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Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whose leak of agency documents has set off a national debate over the proper limits of government surveillance, has been charged with violating the Espionage Act and stealing government property for disclosing classified information to The Guardian and The Washington Post, the Justice Department said on Friday.
Each of the three charges unsealed on Friday carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, for a total of 30 years. But Mr. Snowden is likely to be indicted, and additional counts may well be added. In addition to the theft charge, the two charges under the Espionage Act include "unauthorized communication of national defense information" and "willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person." Communications intelligence is the technical term for eavesdropping and other electronic intercepts.
The charges were filed on June 14 by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, which handles many national security cases. American officials said they have asked the authorities in Hong Kong, where Mr. Snowden is believed to be in hiding, to detain him while an indictment and an extradition request are prepared. The attempt to extradite him is likely to produce a long legal battle whose outcome is uncertain. The extradition treaty between the United States and Hong Kong includes an exception for political offenses, and Mr. Snowden could argue that his prosecution is political in nature.
Hong Kong has limited autonomy, but matters involving national security and foreign policy are controlled by the Chinese government in Beijing. Regina Ip, a former Hong Kong secretary of security and a current legislator, said Saturday that Hong Kong authorities had "no choice but to comply" with an arrest warrant and that "our police will go and find Mr. Snowden."
However, Ms. Ip said, Mr. Snowden could delay any extradition by claiming his is "a political offense," or he could apply for asylum, "and those cases can take 10 years."
Last week, hundreds of people turned out in the rain for a protest outside the United States Consulate in Hong Kong demanding that officials not cooperate with any American extradition request. The Global Times, a mainland newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, called an extradition of Mr. Snowden an "inconceivable option" in a recent commentary.
The charges against Mr. Snowden, first reported by The Washington Post, are the seventh case under President Obama in which a government official has been criminally charged with leaking classified information to the news media. Under all previous presidents, just three such cases have been brought.
Mr. Snowden, who turned 30 on Friday, fled to Hong Kong last month, carrying four laptops, after leaving his job at the N.S.A.'s eavesdropping station in Hawaii. He has given hundreds of highly classified documents to The Guardian, the British newspaper, which has been publishing a series of revelatory articles about American and British eavesdropping, and a smaller number to The Post.
Mr. Snowden's disclosures have opened an unprecedented window on the details of surveillance by the N.S.A., including its compilation of logs of virtually all telephone calls in the United States and its collection of e-mails of foreigners from the major American Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Skype.
Mr. Snowden, who has said he was shocked by what he believed to be the N.S.A.'s invasion of Americans' and foreigners' privacy, told The Guardian that he leaked the documents because he believed the limits of surveillance should be decided not by government officials in secret but by American citizens.
American intelligence officials have said his disclosures have done serious damage to national security by giving terrorists and others information on how to evade the intelligence net.
Mr. Snowden's supporters, including some associated with the antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, have approached officials in Iceland on his behalf to inquire about whether he might be granted asylum there. Iceland's Ministry of the Interior, however, said in a statement that he must be in the country to file an asylum application.
An Icelandic businessman with ties to WikiLeaks, Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson, has told reporters that he has private aircraft on standby, prepared to fly Mr. Snowden to Iceland. But the American charges and detention request may short-circuit any attempt to reach Iceland.
Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian columnist who received most of Mr. Snowden's leaked documents, blasted the Obama administration over the Espionage Act charges on his Twitter feed. "How is leaking to a newspaper and informing one's fellow citizens about secret govt behavior 'espionage'???" Mr. Greenwald wrote.
Charlie Savage contributed reporting from Washington, Gerry Mullany from Hong Kong and John F. Burns from London.
Nelson Almeida/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Brazilian protests continued on Friday in Belo Horizonte, where plans to increase public transportation fares were the focus.
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — With cities across the nation heaving in the biggest protests in decades, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil convened an emergency meeting of top aides on Friday and announced that she would pursue measures touching on some of the grievances stirring the unrest, including a national transportation overhaul and the use of all oil royalties for education.
