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tial to learn from his leadership."
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• Whisked out of a luxury Hong Kong hotel, vanishing into the mysterious wing of a Moscow airport, Edward Snowden's continent-jumping, hide-and-seek game seems like the stuff of a pulp thriller -- a desperate man's drama played out before a worldwide audience trying to decide if he's a hero or a villain.
• But the search for the former National Security Agency contractor who spilled government secrets has become something of a distracting sideshow, some say, overshadowing at least for now the important debate over the government's power to seize the phone and Internet records of millions of Americans to help wage the war on terrorism.
• "You have to be humble on Day 1 to say, 'This isn't about me. This is about the information.'... I don't think he really anticipated the importance of making sure the focus initially was off him," says Mike Paul, president of MGP & Associates PR, a crisis management firm in New York. "Not only has he weakened his case, some would go as far as to say he's gone from hero to zero."
• Snowden, he says, can get back on track by "utilizing whatever information he has like big bombs in a campaign," so the focus returns to the question of spying and not his life on the run.
• Snowden's disclosures about U.S. surveillance to Britain's Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post have ignited a major controversy in Washington that shows no signs of fading. A petition asking President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden -- dubbing him a "national hero" -- has collected more than 123,000 signatures. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., meanwhile, has called Snowden's disclosure of top-secret information "an act of treason." And Republican House Speaker John Boehner is among those who've called Snowden a "traitor."
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• UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice dismissed claims that Edward Snowden's highly classified leaks have weakened the Obama presidency and damaged U.S. foreign policy, insisting that the United States will remain "the

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