A picture of fugitive former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden in his new refugee documents granted by Russia in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport August 1, 2013, is seen in this still image taken from a video filmed by Rossiya 24 TV Channel. REUTERS/Rossiya 24/Handout via Reuters

By Timothy Heritage and Steve Holland

MOSCOW/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia rejected U.S. pleas and granted American fugitive Edward Snowden a year's asylum on Thursday, letting the former spy agency contractor slip out of a Moscow airport after more than five weeks in limbo while angering the United States and putting in doubt a planned summit between the two nations' presidents.

The United States wanted Russia to send Snowden home to face criminal charges including espionage for disclosing in June secret American internet and telephone surveillance programs. The White House signaled that President Barack Obama may boycott a September summit with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

Snowden, whose disclosures triggered an international furor over the reach of U.S. spy operations as part of its counterterrorism efforts, thanked Russia for his temporary asylum and declared that "the law is winning."

Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden's Russian lawyer, said the 30-year-old had found shelter in a private home of American expatriates.

Putin's move aggravated relations with the United States that were already strained by Russian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in that country's bloody civil war and a host of other issues.

"We see this as an unfortunate development and we are extremely disappointed by it," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters in Washington. "We are evaluating the utility of a summit, in light of this and other issues, but I have no announcement today on that.

Other high-level U.S.-Russian talks were also put in doubt.

Discussions planned for next week between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and their Russian counterparts are now "up in the air," according to a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, has avoided the hordes of reporters trying to find him since he landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport from Hong Kong on June 23. He gave them the slip again as he left the transit area where he had been holed up.

State television showed Snowden, wearing a backpack and a blue button-up shirt, getting into a gray car at the airport, driven by a young man in a baseball cap.

"Over the past eight weeks we have seen the Obama administration show no respect for international or domestic law but in the end the law is winning," Snowden, whose first leaks were published two months ago, was quoted as saying by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group, which has assisted him.

"I thank the Russian Federation for granting me asylum in accordance with its laws and international obligations."

Grainy images on state television showed Snowden's document, which is similar to a Russian passport, and revealed that he had been granted asylum for a year from July 31.

'MOST WANTED MAN'

"He is the most wanted man on planet Earth," Kucherena told Reuters.

Kucherena said Snowden wanted to rent an apartment and find work in Russia, and had no immediate plans to leave.

Snowden, who had his U.S. passport revoked by Washington, had bided his time in the transit area between the runway and passport control, which Russia considers neutral territory.

"He needs to work. He is not a rich man, and the money that he had, he has of course, spent on food," said Kucherena, who sits on two high-profile Russian government advisory bodies.

"Snowden is an expert, a very high-level expert, and I am receiving letters from companies and citizens who would eagerly give him a job. He will not have any problems," the lawyer said.

Snowden already has been offered a job by Russia's top social networking site.

A pledge not to publish more information that could harm the United States was the condition under which Putin said Snowden could receive safe harbor. "Edward assured me that he is not planning to publish any documents that blacken the American government," Kucherena said.

Snowden was accompanied by Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks legal researcher. "We would like to thank the Russian people and all those others who have helped to protect Mr. Snowden. We have won the battle - now the war," WikiLeaks said on Twitter.

"I am so thankful to the Russian nation and President Vladimir Putin," the American's father, Lonnie Snowden, told Russian state television.

Bruce Fein, an attorney for Lonnie Snowden, spoke twice on Thursday with Kucherena. The discussions were about Edward Snowden's safety - "he is fine" - and about arranging a visit to Russia by Snowden's father and his legal team to see his son, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters.

Lonnie Snowden has not had direct contact with his son yet and "nobody knows where he (Edward) is," the source said.

The visit to Russia could occur in the next three weeks or so, the source said.

U.S. LAWMAKERS INCENSED

Prominent U.S. lawmakers - Republicans and Democrats - condemned Russia's action and urged Obama to take stern retaliatory steps beyond the issue of the September summit.

It is not clear whether Obama might also consider a boycott of the G20 summit in Russia in September, immediately after the planned summit with Putin, or of the Winter Olympics, which Russia will host in the city of Sochi next February.

"Russia has stabbed us in the back, and each day that Mr. Snowden is allowed to roam free is another twist of the knife," said Senator Chuck Schumer, a close Obama ally and fellow Democrat who urged Obama to recommend moving out of Russia the summit of G20 leaders planned for St. Petersburg.

Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, already sharp critics of Putin, called Russia's action a disgrace and a deliberate effort to embarrass the United States. They said the United States should retaliate by pushing for completion of all missile-defense programs in Europe and moving for another expansion of NATO to include Russian neighbor Georgia.

Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov played down concerns about the impact on relations with the United States.

"Our president has ... expressed hope many times that this will not affect the character of our relations," he said.

Snowden hopes to avoid the same fate as Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army soldier convicted on Tuesday on criminal charges including espionage and theft related to releasing classified data through WikiLeaks.

Nicaragua, Bolivia and Venezuela have offered Snowden refuge, but there are no direct commercial flights to Latin America from Moscow and he is concerned the United States would intercept any flight he takes.

Snowden also has received a marriage proposal via Twitter from Anna Chapman, the glamorous former agent who was deported to Russia from the United States in a Cold-War style spy swap in 2010.

Putin has said he wants to improve relations with the United States amid differences over the Syrian civil war, his treatment of political opponents and foreign-funded non-governmental organizations. He would have risked looking weak if he had handed Snowden over to the U.S. authorities.

More than half of Russians have a positive opinion of Snowden and 43 percent wanted him to be granted asylum, a poll released by independent research group Levada said this week.

(Additional reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel, Gabriela Baczynska, Alexei Anishchuk, Katya Golubkova and Gleb Stolyarov in Moscow, Mark Felsenthal and Tabassum Zakaria in Washington, and Andrew Osborn in London, Editing by Will Dunham and Jim Loney)

SHANGHAI (AP) — It's been so hot in China that people are grilling shrimp on manhole covers, eggs are hatching without incubators and a highway billboard has mysteriously caught fire by itself.

The heat wave — the worst in at least 140 years in some parts — has left dozens of people dead and pushed thermometers above 40 degrees C (104 F) in at least 40 cities and counties, mostly in the south and east. Authorities for the first time have declared the heat a "level 2" weather emergency— a label normally invoked for typhoons and flooding.

"It is just hot! Like in a food steamer!" 17-year-old student Xu Sichen said outside the doors of a shopping mall in the southern financial hub of Shanghai while her friend He Jiali, also 17, complained that her mobile phone had in recent days turned into a "grenade."

"I'm so worried that the phone will explode while I'm using it," He said.

Extreme heat began hitting Shanghai and several eastern and southern provinces in early July and is expected to grip much of China through mid-August.

Thousands of Chinese Hit Pool to Escape HeatwavePlay video."

Shanghai set its record high temperature of 40.6 C (105 F) on July 26, and Thursday's heat marked the city's 28th day above 35 C. At least 10 people died of heat stroke in the city over the past month, including a 64-year-old Taiwanese sailor, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Climate scientists usually caution that they can't attribute a single weather event like the Chinese heat wave to man-made global warming. But "human-caused warming sure ups the odds of heat waves like this one," said Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona. The Chinese heat wave "gives a very real face to what global warming is all about," he wrote in an email.

"This is the future. Get used to it," Andrew Dressler of Texas A&M University told The Associated Press by email. "You often hear people say, 'Oh, we'll just adapt to the changing climate.' It turns out that that's a lot harder than it sounds, as the people in China are finding out now."

Wu Guiyun, 50, who has a part-time job making food deliveries in Shanghai, said she has been trying to linger inside air-conditioned offices for as long as possible whenever she brings in a takeout order. Outside, she said: "It's so hot that I can hardly breathe."

The highest temperature overall was recorded in the eastern city of Fenghua, which recorded its historic high of 42.7 degrees (108.9 F) on July 24.

Zoo cools animals in China heatwavePlay video."

On Tuesday, the director of the China Meteorological Administration activated a "level 2" emergency response to the persistent heat wave. This level requires around-the-clock staffing, the establishment of an emergency command center and frequent briefings.

Some Chinese in heat-stricken cities have been cooking shrimps, eggs and bacon in skillets placed directly on manhole covers or on road pavement that has in some cases heated up to 60 degrees C (140 F).

In one photo displayed prominently in the China Daily newspaper, a boy tended to shrimps and an egg in a pan over a manhole cover in eastern Chinese city of Jinan.

