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Amir Meshal has a fascinating history. He's originally from New Jersey, but back in 2007 he was detained and interrogated by the FBI in Kenya after escaping from Somalia. Somehow, his travels brought him to Minnesota, and to a mosque in Bloomington, which kicked him out this summer. Friday prayers bring hundreds to the Al-Farooq Youth and Family Center, which is perhaps the largest mosque in the Twin Cities. But not everyone is welcome -- not after Meshal began attending prayer and hanging out earlier this year. In June, the center called police and had Meshal, 31, removed and ticketed...

The campaign to separate Scotland from the rest of the UK is in the lead for the first time ahead of the independence referendum later this month, according to a new poll. A YouGov survey found that the pro-independence campaign, led by the Scottish first minister Alex Salmond, had a two point lead of 51 per cent over the unionists’ 49 per cent. The poll for the Sunday Times is the latest evidence of a dramatic surge for the Yes campaign, which has seen the campaign recover from a 22 point deficit in just one month.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status.

Gazprombank GPB (OJSC), a Russian bank targeted with sanctions by President Obama over the Ukraine crisis, has hired two former U.S. senators to lobby against those sanctions, according to a new disclosure filed with the Senate. Gazprombank is controlled by Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom, the country’s largest gas producer; it supplies about a third of Europe’s natural gas. In a filing submitted Friday and effective that day, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and former Senator John Breaux, D-La., are listed as the main lobbyists under the Gazprombank account for the firm Squire Patton Boggs, lobbying on “banking...

Mike Brown.’s Instagram account was located. Brown describes himself: “My Hands My Ammunition” “I’m out here to claim what’s mines” And he did. Brown was caught on camera robbing a local convenience store before his death.

A U.S. security team in Benghazi was held back from immediately responding to the attack on the American diplomatic mission on orders of the top CIA officer there, three of those involved told Fox News’ Bret Baier. Their account gives a dramatic new turn to what the Obama administration and its allies would like to dismiss as an “old story” – the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Speaking out publicly for the first time, the three were security operators at the secret CIA annex in Benghazi – in effect, the...

Job growth cooled in August, with nonfarm payrolls adding just 142,000 even as the unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent, according to the Labor Department. The fall in the headline rate came as labor-force participation fell, declining to 62.8 percent, or 64,000 workers, tying the 2014 bottom and remaining at the lowest level since 1978. Economists expected payroll growth of 225,000 in August following July's upwardly revised 212,000. The unemployment rate was forecast to drop to 6.1 percent from 6.2 percent. August's number are a notoriously volatile set, with 2013's initially reported 169,000 ultimately revised up to 238,000. In 2011,...

Cuba’s communist-led intelligence services are aggressively recruiting leftist American academics and university professors as spies and influence agents, according to an internal FBI report published this week.Cuban intelligence services “have perfected the work of placing agents, that includes aggressively targeting U.S. universities under the assumption that a percentage of students will eventually move on to positions within the U.S. government that can provide access to information of use to the [Cuban intelligence service],” the five-page unclassified FBI report says. It notes that the Cubans “devote a significant amount of resources to targeting and exploiting U.S. academia.”“Academia has been and remains...

MINNEAPOLIS — Two former employees of the Minneapolis VA Medical Center allege they were pressured to falsify patient appointment dates and medical records to hide delays, a television station reported. In a report that aired Wednesday night, the ex-employees told KARE-TV that in some cases, they were told to falsify medical records by writing that patients had declined follow-up treatments when, in reality, they say the veterans had never been contacted. The former VA workers fear that patients' lives may be at risk because they say some cases involved suspected colon cancer. "Some of them were getting missed altogether," said...

James Vanderbilt's Truth, the high-profile movie chronicling the scandal that derailed Dan Rather's career, has gotten the greenlight to begin shooting this fall. Brett Ratner's RatPac Entertainment and Echo Lake Entertainment will finance the movie, starring Robert Redford as the iconic news anchor and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Rather's producer. At the same time, FilmNation has come aboard to represent international rights and will pre-sell the project to foreign buyers at the Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night (based on the cast, it's sure to whet appetites). Mythology Entertainment is the driving force behind Truth, which was...

