Google Inc rejected a request by the White House on Friday to reconsider its decision to keep online a controversial YouTube movie clip that has ignited anti-American protests in the Middle East.

The Internet company said it was censoring the video in India and Indonesia after blocking it on Wednesday in Egypt and Libya, where U.S. embassies have been stormed by protestors enraged over depiction of the Prophet Mohammad as a fraud and philanderer.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in a fiery siege on the embassy in Benghazi.

Google said was further restricting the clip to comply with local law rather than as a response to political pressure.

"We've restricted access to it in countries where it is illegal such as India and Indonesia, as well as in Libya and Egypt, given the very sensitive situations in these two countries," the company said. "This approach is entirely consistent with principles we first laid out in 2007."

White House officials had asked Google earlier on Friday to reconsider whether the video had violated YouTube's terms of service. The guidelines can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines.

Google said on Wednesday that the video was within its guidelines.

U.S. authorities said on Friday that they were investigating whether the film's producer, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 55-year old Egyptian Coptic Christian living in Southern California, had violated terms of his prison release. Basseley was convicted in 2010 for bank fraud and released from prison on probation last June.

President Barack Obama on Saturday rejected any denigration of Islam, but insisted there was no excuse for attacks on U.S. embassies as angry protests over an obscure, anti-Muslim film spread to Australia.

"I have made it clear that the United States has a profound respect for people of all faiths," Obama said in his weekly radio address.

"Yet there is never any justification for violence .... There is no excuse for attacks on our embassies and consulates,” he added.

Anti-American protests have swept the Muslim world in response to the film, which insults the Prophet Muhammad.


The death toll as a result of violence during protests in the Middle East and North Africa Friday rose from seven to nine with Tunisian officials saying four people -- rather than two as stated earlier -- died there. Three were killed by gunfire and the other died after being hit by two police cars, a senior hospital official told Reuters.

An attack on the U.S. Consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others this week.

A day after Obama led a somber ceremony marking the return of the bodies of the Americans killed in Libya, Obama acknowledged that a surge of anti-American violence in the Middle East is disturbing.

Suspected anti-Islam filmmaker questioned by Feds


The Pentagon is sending Marines to beef up security at the U.S. embassy in Sudan, following similar reinforcements to Libya and Yemen.

The Libyan attack and the U.S.-directed outrage have raised questions about Obama's handling of the so-called Arab Spring, a series of revolutions that have unseated entrenched authoritarian governments.

At least seven reported killed in regional protests over anti-Islamic video

The turbulence in the Middle East has had ripples in a tight U.S. presidential election, with Obama's Republican challenger Mitt Romney saying Obama has weakened U.S. authority around the world.

Twenty-three-year-old Lizzie Velasquez was born without any adipose tissue -- meaning she has no fat on her body.

As a result, she weighs just 58 pounds, even though she eats as many as 60 times a day, the Daily Mail reported. she has been the subject of cyberbullying and stares when she walks out in public, she recently revealed to Dr. Drew Pinsky on HLN.

Some cyberbullies even dubbed her the "ugliest woman in the world," because of her appearance due to her medical condition, she said.

"It's not easy, I will be the first to tell you it's not easy," Velasquez told Dr. Drew. "I may have this outer exterior of people saying, 'She can handle everything, she's dealt with this for so long,' and to be honest, I'm human and of course these things are going to hurt."

Back in 2010, The Telegraph reported that Velasquez consumes 5,000 to 8,000 calories a day -- eating food every 15 minutes. But because of the condition, the Texas State University in San Marcos student has never weighed much more than 60 pounds, she wrote in the description of her book that came out earlier this year, titled "Be Beautiful, Be You."
Velasquez's condition is extremely rare; she is just one of three people in the entire world to have it, she noted in her book description.

The Telegraph reported that doctors believe she may have something called Neonatal Progeroid Syndrome. It is a condition that leads to premature aging, but is different from the more common aging disorder, progeria, according to the National Institutes of Health. It is characterized by wrinkled skin, not much fat, a large head, a face that looks aged and visible veins in the scalp.

"I think the biggest things I have to deal with is constantly people staring at me as soon as I walk into a room," Velasquez told Dr. Drew. "Recently, it's been a lot of adults I've been having to deal with who will slowly walk in front of me and turn their heads, and look me up and down. So the stares are what I'm really dealing with in public right now."

But "instead of just sitting by and watching these people judge me, I'm starting to want to go up to these people and introduce myself, or give them my card, and say, 'Maybe you should stop staring and start learning.'"

  For most of five decades, it seemed no one would ever be held accountable for the murder of a 7-year-old Illinois girl snatched off a small-town street corner as she played.

Now, someone has.

Fifty-five years after Maria Ridulph vanished, her friends and family let out a deafening cheer in court Friday as a judge pronounced a former neighborhood teen -- now a 72-year-old man -- guilty of the kidnapping and murder. It was one of the oldest unsolved crimes in the U.S. to make it to trial.

The roar of approval soon gave way to loud sobs from those who knew the little girl whose body was found after a five-month search that drew national media attention and haunted people across the country. Jack McCullough, who was 17-year-old John Tessier at the time, showed no hint of emotion.

"A weight has been lifted off my shoulders," said Kathy Chapman, 63, who was playing with Maria in the snow on the night of Dec. 3, 1957, before she vanished. "Maria finally has the justice she deserves."

McCullough approached the girls as they played and won Maria's trust by talking about dolls and giving her piggyback rides. At some point after Chapman ran home to grab mittens, authorities say McCullough dragged Maria into an alley, choked her with a wire, then stabbed her in her throat and chest.

The motive? Prosecutors say McCullough was sexually attracted to the second-grader. Even in a police interview in 2011, he recalled seeing Maria around the neighborhood, saying she was as pretty as a "Barbie doll." He wasn't charged with molesting her, however.

McCullough was briefly a suspect, like more than 100 others, in the 1950s, but he had an alibi. He told investigators he had been traveling to Chicago to get a medical exam before joining the Air Force. He settled in Seattle, working as a Washington state police officer.

As the months became years, many Sycamore residents assumed the killer must have been someone passing through town -- perhaps a truck driver.

A deathbed accusation by McCullough's mother in 1994 -- passed on to police by his half-sister in 2008 -- that she knew her son killed the girl led to a chain of events that brought about his conviction.

His mother, Eileen Tessier, had lied to police canvassing the neighborhood in 1957 about her son's whereabouts, buttressing his alibi, prosecutor Julie Trevartchen said Friday.

"She knew what she did and she didn't want to die with that on her conscience," she said.

McCullough's girlfriend in the 1950s also contacted police with evidence calling his alibi into question. She had found his unused train ticket to Chicago for the day Maria disappeared.

You would be surprised how many women going through divorces tell me they knew they were making a mistake when they walked down the aisle — in more recent headlines, Kim Kardashian even shared this similar sentiment. Below are five warning signs you may want to consider before saying "I do."

1. You don't get along with his family. Many couples go through with weddings hoping all the family stuff will "just work out." Don't fall into this trap because it seldom does. In fact, issues with in-laws tend to get worse over time — especially when babies come along. If his family is causing a problem in your relationship before you're married, you may want to give serious thought to calling off your wedding.

2. You've dated for less than a year. Most people are on their best behavior for the first twelve months of a relationship. After that, people tend to let their guard down a little bit and you get to see what a person is really like. This is important because ideally when you get married, you will be spending the rest of your lives together — you will need to know if your partner is someone you can live with on a day-to-day, long-term basis after the honeymoon phase of your relationship is over.

3. You haven't come to an agreement about kids, careers and other fundamental issues. So many couples get caught up in wedding planning, that they forget to talk about the fundamental issues of sharing a life together.
Will you have kids? How many? What religion will you raise your children? Where will you live? Will one of you be a stay at home parent? How will holidays be handled? How will housework be divided?

Couples should spend at least as much time paying attention to the details of their lives together as they do to the details of their weddings. If you can't come to an agreement to these types of fundamental issues before your marriage, you should consider calling off your wedding until you reach a mutually acceptable agreement on the details of your lives together.

4. You lack conflict resolution skills. A lot of couples write off arguments before a wedding as "wedding day jitters," but the truth of the matter is that if you have horrendous arguments and fights with your partner and nothing ever seems to get resolved, you may want to consider calling off your wedding until the two of you work on your conflict resolution skills. Long-term relationships require good conflict resolution skills and the good news is that they can be learned if both couples are committed to doing so.

My sister has been engaged twice. Although if you remind her of this now, she will scoff and insist that she's only been engaged once and she married that man. However, what she has conveniently tried to forget is that once upon a time she was caught up in a relationship with Paul and she had every intention of marrying him. They were, by his definition, engaged despite my sister not having a ring, because as a hippy who shunned material things, "no diamond could express the feelings in his heart." In other words, he didn't have the money to buy one.

It wasn't just that he didn't have the money, but he didn't "need" the money. According to him, people don't need money; it wrecks havoc on the world and makes them greedy, selfish, and corrupt. It was also very easy for him to say this while he stayed home working on his "art" while my sister, the full-time college student, worked two jobs to keep them afloat. But she was "in love, " and I "just didn't understand what it was like to love an artist who was so dedicated." She was 22 at the time and clearly blinded by her artist boyfriend who, mind you, would sit on the toilet strumming away songs on his guitar about her while she showered. That's what artists do, in case you were unaware.

I met Paul once and instantly despised him. Everything about him rubbed me the wrong way. I also hated the fact that my sister, who was so consumed with supporting his dreams, was sacrificing her own in the process. We had both been raised to be very strong, independent thinkers, but something about Paul and his manipulative ways reached deep inside her and stripped away that independence. She wasn't just his puppy; she was his drone.

Everything Paul said about any topic in the world immediately became my sister's opinion, too. His stance on everything was now her stance, she gave up pursuing law because he told her the world had enough lawyers and because he was a vegetarian, he insisted she be one, too. In a matter of months, the strong-willed, stubborn sister I knew was gone; all that remained was a physical clone that had no insides to even give her a pulse. She was practically the walking dead.

While my parents admitted that she had changed a lot since meeting Paul, the consensus that helped them sleep at night was that maybe she had actually just found her true self. But I knew that wasn't her true self; that robot who only Paul owned the remote control to was not my sister.

Every time the topic of him came up, and it did often, my sister would viciously accuse me of being jealous of their love. How did she know I was jealous? Because Paul told her so. I was trying to steal her away from him, I was trying to corrupt her with mediocre ideas, I was trying to trap her with society's standards... and on and on she went just vomiting up Paul's perfectly scripted words.

When she announced that she was "engaged," it had become clear that Paul was definitely bad news. There were so many stories that didn't add up, so many parts of his past that didn't make sense and finally, by then, my parents could see what he had done to my sister.

So there she was engaged to a puppet master, without a ring and running off to get a third job so they could get married in Fiji. Of course, they were going to get married in Fiji! Getting married so far away would prevent too many guests from showing up who might interfere in Paul's manipulation tactics.

For a girl who is rich, famous and engaged to be married, Miley Cyrus, is somehow still dreaming of more.

On Sept. 13, the 19-year-old singer and actress made a series of surprising and somewhat depressing comments on Twitter.

In a series of tweets she wrote:

"ever feel like you want just.... something more. not sure what exactly... passion perhaps? sometimes i feel like i love everyone more than they love me. hatttte that feeling. Thought of the day: maybe it's not that they love you less, they just love you the most they are capable of loving."

The sad sack comments alarmed Cyrus' nearly 9 million followers, who immediately wondered if everything was all right between the singer and her fiance, Liam Hemsworth, whom she became engaged to in June.

The former Disney star responded to their worries, assuring them that was not the case:

We've become particularly fond of Cyrus' Twitter musings over the past year, because her ruminations are both fairly amusing and often enlightening. The singer's propensity to stand up for what she believes politically and personally via her Twitter account has proved rather impressive.

Her Twitter presence is appreciated, but Cyrus also seems to have a desperate need for attention, which is more than evident by her constant documentation of her ever-changing hair, alarmingly shrinking body and skimpy outfits.

Perhaps Cyrus' depressing tweets are evidence that something is truly wrong, but it's also likely that the world was simply witnessing a public teenage mood swing.

Last week, Lindsay Lohan asked President Barack Obama to lower taxes for those on Forbes' millionaires list. Now, she is telling people how to fight for their dreams, by buying a Mac computer and a Birkin bag, of course.

Lohan's latest in a string of bizarre tweets featured a snapshot from the inside of a private jet, in which she showcased her Mac computer, Birkin bag and Chanel accessories.

Gawker's Caity Weaver quipped, "You too can own a $30,000 handbag and a Macintosh personal computation device, provided you never stop fighting to live your dreams."

Lohan was picked up by a private jet after she went MIA. during the filming of "Scary Movie 5." The 26-year-old "freaked out" because the script of the film made fun of her and failed to report for work, according to the New York Post. She was allegedly threatened with a lawsuit before the private plane went to pick her up and bring her to the shoot.

“Lindsay missed every meeting she had for the film, including script reads and wardrobe meetings,” a source told the NY Post. “Then she missed her flight to Atlanta on Sunday to shoot the movie. The producers had been getting signs Friday that she was a mess, and would not be fit to work.”

Lohan's tweets about "living your dreams" and "her beautiful mommy" are just some of the puzzling messages posted by the starlet recently, who has tweeted to her followers about topics ranging from charity to Chris Brown.