In the port city of Ningbo in Zhejiang province, glass has cracked in the heat, vehicles have self-combusted, and a highway billboard caught fire by itself, sending up black smoke in the air, according to China Central Television. The broadcaster said the heat might have shorted an electrical circuit on the billboard.

In the southern province of Hunan, a housewife grabbed several eggs stored at room temperature only to find half-hatched chicks, state media reported.

View gallery."

A boy cools off in a fountain at a park in Shanghai, China, Thursday, Aug. 1, 2013. Hot weather has …

A joke making the rounds: The only difference between me and barbequed meat is a little bit of cumin.

___

Associated Press writer Didi Tang in Beijing, news assistant Fu Ting in Shanghai and science writer Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report.

***** UPDATED *****

Suffolk County Police now confirm that a search of the Catalano home took place on Wednesday afternoon. However, in a surprising new developing, they claim that the search was prompted by a tip from a former of employer of either Michele Catalano or her husband. Further, they claim the search contained the works "pressure cooker bomb" and "backpack," not simply "pressure cooker' and not in separate searches from Catalano and her husband as she claims. From the department's statement:

"Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms 'pressure cooker bombs' and 'backpacks.'”

"After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature."

"Any further inquiries regarding this matter should be directed to the Suffolk County Police Department."

"If it was misleading, just know that my intention was the truth. And that was what I knew as the truth until about ten minutes ago. That there were other circumstances involved was something we all were unaware of."

“There has been no involvement from the Nassau County Police Department,” Detective Vincent Garcia told Yahoo News in a phone interview on Thursday.

A report by The Guardian on Thursday said the FBI also has denied involvement but said members of the Nassau and Suffolk County Police Departments visited Catalano’s home.

“We’ve received over 70 calls in the past hour,” Garcia said. “We think the comment from the FBI was a mistake based on the fact that she lives in New York. But we have no record of her in our system: no parking tickets, nothing.”

Garcia added, “We did some research on our own, reached out to anyone who could have possibly been involved, and we have no record of anyone in our department visiting the Catalano home.”

Despite the denials from local police and the FBI, Catalano's claims have ignited a flurry of attention online, especially following recent allegations concerning the National Security Agency’s domestic intelligence gathering program first reported by The Guardian.

“It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning,” Catalano, a contributor to boingboing.net and deathandtaxesmag.com with more than a decade of professional journalism experience, wrote on the site Medium.com. “Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling.”

Catalano said the search stemmed from her Web search for pressure cookers. Police say Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, accused of being one of the Boston Marathon bombers, used pressure cookers for making the bombs used in that attack.

Catalano says that the investigation happened while she was at work and that her husband told her about the incident. Catalano says authorities spent about 45 minutes searching her home and questioning her husband about Internet searches and his business travels overseas before leaving the premises.

“They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live,” Catalano says her husband told her in a phone call. “Do you have any bombs? they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. 'Can you make a bomb with that?' My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa.”

Her claims have been met with a mixed reaction from readers online, several of whom point out that Catalano, a former contributor to Forbes, has not provided any definitive evidence that the search actually took place.

Reporter Declan McCullagh points out that Catalano posted a picture to her Facebook page of M-66 “explosives.” However, that picture was posted on the Fourth of July, and M-66’s are in fact a popular form of firecrackers.

Catalano is standing by her claims but has refused to grant any interviews with the media. On her Twitter feed, Catalano writes, “You don't believe my story? Ask any of my followers about my credibility. Then kiss my ass.”

MADRID (AP) — The driver of the train that derailed in northwestern Spain, killing 79 people, has said he was traveling at twice the speed limit when he approached a treacherous turn.

But, sitting uneasily before a judge, he waved his hands in front of his face and was at a loss to explain why he didn't slow down in a courtroom video released by a Spanish newspaper Thursday.

"I can't explain it," Francisco Jose Garzon Amo said, shifting in his chair and looking around. "I still don't understand how I didn't see ... mentally, or whatever. I just don't know."

The journey was "going fine" until the curve was upon him, he said. When the danger became clear, he thought, "Oh my God, the curve, the curve, the curve. I won't make it."

The edited video of Garzon's appearance at Sunday night's court session in Santiago de Compostela, where the accident occurred last week, was released by Spain's ABC newspaper. Two court officials said the video appeared authentic. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the video has not been officially released.