But she has floated her ambitious proposal before — to use oil revenues to improve the beleaguered public schools — only to run up against stiff resistance from state governors who rely on the money to meet their budgets, leaving her ability to enact it in doubt.
Her pledge came as the government put forward other small measures as well, like injecting new money to bolster transportation and pledging to better scrutinize financial corruption within its ranks.
"Brazil fought a lot to become a democratic country, and it is fighting a lot to become a country that it is more just," Ms. Rousseff said.
In a show of resolve, Ms. Rousseff and other authorities also lashed out at the growing violence among some of the protesters, denouncing recent attacks on government buildings, acknowledging their concerns about security ahead of a visit by the pope and, in at least one case, threatening to deploy the army to the streets if the demonstrations continued to intensify.
"I assure you, we will maintain order," Ms. Rousseff said.
More than a million people protested in scores of cities across the country on Thursday night to excoriate the government on a broad array of issues, including political corruption, the high cost of living and the billions of dollars being devoted to building stadiums for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in a country where poverty is pervasive and public education is often in shambles.
But while most of the protesters have vented their frustrations peacefully — even joyfully at times, singing and celebrating what they call a mass awakening across the country — a violent subset has stormed public buildings, set fires and smashed storefronts, bus shelters, traffic lights and some A.T.M.'s.
In Rio de Janeiro, José Mariano Beltrame, the official in charge of security policies, said that if the unrest intensified, the army could be asked to increase patrols in various parts of the city to "protect the integrity of people and of public and private and public property."
The concern over the violent turn among protesters was enough that Gilberto Carvalho, a top aide to Ms. Rousseff, acknowledged it could affect the visit of Pope Francis to Brazil, which is scheduled for July.
"We have a series of complications and concerns," Mr. Carvalho told reporters in the capital, Brasília. "The situation is evolving so fast that we can't predict what will happen."
Protests continued to shake cities around Brazil on Friday. In São Paulo, the nation's largest city, protesters blocked roads leading to the airport and thousands rallied at a downtown plaza to protest a measure backed by conservative legislators, known as the gay cure, that would allow psychologists to treat homosexuality as a form of mental illness.
The protests continued even though one of the main groups that had been behind the original demonstrations here said that it would not call for any more marches in São Paulo. The group indicated that it had won the concessions on bus fares it had demanded and that it was concerned that some members of allied groups, like left-wing political parties or social movements, had been singled out and beaten up at the demonstrations.
"We won the fight, so we are going to take time to think about what to do next," said Rafael Siqueira, a member of the group, Passe Livre, which had pushed for the rollback of a bus fare increase.
In Ribeirão Preto, 1,000 people attended the funeral of Marcos Delefrate, an 18-year-old who died after being struck by a car on Thursday. Military police officers escorted the mourners, and the cavalry positioned itself in front of the cemetery.
The protests claimed a second victim on Friday, Cleonice Vieira, 51, a street cleaner in the city of Belém in the Amazon. Brazilian news organizations reported that she had died of a heart attack after a tear-gas canister exploded nearby.
As the protests continued, the national development bank, known as BNDES, announced that it had approved more than $1 billion in loans to expand the metro system in São Paulo, the city where the bus fare increase set off the initial protests. And in Brasília, the Finance Ministry said it had created an inspector to review allegations of corruption, one of the main issues that has driven countless thousands to the streets in recent days.
But many protesters said the measures fell far short of what was needed.
"They have been promising lots of things for many years, but it doesn't go beyond that," said Jeniffer Novaez, 18, a physical therapist. "I don't know if they understand what is really happening here, but it's been many years and we are thirsty. We want everything, and we want it now."
Another protester, Bruna Santana, 22, a student, said the government was not serious in its response. "They only want to shut us up," she said.
Paula Ramón contributed reporting.
