Snowden Flight Rumors Irk Bolivia

Bolivian President Evo Morales had to make an unscheduled stop in Austria after France, Portugal, and Spain denied his plane access to their airspace. It all began earlier this week in Moscow, when Morales offhandedly suggested that he might be willing to take in the fugitive American whistleblower Edward Snowden. By Tuesday it had spiraled into an international goose chase, with Morales’s plane being rerouted on its way back to Bolivia out of suspicion that Snowden was on board. All this fuss has not made Bolivians happy. “We don’t know who invented this big lie,” Bolivia’s foreign minister said of the Snowden rumors. “We want to express our displeasure, because this has put the president’s life at risk.”