Saturday from the White House South Lawn, President Barack Obama blamed "intelligence estimates" for not anticipating the speed in which ISIS would capture large sections of Iraq.

The president,who has been under harsh media criticism for likening ISIS to an Al-Qaeda JV basketball team in January said, "There is no doubt that their advance their movement over the last several of months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the the expectation of policy makers both in and outside of Iraq."


The president also made clear no troops would go into Iraq during this operation of humanitarian aid and military airstrikes on ISIS.

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

Maybe Amazon really is rattled by the whole Authors United phenomenon organized by Douglas Preston. The writers are encouraging their readers to email Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief executive, and tell him to stop holding books hostage as the company negotiates with Hachette Book Group.

Late Friday, Amazon unveiled Readers United, and encouraged e-book buyers to email the chief executive of Hachette, whose address was helpfully provided.

In introducing the group, Amazon made the same arguments it has been making in the last few weeks: e-books need to be cheaper and Hachette is robbing readers by preventing this from happening. It also provided a list of recommended journalism on the topic - a very selective list.

For readers who are not quite sure exactly what to write to Hachette, Amazon included a list of talking points. The first one is, "We have noted your illegal collusion," always an ice-breaker in these sorts of chats.

© Mohammed Saber/EPAAn Israeli army flare illuminating Gaza on 3 August.

The carnage unleashed on the Palestinians is part of a decades-old routine that depends on western support

Global revulsion at the mind-numbing carnage of Israel's onslaught on Gaza seems finally to have spurred some of the western political class to speak out. The resignation of Sayeeda Warsi, Britain's first Muslim cabinet minister, in protest against her government's "morally indefensible" stance, emboldened Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, to demand the suspension of arms export licences to Israel.

Last week it was Ed Miliband who condemned Israel's invasion and the prime minister's "silence on the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians". Even the United States administration denounced its strategic protege's "disgraceful" bombardment of a school, while Barack Obama described Palestinian suffering as " heartbreaking" - as if he had nothing to do with it.

Now that Israelis and Palestinians have arrived in Cairo to turn the ceasefire into something more long-lasting, perhaps it feels safer to take a stand. But a month of indiscriminate brutality in which 1,875 Palestinians and 67 Israelis have been killed is still presented, grotesquely, as a war of Israeli self-defence - rather than as a decades-long confrontation between occupier and occupied, in which western governments stand resolutely on the side of the occupier.

And while the overwhelming majority of Palestinian dead are civilians - 430 of them children - and 64 of the Israeli dead are soldiers, it is Hamas that is branded terrorist, rather than the Israeli armed forces armed with the most sophisticated targeting technology in the world.

It's only necessary to consider for a moment what the reaction would have been if the death toll had been the other way round to realise how loaded are the scales of western moral outrage and selective the appetite for action. And it's only by ignoring the entire history of the conflict that it can be portrayed as the result of some wearisome ancient ethnic hatred.

This week's centenary of the outbreak of the first world war should help. David Cameron claims it was fought for freedom. In reality, it was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of imperial powers to carve up territories, markets and resources.

Far from defending democracy or the rights of small nations, Britain and France ended the war divvying up the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Iraq to Palestine. A century on, we're still living with the consequences.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won the presidential election with 52 percent of the vote, according to early results. Thus, Erdogan has become the country's first popularly-elected head of state.

The High Election Board (YSK) chair, Sadi Güven, has announced Erdogan's victory in the presidential election, according to interim results.

"The chairman of the AK Party and the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has become the first president elected by the people," Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag posted on his Twitter account.

With 98.75 percent of the ballots counted, Erdogan leads with 52 percent, the Hurriyet Daily reports. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, former Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has received 38 percent of the votes. Selahattin Demirtas, head of the leftist pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party, is in third place with just 10 percent.

The presidents of Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia may hold three-party talks in Sochi on Sunday to curb the recent outbreak of violence in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in the South Caucasus, Moscow said.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan, arrived to the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Saturday for separate talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"We do not rule out such a meeting," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said when asked about three-party negotiations.

The leaders of the three states could also attend a combat SAMBO competition together in the evening on Sunday, he added.

The Israeli military uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, a new report from the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights soon will reveal. An investigative team from the non-governmental organization, based in both Geneva and the Gaza Strip, has obtained first-person testimony from several families in various locations describing their capture and use as "shields" for Israeli soldiers for hours at a time.

"The Israeli government has tried to defend its indiscriminate killing of civilians - including more than 400 children - by claiming that resistance fighters hide among the people, when actually there is no place in Gaza that is safe from the bombs and shelling," says Ramy Abdu, chair of the Euro-Mid Observer. "Instead, what we have documented is that Israeli forces have literally used Palestinian civilians as shields as they killed their neighbors."

One of these victims, Ramadan Muhammad Qadeeh, who lives in the town of Khuza'a in the southern Gaza Strip, recounted his family's harrowing ordeal in a video interview recorded by Media Town and released by Euro-Mid Aug. 9. An Israeli assault leveled much of Khuza'a, leaving whole streets flattened and once-grand mosque domes reduced to ground level. One man recalled counting 360 shell attacks in a single hour. Most of the town's 14,000 inhabitants fled.

Last month, I wrote an article highlighting the fact that President Barack Obama apparently had become so tired of being President that he decided to just hang out and socialize instead. The piece was titled, The New York Times Describes Obama - "A Restless President Weary of the Obligations of the White House..."

Apparently, Mr. Obama has found a middle ground. A perfect mix of dinner-party diplomacy with some of the world's most violent and homophobic dictators. Introducing the first ever U.S.-Africa summit, which just ran from August 4-6th. As the Daily Mail points out, President Obama had no problem smiling and hobnobbing with a cornucopia of murders and human rights abusers. If there was a Hollywood celebrity hashtag campaign of outrage protesting the event, I must have missed it.

Former Congressman Ron Paul said the US knows 'more than it is telling' about the Malaysian aircraft that crashed in eastern Ukraine last month, killing 298 people on board and seriously damaging US-Russian relations in the process.

In an effort to inject some balance of opinion, not to mention pure sanity, into the ongoing debate over what happened to Malaysian Flight MH17, Ron Paul is convinced the US government is withholding information on the catastrophe.

"The US government has grown strangely quiet on the accusation that it was Russia or her allies that brought down the Malaysian airliner with a Buk anti-aircraft missile," Paul said on his news website on Thursday.

Despite desperate calls from witnesses, Odessa fire brigades came to the scene of the notorious Trade Unions House blaze only 38 minutes after it was reported, leaked transcripts of emergency calls show. The fire claimed the lives of 48 people in May.

The leaked transcripts involve calls which local emergency services reportedly received on the evening of May 2.

The fire began after violent clashes erupted between rival rallies of anti-government protesters and radicals supporting the Maidan-imposed authorities in Kiev. Tires, a protesters' tent camp and the Trade Unions House - which had anti-Kiev activists inside - were set ablaze.

According to documents obtained by Odessa news website dumskaya.net, the first calls from activists were received at 7:31 p.m. local time.

Washington has refused to allow the UN International Court of Justice (IJC) to hear Argentina's claims that US court decisions on the country's debt have violated Argentina's sovereignty.

"We do not view the ICJ as an appropriate venue for addressing Argentina's debt issues, and we continue to urge Argentina to engage with its creditors to resolve remaining issues with bondholders," the US State Department told Reuters in an email.

The State Department sent an email with the same content to one of Argentina's leading newspapers, the Clarin.

Argentina complained against Washington's decisions on its debt to the International Court of Justice in The Hague on Thursday.