Raymond McCrea Jones for The New York Times
Russell Hiatt, 89, lays claim to being the real barber who gave rise to the fictional Floyd the barber on "The Andy Griffith Show." More Photos »
MOUNT AIRY, N.C. — Marketing a small Southern town that has been repeatedly gut-punched by the economy requires the kind of drive and creativity that come only from desperation.
Mount Airy, a town of about 9,340 that hugs the Virginia border, has a history of economic agility. When the railroad came, it advertised itself as a healthy mountain retreat. When the tobacco barons put local growers out of business, the town started spinning cotton into clothes and socks. When the textile plants shut down, it turned to Andy Griffith.
In 1990, Mount Airy began to transform itself into Mayberry, recreating on its main street the fictional setting of "The Andy Griffith Show." Mr. Griffith, who was born in Mount Airy, starred in the show as Sheriff Andy Taylor. During its run, from 1960 to 1968, it was among the most popular shows in America, and it has been seen in reruns ever since.
A playhouse and a museum are dedicated to Mr. Griffith. At the Mayberry Motor Inn, a woman who looks something like Aunt Bee will show you the room that holds memorabilia from the estate of Frances Bavier, the actress who played her.
Visitors can tour the town in a vintage police car and eat soggy fried pork chop sandwiches at the Snappy Lunch, a real-life place that was mentioned once in the show. The third Friday of the month the actress Betty Lynn, who played Thelma Lou on the show and moved to Mount Airy from Los Angeles in 2007, signs autographs.
In 2010, the 50th anniversary of the show drew 50,000 people to the annual Mayberry Days festival, held each September.
But hard times seem just around the corner for the Mayberry strategy.
This year, organizers hope the festival will at least reach the 30,000 it has in other years. But that might be optimistic. Shopkeepers report that the number of visitors who wander the streets whistling the show's theme song, which is piped out from speakers, are definitely thinning.
It does not help that people connected to the show are dying. Last year, Mr. Griffith died. So did George Lindsey, who played Goober. In January, the town lost Emmett Forrest, 85, Mr. Griffith's childhood friend and the force behind the town's embrace of the Mayberry way of life.
Even Russell Hiatt, the elderly barber who says he was the inspiration for the character Floyd, is moving slower, giving fewer and fewer trims as the months pass.
The question, then, becomes, how much longer can one little town rely on the gimmick?
"I think it's already coming to a halt," said Amanda Richardson, 24, who works at a cafe called Barney's on Main Street, not far from Opie's Candy Store. "My daughter isn't going to want to go somewhere to learn about Andy Griffith."
Few will argue that the town is going to have to come up with something else eventually.
"Nobody knows how long we can hold onto the name," said Becky Payne, 59, who was eating at Barney's recently. "It's wonderful we have Andy Griffith, but what else do we have here?"
Unemployment in Surry County has just dipped under 10 percent, but jobs remain hard to find. Spencer's, a major employer that once made baby clothes in a light blue factory in the center of town, closed in 2007. The nearby granite quarry has had rounds of layoffs.
There are other problems in a town that, to all appearances, seems as nice as they come. The police report a stubborn problem with illegal OxyContin use. In May, a man claiming to be from a nonexistent winery ran a fake raffle promising a Fiat. Dozens of people bought the $100 tickets. The police are still looking for him.
But Mount Airy remains undeterred. One thought is to continue to capitalize on vineyards in the Yadkin Valley springing up on old tobacco fields. Nearby wineries have increased to 35 from only 5 in 2002. That led to a new, somewhat debated, slogan: From Mayberry to Merlot. At the Chamber of Commerce, they hand out promotional corkscrews.
There are other attractions to build on, among them the colorful fall leaves, the annual fiddlers' festival and the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains.
Eng and Chang Bunker, the conjoined twins from Thailand whose plight brought about the term Siamese twins, settled in the area. They died in 1874 and are buried nearby. Between them they had 21 children, and their descendants hold an annual reunion in July that is open to the public.
But all in all, many people think the appeal of Mayberry is still the best bet.
