Markets Poised to Open Higher; Snowden to Media
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: NEWSROOM starts now. Good morning. Thank you so much for being with me. I'm Carol Costello. Checking our top stories at 30 minutes past the hour. Supporters of ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy are calling for mass protests to mark a day of anger. Demonstrations would defy an emergency ordered declared after clashes Wednesday left at least 580 people dead. Egyptian state news reports the army is trying to thwart protests by blocking public spaces with armored vehicles and barbed wire. To southern California where kidnapping survivor Hannah Anderson was spotted in public for the first time since her harrowing rescue in the Idaho woods. The 16-year-old was seen arriving at a fund-raiser for her and her family. Hannah did not talk to reporters. Her father, though, thanked the community for helping his daughter heal. Another sign of recovery in Boston. A restaurant just steps from the site of the marathon attack reopens today. CNN affiliate WCVV reports that the Forum (ph) restaurant is the last business on Boylston Street to reopen since the April bombings. Its security cameras caught the alleged bombers on tape and its staff is credited with helping many who were injured. Opening bell, yes, ringing on Wall Street. Right now, markets are poised to head higher. And that's a good thing, taking back some of those big losses we've seen in the last couple of days. Alison Kosik is following the</s>ALISON KOSIK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. And stocks are not heading higher, actually. Stocks are extending their losses. The Dow, over the past two days, has tumbled more than 300 points. Gosh, you know, August has really been a rough one for stocks. But putting it in perspective, it's after six weeks in a row of gains for the Dow. One analyst puts it this way, there's this eerie calm settling over the markets at this point that we could be in for a bit of a slowdown. It's not normal to see in August, but here's the thing, some of the economic data that we've been getting are concerning, too, especially with manufacturing and the job's market. There's also the worry hanging over investors when the Fed will pull back on that stimulus money that it's been pumping into the economy and that if it's taken away too soon, it could cause a setback for the economy. We watch the big names like Wal-Mart and Cisco say the economy is challenging for their business. So, with so much up in the air, no big reason to buy into stocks today. The reason you are seeing stocks head lower in the early minutes of the trading day. Carol.</s>COSTELLO: All right, Alison Kosik, we'll get back to you. Also new this morning, the latest bombshell from Edward Snowden claiming the NSA has violated privacy rules thousands of times a year, every year, since 2008. This was reported in "The Washington Post." The article says Snowden leaked an audit from May 2012 outlining nearly 3,000 violations. They show the NSA collected surveillance on Americans without court authorization, accessed legally protected communications. But "The Post" says these incidents may have been unintended, accidents, like the one time in 2008 when the NSA intercepted phone calls from Washington after a programming error confused the 202 area code for 20, which is the international call for calling Egypt. The NSA responded to the latest leak saying, quote, "NSA's foreign intelligence collection activities are continually audited and overseen internally and externally. When NSA makes a mistake in carrying out its foreign intelligence mission, the agency reports the issue internally and to federal overseers and aggressively gets to the bottom of it." There you have it. In the meantime, Edward Snowden is speaking out from his hiding spot in Russia and he has a message telling the media, quit exploiting his father for the sake of tabloid news. Snowden's dad has been outspoken and critical and sometimes speculative but now Snowden says, the younger Snowden that is, he says his dad does not speak for him. CNN's Phil Black has more for you.</s>PHIL BLACK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Since Edward Snowden fled the United States, one person has assumed the role of his public champion, his father.</s>LON SNOWDEN, EDWARD SNOWDEN'S FATHER: I know my son. I know he loves his country.</s>BLACK: But Lon Snowden has also often strayed into commentary about his son's legal options and recently his own legal team expressed concern about the advice Edward is receiving from WikiLeaks and journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA leak stories. Edward Snowden didn't like those comments. From his secret location somewhere in Russia, he smacked them down in a statement to "The Huffington Post" "Neither my father, his lawyer, Bruce Fein, nor his wife, Mattie Fein, represent me in any way. I ask journalists to understand that they do not possess any special knowledge regarding my situation or future plans, and not to exploit the tragic vacuum of my father's emotional compromise for the sake of tabloid news." But the father and son relationship remains strong. For the first time since Edward fled the U.S., the Snowdens have been in direct contact using an encrypted Internet chat service. Their lawyers didn't want them to do it. Investigators haven't finished digging into Edward Snowden's past. Reuters reports they're now looking at the three plus years he worked at the Dell computer company. The news agency says Snowden left an electronic footprint which shows he began accessing information on NSA surveillance programs as early as April 2012.</s>COSTELLO: Phil Black reporting there. Edward Snowden, as you know, was charges with espionage and other crimes in the United States, but he has been granted temporary asylum in Russia. Still ahead in the NEWSROOM, Area 51. Yes, it does exist. But are the remains of alien spaceships kept there? We'll explore that issue when we come back.