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An appeals court today reversed a lower court’s decision compelling YouTube to remove the controversial film Innocence of Muslims, saying that such an act was a violation of the First Amendment. The film, a 13-minute “trailer” created by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in 2012, sparked outrage among the Muslim community for its depiction of the prophet Muhammad as a pedophile and a murderer, and for a time was thought to be the cause of the attacks against the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya. The initial lawsuit had been filed by Cindy Lee Garcia, one of the actresses in the film, who...

Full title.....Gold Mine: Hillary Clinton’s Brother Granted Super-Rare Mining Permit from Haiti After State Dept. Sent Country Billions Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, sat on the board of a self-described mining company that in 2012 received one of only two “gold exploitation permits” from the Haitian government—the first issued in over 50 years. The tiny North Carolina company, VCS Mining, also included on its board Bill Clinton’s co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), former Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. The Rodham gold mine revelation is just one of dozens featured in a forthcoming bombshell investigative book by...

Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in the Wall Street Journal. We reprint in part here. Hillary Clinton’s State Department was part of a panel that approved the sale of one of America’s largest uranium mines at the same time a foundation controlled by the seller’s chairman was making donations to a Clinton family charity, records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show.The $610 million sale of 51% of Uranium One to a unit of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear agency, was approved in 2010 by a U.S. federal committee that assesses the security implications of foreign investments. The State Department, which...

Witness John Hill saw the whole thing unfold. He was working nearby when he had a feeling something was about to happen. He went to his car to grab his camera and before he knew it, the 100 slope next to the freight train started fail! “I saw the hill start to go. It went down and hit the first car and it tipped over, then more cars kept tipping over. It was crazy how loud it was and how slow it all happened,” he said. There had been “activity” on the rain saturated slope earlier in the day which...

At an event in Cleveland on Wednesday, President Obama endorsed a system of mandatory voting, a policy that would penalize eligible voters who don't make it to the polls on Election Day. The idea is not universally embraced, though it has significantly boosted turnout in Australia, where it's in place. It's very easy to see why Obama likes the idea. He spoke longingly of increased turnout during the 50th anniversary ceremony in Selma, Ala., earlier this month. There's value in getting more people involved in the democratic process that doesn't tie directly to the success of his party, but it's...

During Barack Obama's recent State of the Union speech, he told America he had no more campaigns to run. But it seems that statement flies in the face of reports that an organization known as “One Voice” has brought in what has been called a "five-man Obama team" to defeat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Included in that five-man team is Jeremy Bird, the national field director for Obama's 2012 campaign, Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director of the Independent Media Review and Analysis, said Monday, citing a report at Haaretz. That group, Dr. Lerner added, will run the anti-Netanyahu effort out...

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) - The United States will have to negotiate with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a political transition in Syria and is exploring ways to pressure him into agreeing to talks, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told CBS News in an interview. Washington has long insisted that Assad must be replaced through a negotiated, political transition, but the rise of a common enemy, hardline militant group Islamic State, appears to have slightly softened the West's stance towards him. In the interview broadcast on Sunday, Kerry did not repeat the standard U.S. line that Assad had lost...

Maybe more than at any point in her life, even during her 2008 bid for the White House, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s past and associations are coming under intense scrutiny in mainstream press outlets. From her potentially unsecure, private email account to the Clinton Foundation’s suspect fundraising methods, Clinton’s past is apparently anything but unimpeachable. One positive thing you can say for sure about the secretary is that she takes care of her friends. Apparently, former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) wife and longtime Clinton confidant Huma Abedin was especially well cared for. According to a New York Times...

President Barack Obama is nominating a major fundraiser for his presidential campaign to be the next U.S. ambassador to Sweden. The White House says Azita Raji is Obama’s pick for the job. She’s a former investment banker who served as national vice-chair of finance for Obama’s 2012 campaign. She helped raise more than $500,000 for Obama’s campaign as a “bundler” in 2012. …

In 2012, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration abruptly stepped down from his post. According to a Foreign Policy report by Josh Rogin (now a reporter for Bloomberg), Gration was the subject of a whithering evaluation from the State Department: The impending release of a highly critical report by the State Department’s Inspector General’s office prompted the sudden resignation Friday of U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration, according to administration and congressional sources. Very soon after the Ambassador’s arrival in May 2011, he broadcast his lack of confidence in the information management staff. Because the information management office could not...

