N.Korea test-fires two missiles

North Korea test-fired two short-range missiles Wednesday, an unsettling reminder of the reclusive communist regime’s ability to cause instability in the region where a standoff persists over its nuclear program.

The development underscored the dangers posed by the country’s longer-range missiles and professed nuclear weapons program.

Pyongyang shocked Tokyo and other nations when it test-fired a ballistic missile over northern Japan in 1998. It has since test-fired short-range missiles many times, including one launched into the Sea of Japan in May. In 2003, North Korea test-fired short-range land-to-ship missiles at least three times during heightened tensions over its nuclear program.

Monrovia

Woman to become Liberia’s top cop

A New Jersey teacher is about to become Liberia’s first female top cop, charged with rebuilding a police force in a nation ripped apart by a quarter century of war.

Her first act as national police chief, Beatrice Munah Sieh said Wednesday, will be issuing new badges and confiscating the old ones held by rebels, who have used the IDs to impersonate police and commit acts of torture and robbery.

Sieh, who was deputy director of police operations in the late 1990s but fled the West African country fearing for her life, was appointed to the top law and order post last month by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Sieh, who was a special education teacher at a Trenton, N.J., middle school for the past six years, must still be confirmed by the Senate before taking up her duties, but she is expected win confirmation easily.

Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated former finance minister, took office in January as Africa’s first elected female head of state.

Dublin

Irish church admits priests abused kids

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, rocked for a decade by sex scandals, on Wednesday made its biggest admission yet: 102 of its Dublin priests past and present, or 3.6 percent of the total, are suspected of abusing children.

The disclosure comes a week before the government convenes a probe into how church and state authorities conspired, by negligence and design, to cover up decades of child abuse within the Dublin priesthood.

“It’s very frightening for me to see that in some of these cases, so many children were abused. It’s very hard to weigh that up against anything,” said Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, a Vatican diplomat assigned to Dublin in 2003 to address the problem in Ireland’s largest Catholic congregation.

Since his appointment, the archdiocese – home to more than 1 million Catholics – has been going over the personnel records of more than 2,800 priests who have worked in Dublin since 1940.

The conclusion: 102 are suspected of abusing children, 32 have been sued, and eight have been convicted of criminal offenses.