"What is Mayberry?" asked the ever-buoyant Betty Ann Collins, president of the Greater Mount Airy Chamber of Commerce. "It's what's in your mind. It's that safe place you can come to so that you can escape. Who wouldn't want some of that?"
The prison sentence of Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron who spearheaded the pervasive fraud that destroyed the energy company, was reduced by 10 years on Friday after a federal judge approved a deal between his lawyers and prosecutors.
Judge Simeon T. Lake III of Federal District Court in Houston, who oversaw Mr. Skilling's trial in 2006, signed off on an agreement that will decrease his 24-year sentence to 14 years.
The reduction was driven in part by a 2009 appeals court ruling that ordered a recalculation of Mr. Skilling's sentence because of a mistake made by the judge in interpreting the federal sentencing guidelines.
Mr. Skilling, 59, who has been serving his sentence at a federal prison in Colorado, appeared in court on Friday wearing an olive-drab prison uniform and a salt-and-pepper beard, and looking bulkier than he did during his days as a corporate chieftain.
He will now exit prison as early as 2017. There is no parole in the federal criminal justice system, but Mr. Skilling will most likely receive the standard 15 percent sentence reduction for good behavior and a one-year reduction for completing an alcohol-abuse treatment program.
"We are relieved that Jeff can now look forward a day when he can come home to his family and friends," said Daniel M. Petrocelli, Mr. Skilling's lead lawyer.
In exchange for his reduced sentence, Mr. Skilling gave up about $42 million, all of which will be distributed to victims of Enron's fraud. He also agreed not to pursue any further legal appeals, including a claim that would have accused the prosecution team of misconduct.
"The sentence handed down today ends years of litigation, imposes significant punishment upon the defendant and precludes him from ever challenging his conviction or sentence," Mythili Raman, the acting assistant attorney general, said in a statement.
Several Enron victims wrote letters to the court protesting Mr. Skilling's proposed reduced sentence. On Friday, Andrew Stoltmann, a lawyer who represented several victims, criticized the Justice Department for agreeing to the reduction and said it was unacceptable coming on the heels of the lack of prosecutions arising out of the financial crisis.
"By entering into this early release agreement, a clear message will be sent to corporate C.E.O.'s that if you get caught with the hand in the cookie jar, you will get little more than a slap on the wrist," Mr. Stoltmann said.
Mr. Skilling's legal team mounted a zealous appeal, seeking to overturn his conviction on a variety of legal grounds. Last year, they said that Mr. Skilling would seek a new trial based on recently discovered evidence.
The case also made its way to the Supreme Court, which in 2010 questioned the use of the "theft of honest services" law that helped convict Mr. Skilling, finding it unconstitutionally vague. But a federal appeals court ruled that there was overwhelming evidence of his guilt, so his conviction was not tainted by the use of that legal theory.
Mr. Skilling, a former consultant at McKinsey & Company, joined Enron in 1990 and led its transformation from a sleepy pipeline operator to a global energy-trading colossus. He also played a central role in the accounting schemes that masked its debts and weak finances from shareholders and regulators.
The fall of Enron, which at its peak was one of the country's most admired businesses, cost shareholders billions of dollars and its employees their retirement savings. Its demise ushered in a wave of prosecutions that rooted out accounting fraud at once-highflying companies like WorldCom, HealthSouth and Adelphia Communications.
Prosecutors tried Mr. Skilling alongside Kenneth L. Lay, Enron's chairman, who was also found guilty in the fraud. Mr. Lay died about a month after the trial, and his conviction was vacated.
During Mr. Skilling's time in prison, his parents and his 20-year-old son have died.
Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency
The New York Stock Exchange on Friday. Shares recovered somewhat after falling sharply on Thursday after the Fed's announcement.
When the Federal Reserve said this week that the economy could soon be strong enough to live with less of its stimulus, the markets threw their version of a tantrum.
The temptation is not to take Wall Street's truculence too seriously and treat it as an inevitable, but passing, reaction to a world with less easy money.
But if stocks and bonds keep declining, doubts about the Fed's withdrawal could deepen, leading to a situation in which even the real economy suffers.