In it, Garzon, a slightly-built 52-year-old with short-cropped gray hair and glasses, appears shaken and at times hesitant. He sits in a simple chair in front of the judge, with four rows of chairs behind him in the small courtroom.

Garzon is wearing a dark jacket and trousers with an open-necked shirt. Behind him are two men in dark uniforms, and several other unidentified people are in the room. He also answers questions from a prosecutor.

Garzon's testimony added little new to what is already known about the crash on the evening of July 24 as the high-speed train, carrying 218 people in eight carriages, approached the capital of Spain's northwestern Galician region. But the video was the public's first look at the court testimony of the driver who walked away from the accident with a gash in his head.

ABC said its footage showed 18 minutes of excerpts from the full 55-minute session, accompanied by what it said was a transcript of the full session. The paper said it obtained a copy of the video that the court took of the session but has not made public.

The train had been going as fast as 119 mph (192 kph) shortly before the derailment. The driver activated the brakes "seconds before the crash," reducing the speed to 95 mph (153 kph), according to the court's preliminary findings based on black box data recorders. The speed limit on the section of track where the crash happened was 50 mph (80 kph).

In his Sunday night testimony, Garzon said he was going far over the speed limit and ought to have started slowing down several miles (kilometers) before he reached the notorious curve.

Asked whether he ever hit the brakes, Garzon replied, "The electric one, the pneumatic one ... all of them. Listen, when ... but it was already inevitable."

His voice shakes, his sentences break down and he appears close to tears as he replies to a question about what was going through his mind when he went through the last tunnel before the curve.

View gallery."

FILE - In this July 25, 2013 file photo, a rail personnel worker checks the cabin of a derailed trai …

"If I knew that I wouldn't think it because the burden that I am going to carry for the rest of my life is huge," he said. "And I just don't know. The only thing I know, your honor, sincerely, is that I don't know. I'm not so crazy that I wouldn't put the brakes on."

Garzon said that after the derailment he called central control in Madrid about the accident.

"At the speed I was going and the smashup, though I couldn't see what was behind me. I knew what I was up against and I knew it was inevitable that there was a calamity and so (I called Madrid) to activate the emergency protocol," he testified.

Garzon also explained a photograph on his Facebook page which showed a train speedometer registering 124 mph (200 kph). He said he took the photo "as a laugh or whatever you want to call it" while a colleague was driving a test train on a different track some time ago. His Facebook page was taken down shortly after the crash. It is not known who removed it.

The investigating judge is trying to establish whether human error or a technical failure caused the country's worst rail accident in decades, and Garzon is at the center of the investigation.

The judge provisionally charged Garzon on Sunday with multiple counts of negligent homicide. Garzon was not sent to jail or required to post bail because none of the parties involved felt there was a risk of him fleeing or attempting to destroy evidence, according to a court statement.

National rail company Renfe said Garzon is an employee with 30 years of experience who became an assistant driver in 2000 and a fully qualified driver in 2003.

Garzon went back to court, voluntarily, to offer more testimony on Wednesday.

In that second appearance, he said he was talking by phone to the train's on-board ticket inspector moments before the accident and hung up just before the train left the tracks. But that contradicted what the court said the black boxes showed — that Garzon was on the phone at the time of the derailment.

The court said the inspector would testify Friday as a witness. It said the judge has ruled that while the phone call was inappropriate it could not be considered a cause of the accident.

Health authorities say 57 people from the crash are still in the hospital, 11 of them in critical condition.

____

Hatton contributed from Lisbon, Portugal. Associated Press writer Jorge Sainz contributed from Madrid.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States is shuttering its embassies and consulates throughout the Muslim world on Sunday after receiving an unspecified threat, officials said.

State Department officials said Thursday that they were taking action out of an "abundance of caution."

Spokeswoman Marie Harf cited information indicating a threat to U.S. facilities overseas and said some diplomatic facilities may stay closed for more than a day.

Other U.S. officials said the threat was in the Muslim world, where Sunday is a workday. American diplomatic missions in Europe, Latin America and many other places are closed on Sunday.

Those officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

The State Department issued a major warning last year informing American diplomatic facilities across the Muslim world about potential violence connected to the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Dozens of American installations were besieged by protest over an anti-Islam video made by an American resident.

In Benghazi, Libya, the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed when militants assaulted a diplomatic post. The administration no longer says that attack was related to the demonstrations.