Democrat Chad Taylor must stay on the ballot for U.S. Senate in Kansas, Secretary of State Kris Kobach said Thursday afternoon. Kobach said Taylor submitted a letter Wednesday to withdraw from the race but did not declare he was incapable of serving, which is also required. The Kansas Republican Party had questioned whether Taylor, the Shawnee County district attorney, could withdraw. Kansas law means “we now have no choice” but to put Taylor’s name on the ballot, Kobach told reporters at an afternoon news conference. “The law is the law.” Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/election/article1504835.html#storylink=cpy

Three senior members of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) - including an aide to its leader - were killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq, a senior Iraqi security official told NBC News Thursday. The strike on the ISIS stronghold of Mosul killed Abu Hajar Al-Sufi, an aide to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as an explosives operative and the military leader of nearby Tel Afar, the source said on condition of anonymity. Al Arabiya cited the Iraqi Defense Ministry saying Baghdadi's aide had been killed.

Since early Thursday morning, United States military planes have begun shelling the outskirts of Mosul, a Sunni-majority city in northern Iraq and military post of Islamic State (IS) militants. According to a source from the Peshmerga forces stationed near Mosul, US warplanes began bombing the hideouts of IS militants in Mosul and the surrounding areas in the ill-lit hours of dawn. The current shelling began in the neighborhoods of Somar and Intisari, which are on the outskirt of Mosul. US planes also attacked high buildings in the city that have been used as hideouts and supply storage by the Jihadi...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Wednesday said that the Obama administration should make defeating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) its top priority. "ISIS is growing in strength. It has money, it has organization, it has the capacity to inflict real damage. So when we think about a response we have to think about how to destroy that," Warren told Yahoo's Katie Couric. Warren agreed that "time is of the essence." "We need to be working now, full-speed ahead, with other countries, to destroy ISIS. That should be our No. 1 priority," she said in a wide-ranging interview...

The French government has announced that planned deliveries of two Mistral warships to Russia have been placed on hold. The first delivery was scheduled for October. After a meeting of the French defense committee on Wednesday, Paris announced that the deliveries would not yet take place given the current unrest in eastern Ukraine. "The President of the Republic declared that, despite the prospect of a ceasefire which still remains to be confirmed and implemented, the conditions for France to deliver the first warship are not to date in place," a statement from the office of French President Francois Hollande read.

(Reuters) - As fighting between the army and Russian-backed rebels rages in eastern Ukraine, preparations are under way near its western border for a joint military exercise this month with more than 1,000 troops from the United States and its allies. The decision to go ahead with the Rapid Trident exercise Sept. 16-26 is seen as a sign of the commitment of NATO states to support non-NATO member Ukraine while stopping well short of military intervention in the conflict. The annual exercise, to take place in the Yavoriv training center near Ukraine's border with Poland, was initially scheduled for July,...

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis has sought to encourage Iraq's beleaguered Christians under threat from Islamic militants, saying they are the "heart" of the church and that the church is proud of them. In comments translated into Arabic during his weekly Wednesday general audience, Francis said the Catholic Church is like a mother, and like any mother will "defend her defenseless and persecuted children." Francis has said it was legitimate to use force to stop the militants..."The church suffers with you and is proud of you."

BEFORE he was named as a key suspect in the brutal beheading of two western journalists, the man who has become known as Jihad John was an aspiring rapper with a dark message. Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, who released music videos under the name L Jinny and even had a few songs played on BBC radio, has gained notoriety for darker reasons other than his music. The British man has gained worldwide attention after he was named as the chief suspect in the gruesome beheading of American journalist James Foley. Police and intelligence officials told Britain’s Sunday Times that “MI5 and...

ANCHORAGE—A controversial ad from the campaign to re-elect Democratic Sen. Mark Begich, which attacked his Republican rival Dan Sullivan’s record as Alaska’s attorney general, has been pulled from the airwaves. But an argument over the ad’s merits continued Tuesday. The ad started running early Friday and claimed that a list of sex offenders flashing across the screen had received inappropriately light sentences when Sullivan was attorney general. It made reference to one defendant in particular — though not by name — who is charged with murdering two elderly Anchorage residents and sexually assaulting a 2-year-old girl. In the ad, a...

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said that President Barack Obama should “continue to follow the law” in order to help “create an environment where you could do immigration reform in a responsible way next year” on Tuesday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show.”