On Oct. 10, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey's spy agency Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, or MIT, has been the "driving force behind [Turkey's] efforts to supply the rebels and topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad." Consequently, Fidan "has tilted the interests of the longtime U.S. ally in ways sometimes counter to those of the U.S," the report stated. According to the WSJ article, Fidan, who was once lauded by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erodgan as "my secret-keeper," had in 2010 provided Iran with "sensitive intelligence" collected by the US and Israel. "U.S. officials believe...

housands of emails Hillary Clinton generated as secretary of state were not archived as official government records because she used a private email account to conduct State Department business, the State Department acknowledged Monday. Aides to the former secretary of state turned over 55,000 pages of emails from her personal account to the State Department in December at its request, a department official said. Clinton’s use of the personal account for work-related emails and the State Department’s effort to gain control over the information were first reported by The New York Times. Clinton did not use a State Department email...

Operatives linked to Iran tried to kill foreign diplomats, including Israelis and Americans, in at least seven countries over 13 months, the Washington Post reported. New evidence uncovered by investigators in four countries linked the assassination attempts to either Iran-backed Hezbollah militants or operatives based inside Iran, the Post reported Monday, citing U.S. and Middle Eastern security officials. The officials reportedly said that the assassination attempts stopped in early spring, when Iran began to take a softer tone with the West. Shortly after, Iranian officials formally accepted a proposal to resume negotiations with six world powers on proposals to limit...

When Barack Obama pulled the last American troops from Iraq in 2011 after shrugging off advice to keep a significant force on hand, he took credit for ending the war. Obama continued to brag about keeping his promise to get all combat troops out of the country, and during one of the 2012 presidential debate affected offense when Mitt Romney suggested that Obama had wanted to keep troops in the country. By this summer, Obama claimed that he had been powerless to keep troops in Iraq, and that the Iraqis didn’t want US combat forces on the ground in...

There are plenty of people listening to talk radio. But over the past three years, it has become increasingly difficult to make money off it. Many national advertisers have fled from such stations in recent years, seeking to avoid associating their brands with potentially controversial programming. Radio executives said the erosion of ad dollars from talk stations was driven in part by a series of organized social-media campaigns by liberal activists in early 2012 that scared away advertisers.

A second Democratic campaign has been caught mistaking a foreign ship for a U.S. Navy vessel in images meant to brag on the candidate's devotion to the military. A month after the Democratic National Convention featured Cold War-era Soviet ships on a giant screen as a former Navy admiral representing the Obama campaign praised American veterans, the Democrat running for Senate in Connecticut featured a foreign sub in a television ad promoting his efforts to create jobs at the state's sub-maker, General Dynamics' Electric Boat of Groton. Instead of Groton-made subs, the ad for Rep. Chris Murphy featured a Norwegian...

An undercover FBI agent gave campaign donations to an unnamed Bay Area politician during a yearslong undercover investigation into a Chinatown gang and alleged political corruption that culminated in the arrests of state Sen. Leland Yee and Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow earlier this year. This is according to the latest filing by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the federal case against the two men and about 20 others. Besides indicating that a politician other than Yee allegedly took money from undercover FBI agents in exchange for favors, the filing further lays out the relationship between former school board member and...

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The 27-year-old man photographed in 2009 seemed to represent hope springing from Paris’s desperate suburbs. Part of a work-insertion program, he was about to meet then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who was trying to combat high youth unemployment.... The man was Amedy Coulibaly, who was killed Friday after seizing hostages in a Jewish supermarket in Paris, an attack he claimed was in support of the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham. A close associate of Said and Chérif Kouachi, the two brothers who attacked the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo Wednesday, Coulibaly is a symbol of the huge challenges lying ahead...

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against retired Gen. David H. Petraeus for providing classified information to his former mistress while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison. The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other...