In a pivotal communication, the Fed on Wednesday clearly laid out the steps it would take to reduce the extraordinary stimulus it has injected into the financial system and economy since the financial crisis of 2008. It stressed it would withdraw its support only if the economy were strong enough. The Fed's chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, sounding not unlike a soothing parent, even said the central bank would reverse course if it mistakenly pared back too soon.
Such placating words hardly satisfied investors. The benchmark Standard & Poor's 500-stock index dropped 2.5 percent on Thursday, its steepest one-day decline since November 2011, and ended the week down 2.1 percent. The 10-year Treasury bond also plunged in price, which pushed up its yield to 2.54 percent at the end of the week, capping a sharp run-up over the last month.
Wall Street finds itself in an uncomfortable place. Perhaps more than at any time since the crisis, it knows it must prepare for a world without the Fed's largess, one that is also facing uncertainty about tightening credit in China and continuing debt woes in Europe. Of course, stocks and bonds were always going to sell off when it became evident that the Fed was changing course.
In the past, markets have panicked initially when investors anticipated a tightening of interest rate policy by the central bank. Prices soon recovered as investors realized a stingier central bank need not spell doom. In 1994, investors sold off in the face of a toughening of Fed policy, but stocks recovered and rallied in the next years. To the optimists, the week's instability may have merely been the market wobbling as it tried to stand on its own two feet again.
"I think it's very fair to describe what's going on in the markets as very normal," said David Bianco, an equities strategist at Deutsche Bank. "Normal for when there are big changes in interest rate policies."
Though talk about withdrawing support unnerved some investors, it may turn out to be a necessary step to build further confidence, Mr. Bianco said. After several years of Fed support, investors are not quite sure whether the searing rally in stock prices since 2009 is entirely genuine. But if stocks recover now and keep climbing, the jibes that the markets are riding on a "sugar high" could lose credibility.
Stocks are vulnerable to a tightening of Fed policy when they are overvalued. But the corporations in the S.& P. 500 are reporting historically strong profits.
"The second quarter is still estimated to be an all-time record," said Howard Silverblatt, a senior analyst at Standard & Poor's. And because of those strong earnings, stocks do not look overvalued, he said. The companies in the S.& P. 500 have a stock market value that is 15 times as large as their expected combined earnings for this year. That multiple is well below the 19 times that is the average for the last 25 years, Mr. Silverblatt said.
As strong as earnings might look, the stock market reacts negatively to any hint that profits may fall below expectations.
Stocks did recover a bit on Friday, with the S.& P. 500 rising 4.24 points, or 0.3 percent, to 1,592.43, and the Dow Jones industrial average climbing 41.08 points, or 0.3 percent, to 14,799.40. But it is highly unlikely that the markets have seen the last of extreme volatility. The sell-off in the bond market has caused interest rates to rise, which could depress economic activity and weigh on corporate profits. Weakness in foreign economies could also take a toll on earnings. Seeing that coming, investors might very well dump stocks.
It is these crosswinds that have convinced some people that the Fed should have waited to talk about an exit until the economic signals at home and abroad looked stronger.
James B. Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, who is on the Fed committee that shapes monetary policy, dissented to the Fed's statement on Wednesday and registered his disagreement with some of the committee's decisions. On Friday, the St. Louis Fed took the somewhat unusual step of explaining his opposition at length in a news release, saying that Mr. Bullard thought the economy was not yet strong enough to start a stimulus withdrawal. That view is widely shared on Wall Street.
"Bullard is saying it's important to look at economic conditions now — and they are fairly weak," said Kenneth B. Petersen, a portfolio manager at Laffer Investments.
One area of the economy that investors will be following closely is housing. The Fed's policies led to historically low mortgage rates, and a revival in house prices. But a rapid reversal in rates has taken place. House prices still look affordable on a historical basis, so the higher cost of borrowing may not hurt too much, said Michael Cudzil, a portfolio manager at Pimco. But he added, "This will create a little more of a headwind for the economy."
