• Follows four days of clashes over anti-Islam film
• Egypt's Islamist president faces tough balancing act
• United States is major aid donor to Egypt

Hundreds of riot police sealed off the area near the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Saturday and the interior minister said he would restore calm after four days of clashes between police and Egyptians incensed by a film denigrating the Prophet Mohammad.

A 35-year-old protester was killed and dozens of people were injured in clashes overnight.

The authorities closed the street leading to the embassy where the demonstrators had spent four days throwing rocks and petrol bombs at police.

The area was quieter early on Saturday. A Reuters reporter saw police push several young men into trucks. Two of the men looked bruised and one was stripped down to his underwear.

"Not so rough," shouted one as he was hustled away.

Police formed cordons on roads into Tahrir Square near the U.S. mission and plain-clothes officers wielding sticks frisked passers-by. The square, the focus of last year's popular uprising that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, was strewn with garbage and a torched vehicle was towed away.

The US is sending more spies, Marines and drones to Libya, trying to speed the search for those who killed the US ambassador and three other Americans, but the investigation is complicated by a chaotic security picture in the post-revolutionary country, and limited American and Libyan intelligence resources.

The CIA has fewer people available to send, stretched thin from tracking conflicts across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

And the Libyans have barely re-established full control of their country, much less rebuilt their intelligence service, less than a year after the overthrow of dictator Moammar Gaddafi.

The US has already deployed an FBI investigation team, trying to track al-Qaida sympathizers thought to be responsible for turning a demonstration over an anti-Islamic video into a violent, coordinated militant attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.

Ambassador Chris Stevens, and three other embassy employees were killed after a barrage of small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars tore into the consulate buildings in Benghazi on Tuesday, the 11th anniversary of 9/11, setting the buildings on fire.

President Barack Obama said in a Rose Garden statement the morning after the attack that those responsible would be brought to justice. That may not be swift. Building a clearer picture of what happened will take more time, and possibly more people, US officials said on Friday.

Intelligence officials are reviewing telephone intercepts, computer traffic and other clues gathered in the days before the attacks, and Libyan law enforcement has made some arrests. But investigators have found no evidence pointing conclusively to a particular group or to indicate the attack was planned, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, adding, "This is obviously under investigation."

It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: "The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens."

That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.

At the end of the Cold War many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation-state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, the former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation warfare and the inability of national armies to adapt to it. The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been numerous books about globalization and how it would eliminate borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time - for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.

In his sardonic 1955 novel The Quiet American, Graham Greene offered a devastating portrait of Alden Pyle, a young American covert agent in Vietnam, exuding idealist notions of democracy and Americanism while trying to cobble together a "third force" to stem the tide of the Vietnamese revolution. Unleashing mayhem upon the country's population in the process, he ultimately becomes the victim of his own political intrigues.

"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator says of Pyle.

The description seems apt as the eulogies pour in for J. Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, who was slain together with three other Americans in an armed assault on the American consulate in Benghazi Tuesday.

No one should take joy in the violent death of a 52-year-old man. But for all the tributes to his "idealism" and - in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - his commitment to "advancing America's values and interests," it is impossible to understand the demise of Stevens without recognizing that this was an individual with blood on his hands who, like the fictional Pyle, fell victim to the very forces he helped unleash.

Protests at US embassies throughout the Middle East against an anti-Islamic video are a devastating popular verdict on the policies of the United States government.

Protests have spread to at least eleven countries, including Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Iran, Morocco, Sudan, and Bangladesh.

Popular anger over the video, a political provocation by right-wing circles in the United States, has brought to the surface deep popular anger over Washington's Middle East policies. Since mass working class uprisings last year toppled US-backed dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, the Obama administration has relentlessly backed right-wing regimes against popular opposition and escalated bloody proxy wars in Libya and Syria.

British Muslims have staged a protest rally outside the US Embassy in London against the US-made film which insults Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
Some 150 demonstrators chanted anti-US slogans and burnt a US flag outside the embassy in Grosvenor Square, on Friday. The rally had been organized by Muslim cleric and former solicitor Anjem Choudary.

The protesters also carried posters reading "America the Enemy of Islam and Muslims," "Democracy and freedom on death row" and "Islam is coming."

Scotland Yard said two people were arrested at the scene.

Khartoum - Sudanese demonstrators broke into the U.S. and German embassy compounds in Khartoum and raised Islamic flags on Friday in state-backed protests against a film that insults the Prophet Mohammad, witnesses said.

Police armed with tear gas and batons had clashed with protesters for almost an hour but retreated from the front of the embassy after a police car struck a demonstrator and left him on the ground in a pool of blood.

A Reuters witness saw another person lying motionless on the ground nearby but it could not be confirmed whether either man was dead. Sudanese authorities had no immediate comment.

Witnesses said guards inside the U.S. embassy, a vast compound comprising several buildings and tiers of fences, fired warning shots after several protesters clambered over the outer security wall and hoisted a black Islamic flag above a balcony.

Earlier in the day police fired tear gas to try to scatter some 5,000 demonstrators who had surrounded the German embassy and nearby British mission. But a Reuters witness said policemen stood by when the crowd forced its way into Germany's mission.

The unrest over an amateur anti-Islam film made in America spread to Lebanon today as an angry mob set fire to a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Hardee's. One protester was killed and twenty five wounded by police who opened fire as they cracked down on the mob who turned their anger on the American fast food chains.

The KFC was set alight after the mob - many wearing face masks- ransacked the interior. The American embassy in Tunisa is also under attack with protesters setting fire to trees inside the compound. It adds to unrest in Sudan where an angry mob attacked the British and German embassies, Bangladesh where tens of thousands have taken to the streets, and India - where there are widespread protests in Muslim Kashmir.

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This sent a chill down my spine. In the midst of my interview with Tangerine Bolen, a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the NDAA's indefinite detention provisions & coordinator of StopNDAA.org, she received an email from her lawyer to inform her that the Obama administration has already appealed yesterday's historic court ruling. That court ruling found indefinite detention to be unconstitutional, and issued a permanent block of that provision. Listen to the full interview directly below.

For a man who doesn't want the ability to order the military to abduct and detain citizens - without charge or trial - it is quite odd that his administration is appealing yet again.

The bond buying will continue until employment improves.

That's the message the Federal Reserve delivered when it announced it will take new steps to boost the sluggish recovery including buying an additional $40 billion of mortgage debt every month for the foreseeable future.

"The employment situation remains a grave concern," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said at an afternoon news conference to explain the central bank's decisions.

The Fed said the fresh security purchases, which it will start on Friday, would come on top of its so-called Operation Twist program, in which it is selling short-term bonds to buy longer-term Treasury debt.

"These actions, which together will increase the committee's holdings of longer-term securities by about $85 billion each month through the end of the year, should put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and to help make broader financial conditions more accommodative," the Fed said in a statement.