North Korea fires test missile into Japanese airspace

 

A North Korean short-range missile was fired into Japanese airspace during a weapons test early Tuesday morning, representing the latest shot across the bow by Pyongyang against Washington and its allies in the Pacific.

The missile shot that penetrated Japanese airspace was reportedly one of three fired from the peninsula, according to officials in Tokyo and Seoul. While one of the missiles flew over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, it remains unclear whether the other test shots targeted the same area.

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The Pentagon confirmed Monday night U.S. time that officials from the North American Aerospace Defense Command detected a single missile shot fired from inside North Korea.

That test shot, defense officials noted, did pass through Japanese airspace before crash-landing into the Pacific Ocean. Japanese military forces stationed in and around Hokkaido were placed on high alert, in conjunction with U.S. missile defense systems based at Yokota air base.

 

Command officials “determined the missile launch from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America,” but that they were coordinating closely with their counterparts at U.S. Pacific and Strategic Commands to assess any possible threat to American allies in the region.

“We’ll take utmost efforts to protect the public,” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a statement shortly after the test shots crash landed.

“This reckless act of launching a missile that flies over our country is an unprecedented, serious and important threat,” he said.

 

The last missile launch to violate Japanese airspace took place in 2009.

The missile launch is only the latest instance of North Korea’s continued use of using its nuclear and missile programs for saber rattling, this one during the massive “Ulchi Freedom Guardian” military drills between American and South Korean forces, scheduled for Aug. 21-31.

The exercise is one of the largest joint military drills carried out on the peninsula, involving a number of the 28,000 U.S. troops based near the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, as well as their counterparts in the South Korean military.

The U.S. and South Korea pressed ahead with the military drills despite both claims by the North that the exercises are a dress rehearsal or cover for an invasion and more gentle suggestions by China that canceling or delaying them might serve as a good-faith gesture and prod the North into broader negotiations on its nuclear and missile programs.

Since command officials opted to go forward with the exercises, the North Korean regime has unveiled images of what are purportedly prototype designs for two new missile systems and threatened new rounds of nuclear weapons tests.

Earlier this month, tensions between the North and the U.S. reached a fever pitch after President Trump’s bellicose threats to rain “fire and fury” on Pyongyang, should it threaten American interests in the region. In response, Pyongyang threatened to fire long-range missiles at U.S military installations on the island of Guam.

Earlier Monday, officials at the United Nations released a letter from North Korea’s U.N. ambassador asking that the Security Council schedule an urgent discussion about the military exercises, which are adding “fuel to open fire.”

The U.S. is staging a “provocative and aggressive joint military exercise at this critical moment of the Korean peninsula, where the situation is just like a time bomb” that nobody is sure “when to blow up,” Ja Song Nam wrote in a letter Friday to the Egyptian delegation.

Egypt currently holds the rotating Security Council presidency and has the power to schedule debates.

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Jailed German nurse may have killed 86 patients – Officials

 

A German nurse serving a life sentence for murdering two of his patients is believed to have killed at least 86 people entrusted to his care, officials said, on Monday, in what they described as an imagination-defying series of crimes.

The nurse, identified as Niels Hoegel, was sentenced to life in prison in February 2015, after he confessed and a court in the northern town of Oldenburg found him guilty of administering overdoses of heart medication to some patients in an intensive care ward in Delmenhorst. He was convicted of two counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder and causing bodily harm to patients and is serving his sentence.

During his trial, the former nurse had also confessed to intentionally inducing cardiac crises in 90 of his patients, 30 of whom he said had died. That prompted officials to launch an investigation into the deaths of some 130 of Hoegel’s former patients. The results were presented Monday in Oldenburg.

At least 84 of the convicted killer’s former patients were found to have died after suffering from injections of five different forms of medication, Johan Kuehme, chief of police in Oldenburg, told reporters.

Authorities are waiting for the results of another 41 toxicology reports, the results of which could drive the number of confirmed deaths even higher, he said.

“The realisation of what we were able to learn is horrifying,” Mr Kuehme told reporters. “It defies any scope of the imagination.”

Hoegel, now 40, told the court at the time that he had enjoyed trying to revive the patients. But his efforts did not always succeed, leaving some to become his victims.

The special commission, launched in October 2014, after Hoegel’s confession, combed through evidence that included more than 500 patient files. It based its conclusions in part on toxicology tests on the remains of 134 possible victims, who were exhumed to see if they contained traces of the chemicals the nurse had confessed to using.

It found that Hoegel had administered lethal injections to patients at a hospital in Oldenburg, where he worked from 1999 to 2001.

The investigation also found that although the high number of patients dying under Hoegel’s care was noticed by other staff members in Oldenburg, no action was taken to understand why.

As suspicions began to swirl around the nurse, he was later transferred from a ward to a position in an anesthesiology unit, according to the public broadcaster NDR.

There, a doctor who worked with him at the time told Hoegel that his services were no longer wanted, because he was always forcing himself into the spotlight when trying to revive a patient, the broadcaster reported.

Nevertheless, after the nurse quit his job in Oldenburg, he was issued a recommendation that bore no indication of any concerns about his ability to carry out his duties, the broadcaster said.

In December 2002, Hoegel then took up a new job as a nurse at the hospital in Delmenhorst.

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