The new U.S. ambassador to Brazil landed in the capital Monday amid increasing tensions over a U.S. spy program that aggressively targets Latin America’s biggest nation, reportedly including the personal communications of its president. Ambassador Liliana Ayalde is a career diplomat with three decades of experience and a former ambassador to Paraguay. She most recently served as the deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, covering Cuba, Central America and the Caribbean.

Fidel Castro has criticised a claim in a Russian newspaper that his country buckled to US pressure and blocked the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden from travelling through Cuba to exile in Latin America. Castro, who ceded the Cuban presidency to his brother, Raúl, in 2006, and is rarely seen or heard from in public, said the article in the Kommersant newspaper on Monday was a lie and libell.

The respected Russian newspaper Kommersant is reporting that NSA leaker Edward Snowden approached the Kremlin for support and spent a few days in the Russian consulate in Hong Kong before flying to Moscow in June. Russia hoped to be rid of the whistleblower a day later until the U.S. essentially blocked him from leaving Russia by threatening Cuba and other unnamed countries with “undesirable consequences” if they allowed him to land on their territory or helped him in any other way, Kommersant writes, citing Russian and U.S. diplomatic sources.

Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies, The Independent has learnt. The station is able to tap into and extract data from the underwater fibre-optic cables passing through the region. The information is then processed for intelligence and passed to GCHQ in Cheltenham and shared with the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s volcanic revelations of ubiquitous US surveillance are in their third month. The aftershocks felt around the world continue. As Russia granted Snowden temporary asylum, the White House fell into anger and dismay. Computer scientist Nadia Heninger argued that leaking information is now becoming the “civil disobedience of our age”. The late historian and activist Howard Zinn described the act of civil disobedience as “the deliberate, discriminate, violation of law for a vital social purpose”.

President Barack Obama is canceling plans to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow next month — a rare diplomatic snub. The move is retribution for Russia's decision to grant temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, who is accused of leaking highly secretive details about National Security Agency surveillance programs. It also reflects growing U.S. frustration with Russia on several issues, including missile defense and human rights.

American fugitive Edward Snowden was offered a job by Russia's top social networking site on Thursday, hours after the former intelligence contractor received a year-long asylum in Russia. "We invite Edward Snowden to Petersburg and will be happy if he decides to join the star team of programmers at VKontakte," Pavel Durov, one of the founders of the St. Petersburg-based VKontakte, Russia's answer to Facebook, said on his profile.

U.S.-Ecuador relations have become tangled. In June, president Rafael Correa made headlines when he offered NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden political asylum. This was considered an attempt by Correa to demonstrate that he was not controlled by “el imperio” (the empire, as Washington is labeled by several left-leaning Latin American governments). But Quito ultimately withdrew its offer and, in baffling recent news, has hired a public relations firm, Van Scoyoc Associates (VSA), based in Washington, D.C., to improve its relations with the U.S. government.