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New claims for US unemployment insurance benefits jumped to a seven-month high last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Initial jobless claims rose by 10,000 to 293,000 in the week ending January 16, the highest level since early July. But claims, a sign of the pace of layoffs, have remained below 300,000 since late February 2015 as the jobs market tightens. Analysts say volatility is typical in the first weeks of the year. The four-week moving average for claims rose by 6,500 to 285,000. A year ago it was 298,250. The US economy added 2.65 million jobs in 2015, the...

Two years ago, Thumbtack -- a startup that connects consumers with local contractors -- conducted a survey to see what they thought of proposals to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10, as per President Obama's bid "to give America a raise." The survey found that that a plurality of the small businesses that used Thumbtack thought a wage hike would be good for the economy. Most thought that a minimum-wage increase would have no effect on their hiring or firing decisions. But what happens if Washington passes Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders' proposal to more than double...

... Today, Palin is standing in Ames, Iowa to put her support behind someone who cannot be trusted to protect the unborn, who has twice traded in his wives for younger models (literally), who claims to be for the “little guy” but who has been all-too-willing to use government as a hired thug to line his own pocket, and who spent years making significant donations to Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee...

Will Smith broke his silence this morning about the controversy surrounding his wife’s Oscar boycott, saying that he also won’t be attending this year’s ceremony because he believes that Hollywood is ‘going in the wrong direction’ when it comes to diversity. The 47-year-old star of Concussion sat down with ABC’s Robin Roberts on Good Morning America to share his thoughts on this year’s overwhelmingly white Academy Award nominations, and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s videotaped call to action ‘I think that diversity is the American superpower. That's why we're great,’ he told Roberts.

Big Guy visited Detroit yesterday to take another victory lap for having saved GM (and whacking bin Laden). BO visits a Detroit-based Shinola store proving he knows…well, you know.While he was in Motown BHO addressed the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan which is 70 miles northwest of Detroit (not that it matters butt Flint is ranked the 10th most liberal city in America, just behind San Francisco). President Barack Obama, in Detroit on Wednesday for his first visit to the North American International Auto Show, weighed in on the Flint water crisis at the top of his speech to...

McAllen, Texas - Illegal aliens with previous convictions for sexual crimes continue to be a regular sight for U.S. Border Patrol agents working in this border region. On Wednesday, the Rio Grande Valley Sector (RGV) of the U.S. Border Patrol confirmed to Breitbart Texas that they had arrested five criminal aliens with a history of sexual offenses including a Guatemalan man who is considered a "sexually violent predator."

LAS VEGAS — The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) insists the agency will enforce President Barack Obama’s new executive actions “on a case by case basis.”

LONDON -- A prominent Russian dissident was assassinated in London with a deadly dose of radioactive poison because he had claimed that Vladimir Putin was a pedophile, according to an independent British inquiry. The hit was "probably" carried out on the personal orders of the Russian president. The allegation -- that Putin had used his position as head of the Russian intelligence service to destroy video evidence of himself having sex with underage boys -- was "the climax" of an increasingly bitter personal feud between Alexander Litvinenko and the Russian president. Sir Robert Owen, a retired High Court judge, found...

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Wednesday she has received a federal court ruling that says the Justice Department may not invoke executive privilege to withhold documents from a congressional committee investigating the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal. But that doesn't mean the Justice Department will now give those subpoenaed documents to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Sen. Jim Lankford (R-Okla.), who previously served on the House Oversight Committee, noted that the court told Lynch's office to turn over those documents by February 2nd. ...

New York City is poised to reshape how it treats many so-called quality-of-life offenses, softening its stance toward low-level infractions like public urination and drinking alcohol in public by steering those cases away from the criminal court system. A package of eight bills to be introduced in the City Council on Monday would reduce the impact of the style of policing known as broken windows that has for two decades guided the Police Department to see minor disorder as a precursor to major crime, often alienating residents in the process.

Nowadays, we consider ourselves too sophisticated to relinquish the God of the philosophers in favor of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But thereby we miss a wonderful spiritual opportunity. One does not need academic training to achieve spiritual experience, nor does one need to be a theologian to serve the Almighty. All one needs is emuna peshuta, the kind of faith that the simple maidservant of the Midrash on this week's Torah portion modeled for us.

I'll see your Sarah Palin with a Glenn Beck. According to ABC News just a few hours after Mrs. Palin announced her support of Donald Trump, another popular conservative media figure - radio and TV host Glenn Beck - will announce his backing of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Mr. Beck's opposition to Mr. Trump is no surprise - he last week called the billionaire tycoon and Republican presidential frontrunner a "monster much, much worse" than President Obama - but he had withheld an endorsement of anyone specific until now. According to ABC News reporter Tom Llamas, Mr. Beck will...

A Muslim teacher who shielded Christian fellow passengers when their bus was attacked by Islamist militants has died in surgery to treat his bullet wound. Salah Farah was on a bus traveling through Mandera in Kenya when it was attacked by al-Shabab in December. The attackers told the Muslims and Christians to split up, but he was among Muslim passengers who refused. A bullet hit Mr. Farah and almost a month on, he died in hospital in the capital, Nairobi. ...

For months, the press and the Republican establishment alike have been expecting the Trump bubble to implode. Now that it's clear Trump isn't going anywhere, we're seeing stories about a long slog of a campaign or even a brokered convention. But there's a very real possibility that, far from those kinds of days of reckoning, Donald Trump could actually "run the table." Ironically, Trump not only could win -- he could win more decisively than any non-incumbent Republican contestant for the nomination since the dawn of the modern primary system. Let's see how that might happen. New Hampshire First, let's...

"Congress must protect our borders first. Amnesty should be done only if the border is secure and illegal immigration has stopped."

Most on the right already were cheering for Rebecca Friedrichs and her allies in their court case against the California Teachers Association. People ought not be forced to pay to join and support organizations whose politics they disagree with. But in last Sunday's Washington Post, Steven Greenhouse, the former labor reporter for the New York Times, shows how this decision could be a true watershed for conservatives. Greenhouse didn't mean to do this. He meant to make the case that a ruling for Friedrichs would be a "time bomb" for public-sector unions and their allies on the left and that...

Professor Saud Saleh - from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt - reportedly said rape is allowed between times of "legitimate war" between Muslims and their enemies. In a television interview Saleh appears to try to discourage the purchase of slaves from Asian countries for sex, claiming Allah has given Muslim men a "legitimate" way to have sexual relations with slave women.

The head of the Iranian regime's notorious Basij militia claimed Wednesday that Iran had received $1.7 billion from the U.S. in exchange for the release of imprisoned Americans, contradicting the Obama administration's denial that the settling of a decades-old legal claim amounted to a ransom. Tehran's semi-official Fars news agency quoted Basij commander Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi as saying in an address to militia members that the U.S. agreed to pay the money to buy freedom for what the news agency called "its spies held by Iran." ...

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North Carolina was the first place polling ever found Donald Trump leading the Republican Presidential race, and he just keeps getting stronger. PPP's newest poll finds him at 38% to 16% for Ted Cruz, 11% for Marco Rubio, 8% for Ben Carson, 6% each for Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush, 4% for Chris Christie, 3% each for Carly Fiorina and Rand Paul, 2% for John Kasich, and 1% for Rick Santorum. Trump's support is up 5 points from a month ago when he was at 33%. The only other candidate who's seen a real gain in their support is Huckabee,...