National: A former CIA employee named Edward Snowden allowed himself to be identified as the source for news reports on the National Security Agency’s secret collection of Internet and telephone information. The Washington Post quotes Snowden as saying in a note, “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.” Snowden has recently been living in Hawaii working for Booz Allen, a technology consulting firm. Several news outlets report that Snowden is in a Hong Kong today.

• A fifth victim in Friday’s Santa Monica, Ca. shooting spree has died. Marcela Franco, 26, was the daughter of Carlos Franco, 68, a groundskeeper at Santa Monica College where the multiple location shooting ended. Carlos Franco was killed instantly Friday.
• Standard and Poor’s lifted its rating on US Government credit saying the economy is stabilizing. But the agency said it is still worried about the size of the US national debt.

World: Car bombs killed 22 people in a Baghdad market area this morning. And in Afghanistan yesterday, security forces yesterday fought off a coordinated Taliban attack on the Kabul airport. Seven suicide bombers died in the incident.

• Flooding continues in central Europe, as thousand of people have had to evacuate their homes in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. One German Member of Parliament described it as a national catastrophe. The damage is estimated to run in the billions of dollars.

Music: Apple Computer is expected to announce today a streaming music service described by some as “The Pandora Killer” to compete with such services as Pandora and Spotify. The company may also announce a new iPhone operating system to compete with popular Samsung smartphones.

Weekend Box: A horror flick called The Purge, starring Ethan Hawke, the guy who stepped out on Uma Thurman, shocked Hollywood with a $36.4 million take. It cost $3 million to make. The Internship with funny guys Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn debuted at 4^th with $18 million, and more than that in free advertising for Internet search giant Google, which is where the two guys have their internship.

The Theatuh: Seventy-nine year old actress Cicely Tyson won a Tony Award for lead actress in the revival of “The Trip To Bountiful”. Tyson is an enduring actress who rose to national fame starring in the 1974 television movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, about a woman who was born a slave and lives into the civil rights era in the south.

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