An immediate investigation is needed into mounting evidence that the Israel Defense Forces launched apparently deliberate attacks against hospitals and health professionals in Gaza, which have left six medics dead, said Amnesty International as it released disturbing testimonies from doctors, nurses, and ambulance personnel working in the area.

"The harrowing descriptions by ambulance drivers and other medics of the utterly impossible situation in which they have to work, with bombs and bullets killing or injuring their colleagues as they try to save lives, paint a grim reality of life in Gaza," said Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International.

"Even more alarming is the mounting evidence that the Israeli army has targeted health facilities or professionals. Such attacks are absolutely prohibited by international law and would amount to war crimes. They only add to the already compelling argument that the situation should be referred to the International Criminal Court."

The resignation of Baroness Warsi highlights deep unrest on the Conservative benches - especially among a group of determined women MPs. Cathy Newman says David Cameron would be well advised to take heed of them

It's been just over a week since I heard the first, low rumble of discontent on Gaza eminating from the Conservative benches. Baroness Sayeeda Warsi was disheartened by the failure to do more to stand up to Israel. Margot James had written a letter to the foreign secretary. Sarah Wollaston too was unhappy.

Now, the grumblings can be contained no longer. Warsi has quit as a Foreign Office minister with a devastating tweet saying: "I can no longer support Govt policy on #Gaza."

Her resignation letter is all the more powerful for its measured and dignified language. She accuses the prime minister of presiding over a "morally indefensible" approach to the Gaza conflict, which she claims is "not in Britain's national interest and will have a long term detrimental impact on our reputation internationally and domestically".

Qaraqosh, Tal Kayf, Bartella and Karamlesh emptied of original populations and now under the control of jihadi militants

Jihadists have taken over Iraq's largest Christian town, Qaraqosh, and the surrounding areas sending tens of thousands of residents fleeing towards autonomous Kurdistan, according to officials and witnesses.

Islamic State (Isis) militants moved in overnight after the withdrawal of Kurdish peshmerga troops, who are stretched thin across several fronts in Iraq, residents said.

"I now know that the towns of Qaraqosh, Tal Kayf, Bartella and Karamlesh have been emptied of their original population and are now under the control of the militants," Joseph Thomas, the Chaldean archbishop of Kirkuk and Sulaimaniyah, told AFP.

In his on air interview with HuffPost Live, US investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald criticized the US media coverage of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, called most of the US journalists cowards and gave them the lowest grading for the reports coming from the war-torn Gaza Strip.

Greenwald said that the American coverage of the conflict is based on the principle that Israeli lives are "just inherently more valuable that the Palestinians".

"It takes probably 50 Palestinians being killed to get anywhere near the attention of, say, an elderly Israeli woman being frightened in her home and having some kind of a medical problem because of the trauma," he said.

Greenwald also said that the number of Palestinians killed during the recent military operation, almost 2,000, is approaching the number that America had lost on 9/11, but the media was "essentially calm about it."

The total number of those killed in the course of the four-week long operation in Gaza has reached 1,800 Palestinians, mostly civilians. A total of 66 Israelis and a Thai worker have died.

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro on Tuesday compared Israel's terror campaign against Palestinians in Gaza to a "disgusting form of fascism" that its ally, the United States, is unable to control.

"I think that a new and disgusting form of fascism is emerging with considerable force at this moment in human history," Castro wrote in a column in the newspaper Granma titled "Palestinian Holocaust in Gaza."

Castro's article appeared as a 72-hour truce took hold in the Gaza Strip, with Israel withdrawing occupation forces after a month of relentless attacks on mostly civilian targets that killed nearly 1,900 Palestinians, including over 400 children.

Residents of the Gaza neighborhood of Khuzaa say they were blocked from fleeing during days of intense Israeli shelling last month. Human Rights Watch says the incident appears to be a war crime.

It had been three nightmare nights. Faten Qdeih and her six children had fled Israeli shelling of their home, but were trapped by tanks and soldiers that shot at the crowd trying to escape. Wherever they went, explosions followed.

And it wasn't over.

A mortar shell rocked the building where they had taken refuge on the third day. Ms. Qdeih, bleeding from shrapnel, rushed the family into the street. Dodging shells, they ran to another building. It was hit too. Her seven-year-old son Anas dashed outside in fear just as another strike landed. Qdeih followed him and found his lifeless body.

Her daughters screamed. Dizzy, Qdeih made a heart-wrenching decision: She left her dead son behind and ran with the living. "I would rather I had died than see what I've seen," she said later.

An exile Uyghur leader has claimed that at least 2,000 ethnic minority Uyghurs may have been killed by Chinese security forces following riots last week in a restive county in China's western Xinjiang region, far more than reported by the state media.

