islamization be halted? An April poll showed that only 12 percent of Turks want to live in an Islamic state.

Record flooding of the Danube and its tributaries has forced thousands to evacuate across Hungary, Germany, Austria and other countries. It also has disrupted public transportation and prompted states of emergency in Budapest and Prague. In southern Germany at the confluence of the Danube, Inn and Ilz rivers, floodwaters reached 42.3 feet over the last few days, breaking a record set in 1501.