Yet another twist in the production of "Innocence of Muslims," the anti-Islam film that has led to riots around the world. Gawker reports that the movie's director is Alan Roberts, a man known best for creating softcore porn films.

Robert's earlier work includes titles like "The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood," "Young Lady Chatterly" and "The Sexpert."

So what was the alleged director doing on the set of a film that would go on to inflame the masses? A number of Gawker's sources suggest Roberts had no idea that the movie would be so political in nature. As previously reported, many members of the cast and crew were duped into thinking they were making a historical film, as much of the dialogue was dubbed over after production ended.

Roberts has apparently been in hiding since the controversy erupted. VICE Magazine obtained documents which appear to link the pseudonym Alan Roberts to Robert Brownell, who was involved with pre-production purchases for "Desert Warrior" -- the working title of "Innocence of Muslims."

Earlier reports pegged Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to the film. Nakoula was thought to have used the pseudonym Sam Bacile, and has an extensive criminal record. He pleaded no contest to bank fraud charges in 2010 and sentenced to 21 months in prison and fined $790,000. Sources in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office also pegged Nakoula to a conviction on a drug case. Nakoula was found guilty of intent to manufacture methamphetamine charges. He violated probation multiple times.

As more details about the movie's production became available, more surprising information came to light. "Innocen
ce of Muslims" appears to have been filmed on a Hollywood set, and the permit for the project is tied to a Christian charity.

On Friday, Google rejected the White House's request to remove a clip of the movie from YouTube. The video was censored in India and Indonesia and blocked in Egypt and Libya.

Britain's royal family says it is suing the French magazine that published topless photos of Kate Middleton sunbathing.

Prince William and Kate Middleton have begun "legal proceedings for breach of privacy" against the magazine's publishers, the St. James Palace said in a statement Friday, after calling the publication of the photos "a grotesque and totally unjustifiable" invasion of the young couple's privacy.

The French magazine, Closer, published a spread of photos of what appears to be the Duchess of Cambridge, 30, on vacation, sunbathing, under the headline "Oh My God!" The magazine went on newsstands in France today.

The magazine defended the decision to publish the photos, saying in a statement on its website that the photos would only appear in the French, not the British edition, and were not degrading.


The pictures were reportedly taken while Middleton and Prince William, who celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary in April, enjoyed a mini four-day vacation together last week at a secluded chateau in the south of France before beginning a tour of the Far East and South Pacific to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.


The royal couple was reportedly told about the photos as they ate breakfast Friday before visiting a mosque in Malaysia. A palace source tells ABC News that at first the couple simply felt saddened, but as the day wore on the sadness turned to shock and anger and ultimately resulted in a decision to take legal action against the magazine.

"Their Royal Highnesses have been hugely saddened to learn that a French publication and a photographer have invaded their privacy in such a grotesque and totally unjustifiable manner. The incident is reminiscent of the worst excesses of the press and paparazzi during the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, and all the more upsetting to The Duke and Duchess for being so," the St. James Palace said an earlier statement Friday.

The revelation came just one day after Middleton marked an important first as a royal, delivering her first official speech overseas. The well-received speech was delivered to staff and patients at the Hospis Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur and focused on the importance of specialized medical care for seriously ill children. Middleton is a Royal Patron of East Anglia's Children's Hospices in England.

The couple, who also visited Singapore and will end their trip this weekend in the island nation of Tuvalu, has been met by cheering crowds at each spot so far on their tour. Thursday's event at the hospice was no different, with a barrier collapsing from the weight of fans reaching out to see them. Young children from a nearby school greeted Kate and William, who joined her for the visit, outside the hospice with Malaysian flags and a welcome banner. Once inside, the couple met with young patients and drew with them on clay bricks, according to reports.

Despite the topless photo revelation, today the royal couple carried on in public as if nothing had happened. At the visit to the mosque, Middleton politely removed her heels and wore a stylish scarf in accordance with Muslim tradition.

Just after William and Middleton were engaged, the prince expressed his concerns about the paparazzi and said he had given Middleton the chance to get out of the relationship if she thought the attention would overwhelm her.

"I wanted to give her a chance to see in and to back out if she needed to before it all got too much. I'm trying to learn from lessons done in the past and I just wanted to give her the best chance to settle in and to see what happens on the other side," the prince said.

Last month, nude photographs of Prince William's younger brother, Prince Harry, partying in a Las Vegas hotel surfaced online and made headlines around the world. In that case, the palace contacted the Press Complaints Commission, which advised British newspapers to not publish the pictures.