Citing "evidence" from the ground, Rebiya Kadeer, president of the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC), accused the Chinese authorities of a cover up of what she called a "massacre" of Uyghurs in Yarkand (in Chinese, Shache) county in Xinjiang's Kashgar prefecture on July 28.

Chinese state media had at first said "dozens" of people were killed but revised upwards the death toll to 96 this week, saying the riots erupted after a "gang" of Uyghurs attacked a police station and government offices in Yarkand's Elishku township and that the authorities reacted with "a resolute crackdown to eradicate terrorists."

But Kadeer told RFA's Uyghur Service that information the WUC received from the area was "absolutely different than the accounts provided by Chinese official narrative."

"We have evidence in hand that at least 2,000 Uyghurs in the neighborhood of Elishku township have been killed by Chinese security forces on the first day [of the incident] and they 'cleaned up' the dead bodies on the second and third day during a curfew that was imposed," she said.

"We have recorded voice messages from the people in the neighborhood and written testimonies on exactly what had taken place in Elishku township of Yarkand county during this massacre," she said, adding that the victims were mainly from villages No. 14, 15 and 16 in the township.

"We can share these facts without releasing the source of the information as their security and safety is at risk," said Kadeer, who has been in exile in Washington since being released from a Chinese prison in 2005.

This year's first outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever virus Ebola started in February in the West African nation of Guinea. It then began spreading to Liberia and, for the first time, to Sierra Leone and now Nigeria. With the possible spread to England in attempts to trace 30,000 people who might have been exposed, and now an American death in Nigeria and two more Americans afflicted with it here in the US, Ebola has rapidly grown into what could become a global epidemic with a potential capacity to wipe out millions.

According to recent statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO) released just last week, at least 672 people have died out of a total of 1,201 cases so far this year in West Africa. However, seven days later the number of fatalities has jumped to 887, a spike of over 200 deaths in just the last few days.

Because the incubation period may last ten days while the infected victim may not even be aware of any illness, the virus is highly contagious. Then what begins like typical flu symptoms of fever, later vomiting as the virus spreads rapidly inside the body causing people to succumb often within days of its onset. Victims literally die from internal bleeding that in the final stages can flow out of every orifice. It has the trappings of a ghastly zombie science fiction nightmare come true.

There is no standard treatment (other than isolating the infected and quarantining those at risk). Nor is there yet an official vaccine, although Reuters just announced that as early as next month the US government will commence testing an experimental Ebola vaccine on humans after positive results were found on primates. It has been reported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) infectious disease unit and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will be running vaccine trials "as quickly as possible."

The Department of Defense and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) classify the Ebola virus as a biowarfare agent. Reports of up to 90% of humans infected die within a very short time. Therefore, it is a very real, extremely potent potential weapon of mass destruction.

On July 10, the German government demanded the immediate departure of the head of the CIA mission in Berlin. Such demands are not unusual, even between ostensible allies. What is unusual is that it should be publicly announced, and with much fanfare. What accounts for what some are already calling an "unprecedented breach" in the very close relations after 1945 between the United States and the German Federal Republic?

It only took one day for the subject to become the occasion of two major articles, one an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times and the other a major story in Germany's Der Spiegel. Both are pessimistic that the unprecedented breach can be swiftly, if ever, repaired.

The op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, written by Jacob Heilbrun, was entitled "The German-American Breakup." The word "breakup" is unequivocal, or almost. After an overview of various German commentaries, Heilbrun ends with this admonition:

"If Obama is unable to rein in spying of Germany, he may discover that he is helping to convert it from an ally into an adversary. For Obama to say Auf Wiedersehen to a longtime ally would deliver a blow to American national security that no amount of secret information could possibly justify."

If Heilbrun seems to have little hope that his viewpoint will be heard in Washington, it pales before the lead article in Der Spiegel on the same date. The long article is entitled "Germany's Choice: Will It Be America or Russia?" One section of the article is entitled "The Last Straw." It cites not someone on the left or someone who has long advocated closer relations with Russia. It cites instead a conservative advocate of the free economy and of rocksolid relations with the United States, who chairs an organization called Atlantic Bridge. In a tone of desperation, he says: "If [the latest allegations about spying] turn out to be true, it's time for this to stop." Note that the article says it's time for it to stop, not that it's time for further discussions or negotiations about it. Just stop.

Charles Arntzen is the Regents' Professor and Florence Ely Nelson Presidential Chair of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. Dr. Arntzen is known as a pioneer in the development of edible plant-based vaccines, and he has also been a key collaborator on what appears to be a promising new Ebola drug.

The Washington Post recently reported that: