Obama: U.S. lacks strategy to train Iraqis to fight IS

ELMAU, Germany - Acknowledging military setbacks, President Barack Obama said Monday the United States still lacks a "complete strategy" for training Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State. He urged Iraq's government to allow more of the nation's Sunnis to join the campaign against the violent militants.

Nearly one year after American troops started returning to Iraq to assist local forces, Obama said the Islamic State remains "nimble, aggressive and opportunistic." He touted "significant progress" in areas where the U.S. has trained Iraqis to fight but said forces without U.S. assistance are often ill-equipped and suffer from poor morale.

IS fighters captured the key Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi last month, prompting Defense Secretary Ash Carter to lament that Iraqi troops lacked "the will to fight." That was a strikingly negative assessment of a military that has been the beneficiary of billions in U.S. assistance dating back to the war started during the administration of U.S. President George. W. Bush in 2003.

Still, Obama indicated that simply increasing the number of Americans in Iraq would not resolve the country's issues. The U.S. currently has about 3,000 troops there for train-and-assist missions.

"We've got more training capacity than we have recruits," he said at the close of a two-day Group of Seven meeting at a luxury resort tucked in the Bavarian Alps.

Judge orders last of the 'Angola 3' released

NEW ORLEANS - The last of the "Angola Three" inmates, whose decades in solitary confinement in connection with the death of a prison guard drew international condemnation and became the subject of two documentaries, was ordered released Monday.

The ruling would free Albert Woodfox, 68, after more than 40 years in solitary, which human rights experts have said constitutes torture.

U.S. District Judge James Brady of Baton Rouge, La., ordered the release of Woodfox and took the extraordinary step of barring Louisiana prosecutors from trying him for a third time.

A spokesman for the Louisiana attorney general said the state would appeal Brady's ruling to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals "to make sure this murderer stays in prison and remains fully accountable for his actions."

Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 after being charged in the death of a Louisiana State Penitentiary guard in April of that year.

Investigators probe audacious prison breakout

DANNEMORA, N.Y. - Investigators questioned prison workers and outside contractors Monday to try to find out who may have helped two killers obtain the power tools they used to escape from a maximum-security institution in an audacious, "Shawshank Redemption"-style escape.

The manhunt stretched into a third day, with law officers questioning drivers and searching trunks at checkpoints near the Clinton Correctional Facility in far northern New York, even though authorities said David Sweat and Richard Matt could be anywhere - perhaps Canada or Mexico.

With authorities warning that the men were desperate and dangerous, some residents were nervous over the escape from the 3,000-inmate prison in the middle of the small town of Dannemora, close to the Canadian border. But others figured the killers were long gone.

"We always joke about it. We're so close to the prison - that's the last place that anyone who escaped would want to be," Jessica Lashway said as she waited for the bus with her school-age children a few doors down from the hulking, fortress-like prison.

Sweat, 34, and Matt, 48, sliced through a steel wall, crawled down a catwalk, broke through a brick wall, cut their way in and out of a steam pipe and emerged through a manhole to make their escape, discovered early Saturday, authorities said.

Turkey's Erdogan loses 'cloak of invincibility'

ISTANBUL - In normal times, you can't escape President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. His voice booms from television screens, his hands wave at campaign rallies and his face smiles from billboards.

Yet as Turkey digested the surprise sinking of support for his long-dominant party, Erdogan's only reaction came in a brief written statement Monday appealing for unity - and acknowledging the sudden need to make new political friends.

"Our people's will is above everything else," said Erdogan, conceding that the new political landscape "does not allow any party the possibility to govern alone."

Photographer of 'napalm girl' returns to scene

TRANG BANG, Vietnam - He stands in the northbound lane of Vietnam's Highway 1, traffic swirling around him, horns honking. He is pointing. Right there, he says - that's where it happened. That's where the screaming children appeared. That's where I made the picture that the world couldn't forget.

Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut was 21 on that day more than half a lifetime ago when he stood on the same road, pointed his camera northeast and captured one of history's most famous images - a naked Vietnamese girl screaming and fleeing after South Vietnamese planes looking for Viet Cong insurgents attacked with napalm from the air.

On Monday, 43 years later to the day, Ut went back to document some of his Vietnam War memories with a tool from an entirely different era - a 4-ounce iPhone 5 equipped with the ability to send photos to the world in the blink of a digital eye.

- The Associated Press