Despite the Fed's efforts to reassure the markets, it is still essentially leaving them to comfort themselves. And as with any unsteady recovery, the risk remains of a tumble or two before footing can be fully regained.
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Marijuana crops on private land in Humboldt County, Calif. Some medical marijuana growers follow state rules, but others do not.
ARCATA, Calif. — It took the death of a small, rare member of the weasel family to focus the attention of Northern California's marijuana growers on the impact that their huge and expanding activities were having on the environment.
The animal, a Pacific fisher, had been poisoned by an anticoagulant in rat poisons like d-Con. Since then, six other poisoned fishers have been found. Two endangered spotted owls tested positive. Mourad W. Gabriel, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, concluded that the contamination began when marijuana growers in deep forests spread d-Con to protect their plants from wood rats.
That news has helped growers acknowledge, reluctantly, what their antagonists in law enforcement have long maintained: like industrial logging before it, the booming business of marijuana is a threat to forests whose looming dark redwoods preside over vibrant ecosystems.
Hilltops have been leveled to make room for the crop. Bulldozers start landslides on erosion-prone mountainsides. Road and dam construction clogs some streams with dislodged soil. Others are bled dry by diversions. Little water is left for salmon whose populations have been decimated by logging.
And local and state jurisdictions' ability to deal with the problem has been hobbled by, among other things, the drug's murky legal status. It is approved by the state for medical uses but still illegal under federal law, leading to a patchwork of growers. Some operate within state rules, while others operate totally outside the law.
The environmental damage may not be as extensive as that caused by the 19th-century diking of the Humboldt estuary here, or 20th-century clear-cut logging, but the romantic outlaw drug has become a destructive juggernaut, experts agree.
"In my career I've never seen anything like this," said Stormer Feiler, a scientist with California's North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. "Since 2007 the amount of unregulated activities has exploded." He added, "They are grading the mountaintops now, so it affects the whole watershed below."
Scott Bauer, of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, said, "I went out on a site yesterday where there was an active water diversion providing water to 15 different groups of people or individuals," many of them growers. "The stream is going to dry up this year."
While it is hard to find data on such an industry, Anthony Silvaggio, a sociology lecturer at Humboldt State University, pointed to anecdotal evidence in a Google Earth virtual "flyover" he made of the industrial farm plots and the damage they cause. The video was later enhanced and distributed by Mother Jones magazine.
Brad Job's territory as a federal Bureau of Land Management officer includes public lands favored, he said, by Mexican drug cartels whose environmental practices are the most destructive. "The watershed was already lying on the ground bleeding," Mr. Job said. "The people who divert water in the summer are kicking it in the stomach."
That water is crucial to restoring local runs of imperiled Coho salmon, Chinook salmon and steelhead, which swam up Eel River tributaries by the tens of thousands before the logging era. Scott Greacen, executive director of Friends of the Eel River, said, "It's not weed that drove the Coho to the brink of extinction, but it may kick it over the edge." By various estimates, each plant needs at least one gallon and as much as six gallons of water during a season.
The idea that the counterculture's crop of choice is bad for the environment has gone down hard here. Marijuana is an economic staple, particularly in Humboldt County's rural southern end, called SoHum. Jennifer Budwig, the vice president of a local bank, estimated last year that marijuana infused more than $415 million into the county's annual economic activity, one-quarter of the total.
For the professed hippies who moved here decades ago, marijuana farming combines defiance of society's strictures, shared communal values and a steady income. "Marijuana has had a framework that started in the 1930s with jazz musicians," said Gregg Gold, a psychology professor at Humboldt State University. "It's a cultural icon of resistance to authority."
"In 2013," he added, "you're asking that we reframe it in people's minds as just another agribusiness. That's a huge shift."
It is a thriving agribusiness. Derek Roy, a special agent enforcing endangered species protections for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said, "These grow sites continue to get larger and larger." Things took off after 1996, when California decriminalized the use of medical marijuana, Mr. Roy said.
