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Cairo — Angry protests over an anti-Islam film spread across the Muslim world Friday, with demonstrators scaling the walls of U.S. embassies in Tunisia and Sudan, torching part of a German embassy and clashing with security forces at an American fast-food restaurant that was set ablaze in northern Lebanon.

Egypt's new Islamist president went on national TV and appealed to Muslims to not attack embassies, denouncing the violence earlier this week in Libya that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador. Mohammed Morsi's first public move to restrain protesters after days of near silence appeared aimed at repairing strains with the United States over this week's violence.

Police in Cairo prevented stone-throwing demonstrators from nearing the U.S. Embassy, firing tear gas and deploying armored vehicles to push them back in a fourth day of clashes in the Egyptian capital.

The day of protests, which spread to around 20 countries,...

Would-be Portland, Oregon bomber Mohamed Osman Mohamud never came close to doing the harm he hoped to, thanks in large part to a government sting operation that fed him faulty explosives. Whether his intention to kill a sizable number of Americans on that day was natural within him before the government got involved, however, will be a major point of contention during trial, and Judge Andrew Napolitano believes Mohamud may have a case that it wasn't.

Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons has condemned the deliberate burning of a mosque in Oregon after it was linked to an alleged terror suspect. The Def Jam co-founder was horrified after police in the U.S. state confirmed that the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center in Corvallis was specifically targeted in the early hours of Sunday, November 28 morning.

One room of the facility was gutted during the blaze. The arson attack is thought to stem from the arrest on Friday of worshipper Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, who was held by police after allegedly plotting to detonate a bomb at a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in nearby Portland.

Simmons admits he was saddened by the circumstances surrounding the fire, and he's taken to his Twitter.com page to condemn the mystery arsonist. In a post on the microblogging site, he writes, "The actions of one does not justify condemning all. Burning of the mosque in Oregon is wrong.

The teenager suspected of attempting to blow up the Portland, Oregon tree-lighting ceremony this week couldn't have been less assuming, according to those who knew him.

If 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud was "absolutely committed" to detonating a van full of explosives at a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland this weekend, he sure did put up a good front in the quiet college town where he studied engineering, say friends and fellow Muslims at the mosque where he sometimes worshipped.

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The Somalia-born teenager lived a typical student life, said Mona Aly Hassanein, an alum of the school who's now teaching English in Egypt, via a Skype interview with The Daily Beast. He was funny, a good conversationalist, a clown. He was known as "Mo." And he never let on that he hated America.

"He never once said anything like that,...

A 19-year-old Somali-American was arrested Friday night in Portland, Oregon after trying to detonate a bomb built by the FBI. In a post that first appeared on Newsweek.com, Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's Mideast editor and Paris bureau chief, reports on why the incident tells us as much about the FBI as it does about al Qaeda.

Every time FBI undercover operatives seduce a dim-witted wannabe terrorist with promises of jihadi glory, there's a tendency among the civil-liberties crowd and the hate-all-government contingent to see the aspiring bomber as a victim. So the Feds took no chances with the court of public opinion when they put together their case against Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the 19-year-old Somali-American who planned to blow up a car bomb in the middle of a crowded Christmas tree-lighting celebration in Portland, Oregon, on Friday night.

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In the lead-up to the event,...