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ment's strong criticism of the massive NSA spy program targeting Internet and telecommunications around the globe, including monitoring the mobile phone of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
• Brazilian senators have asked for Snowden's help during hearings about the NSA program's aggressive targeting of Brazil, an important transit hub for trans-Atlantic fiber optic cables that are hacked.
• "I've expressed my willingness to assist where it's appropriate and legal, but, unfortunately, the U.S. government has been working hard to limit my ability to do so," said the letter, translated into Portuguese by the newspaper. It didn't make the English original available online.
• "Until a country grants me permanent political asylum, the U.S. government will continue to interfere with my ability to speak out," the letter added.
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• BERLIN (AP) -- Germany's Parliament elected Chancellor Angela Merkel to a third term as the leader of Europe's biggest economic power on Tuesday, nearly three months after an awkward election result forced her to put together a new governing coalition.
• Merkel now heads a "grand coalition" of Germany's biggest parties -- her conservative Union bloc and the center-left Social Democrats, which are traditional rivals. Parliament's lower house elected her as chancellor by 462 votes to 150, with nine abstentions
• The new government will move Germany somewhat leftward, for example introducing a national minimum wage, but will take a largely unchanged approach to Europe's debt crisis.
• It features Germany's first female defense minister, conservative Ursula von der Leyen, and sees former Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, return to his old job. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, a powerful figure in Europe's debt crisis, is staying on.
• The parties' effort to form a government after Sept. 22 national elections, in which Merkel's conservatives came close to a parliamentary majority but saw their previous coalition partners lose all their seats, has been the longest in post-World War II Germany.
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