Admiral: North Korea seeks mobile ICBM
WASHINGTON – North Korea’s military is taking steps to field a road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten the United States, the head of American forces in the Pacific says.
While North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hasn’t yet deployed such a missile, “he’s showing us the signs that he’s trying to get there,” said Adm. Samuel Locklear, who offered new insight into the steps the isolated nation is taking to field its KN-08 missile.
Locklear discussed North Korean developments in a wide- ranging Bloomberg Government interview Thursday that included the shift of U.S. military assets toward the Asia-Pacific region, relations with Vietnam, the search for the missing Malaysian airliner and China’s military modernization.
The missile, which isn’t operational yet and is designed to be transported on roads, threatens to change relations between the United States and a nation once feared primarily for its conventional military and fixed long-range intercontinental missiles such as the Taepo-Dong-2, Locklear said.
Fired worker killed after killing woman
OKLAHOMA CITY – A man fired from an Oklahoma food processing plant beheaded a woman with a knife and was attacking another worker when he was shot and wounded by a company official, police said Friday.
Moore Police Sgt. Jeremy Lewis said police are waiting until Alton Nolen, 30, is conscious to arrest him in Thursday’s attack and have asked the FBI to help investigate after co-workers at Vaughan Foods in the south Oklahoma City suburb told authorities that he recently started trying to convert several employees to Islam.
Nolen allegedly stabbed Colleen Hufford, 54, severing her head, Lewis said.
“Yes, she was beheaded,” Lewis told The Associated Press before a Friday news conference.
Lewis said Nolen then allegedly stabbed Traci Johnson, 43, a number of times before Mark Vaughan, a reserve sheriff’s deputy and the company’s chief operating officer, shot him.
U.S., allies launch strikes on extremists
BEIRUT – American warplanes and drones hit Islamic State group tanks, Humvees, checkpoints and bunkers in airstrikes Friday targeting the extremists in Syria and Iraq, as the U.S.-led coalition expanded.
The European countries committed to take part only in the Iraq part of the military campaign, leaving the operation in Syria to the United States and five Arab allies who began conducting airstrikes there on Tuesday. Still, the broadening of the coalition provides a welcome boost for President Barack Obama and the American-led campaign.
The U.S.-led operation aims to roll back and ultimately crush the Islamic State group, which has carved out a proto-state stretching from Syria’s northern border with Turkey to the outskirts of Baghdad.
The militants have employed brute force to achieve their goals, massacring captured Syrian and Iraqi troops, terrorizing minorities in both countries and beheading two American journalists and a British aid worker.
Denmark, Belgium and Britain all signed on as well on Friday.
Associated Press and Bloomberg news
