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NASHVILLE -A coalition of conservative evangelical leaders laid out their beliefs on human sexuality, including opposition to same-sex marriage and fluid gender identity, in a new doctrinal statement.

It's called the Nashville Statement and the national coalition says it's their response to an increasingly post-Christian, Western culture that thinks it can change God's design for humans.

Since it was released Tuesday morning, the Nashville Statement has received both praise for its clarity and has been denounced as harmful to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

More: More than 150 evangelical religious leaders sign 'Christian manifesto' on human sexuality

More: Son tells mom he's gay, she reacts in the best way.

In recent years, attitudes toward those who identify as LGBT have shifted dramatically in the U.S. The Pew Research Center says the majority of Americans think society should accept homosexuality. A 2013 survey reported that 92% of LGBT adults said society accepted them more in this decade than they had in the previous one.

Here's what we know about the Nashville Statement:

What does it say?

The Nashville Statement lists 14 beliefs, which are referred to as articles. Each of the articles includes a statement of affirmation as well as a denial. They're not new. But they cover a range of topics from a prohibition on sex outside of marriage to the connection between biological sex and gender identity.

Here's what article 10 says:

"WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.

"WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree."

You can read all 14 and the rest of the statement at the bottom of this article.

Who put it together?

The Nashville Statement is the work of the The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. The Louisville, Ky.-based group was formed in 1987.

The council's website says it has helped several religious groups, including the Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention, promote "gospel-driven gender roles."

How did the Nashville Statement get its name?

It's named after Nashville because a coalition of scholars, pastors and other leaders finalized a draft of the statement in Nashville, said Denny Burk, president of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, in an email.

The group met last week at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center during the annual conference for the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. The public policy arm of the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. hosted the coalition during their conference, which focused on parenting.

"There is a long Christian tradition of naming doctrinal statements after the places where they were drawn up: Council of Nicaea (325), Council of Constantinople (381), Council of Chalcedon (451), etc.," Burk said.

There's more recent examples too, including The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood's founding document.

Who signed the statement?

More than 150 conservative evangelicals from across the country are listed as initial signatories.

Among the signers who have been involved in national politics: James Dobson, founder of the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based Focus on the Family, and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council in the District of Columbia.

Dobson and four others - Senior Pastor Ronnie Floyd of Cross Church, which has four campuses in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri; Pastor Jack Graham of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas; President Richard Land of the Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, N.C.; televangelist James Robison, founder of Fort Worth-based Life Outreach International - also are members of President Trump's evangelical advisory board.

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention signed on, too: Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and Steve Gaines, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis.

Who doesn't like it?

The mayor of Nashville for one.

Mayor Megan Barry, who as a Metro councilwoman officiated some of the city's first same-sex marriages when they became legal in Tennessee, took issue with the statement's moniker. She called it "poorly named" in a Tuesday morning Tweet and said it "does not represent the inclusive values of the city (and) people of Nashville."

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Lauren Mesnard and Nikki von Haeger are the first same-sex couple to get married in Davidson County, just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case to overturn bans on the marriages across the nation on Friday June 26, 2015. Sam Simpkins / The Tennessean

Several other Nashvillians echoed the mayor's thoughts.

It's received opposition from across the country, including from Christian and religious leaders.

What do the signers have to say in response?

Prominent conservative author David French took issue with Barry's statement in his Wednesday column for the National Review.

French, who lives in Maury County and signed the Nashville Statement, argued that Barry's comments are a declaration of the state against the church, not merely an argument for the separation of church and state. He also points out that Barry is speaking against what some of the people in her city believe.

"Megan Barry is expected to have a position on civil rights and civil liberties, but that's a far cry from stating that Biblical orthodoxy is incompatible with the 'inclusive values' of a city that's located in the heart of the Bible Belt," French writes.
Read the statement below: Follow Holly Meyer on Twitter: @HollyAMeyer
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What is the Nashville Statement and why are people talking about it?

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CLOSE NASHVILLE -A coalition of conservative evangelical leaders laid out their beliefs on human sexuality, including opposition to same-sex marriage and fluid gender identity, in a new doctrinal statement. It's called the Nashville Statement and the national coalition says it's their response to an increasingly post-Christian, Western culture that thinks it can change God's design for humans.

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A Massachusetts hospital worker who considered winning the lottery a "pipe dream" cashed in the most valuable ticket in U.S. history Thursday, hours after her numbers came up for the $758.7 million Powerball jackpot.

"My pipe dream came true," Mavis Wanczyk, of Chicopee, said at a news conference Thursday afternoon, adding that the first thing she wants to do is "hide in my bed."

Wanczyk, 53, said she worked for Mercy Medical Center in Springfield for 32 years.

"I called them and told them I will not be coming back," she said with a laugh.

She said she and a co-worker checked their numbers at work Wednesday night after the drawing. She said she was so rattled when she realized she won she was nervous about driving. Her co-worker followed her home.

Wanczyk, who has a 31-year-old daughter and a 26-year-old son, said her good fortune began to sink in Thursday.

"I have come down from all that," she said. "I want to just be me, be alone and figure out what I want to do."

Wanczyk, who chose to take a lump sum of $480 million before taxes, bought the ticket Wednesday afternoon at a Pride market in Chicopee, 90 miles west of Boston. E arly Thursday, however, the lottery agency had said the winning ticket was sold at a convenience store outside Boston.

The initial announcement sent a flock of media to Handy Variety in Watertown. Handy Variety owner Kamaljeet Kaur took the updated news pretty well, considering she had been set to collect $50,000 for selling the big winner.

"I'm OK ... still happy," she told The Boston Globe. Her solace: The store will receive $10,000 for selling a $1 million winning ticket.

State lottery Executive Director Michael Sweeney apologized for the confusion. He blamed a transcription error when officials manually recorded the dealers that sold the big winner and two other retailers that sold $1 million tickets.

Bob Boduc, who owns the Chicopee store, said he didn't find out his store sold the ticket until he started getting calls from national networks. He said he would contribute the store's $50,000 to local charities.

Bob Bolduc, founder and owner of Pride stores, holds a news conference Aug. 24, 2017, at the Pride Station & Store in Chicopee, Mass., where the winning ticket for the Powerball was sold. (Photo: Steven Senne, AP)

"It's really pretty amazing," he said. "It could have happened anywhere in the country. It's really a stroke of luck."

The winning numbers: 6-7-16-23-26 with a Powerball of 4

The prize was the second-largest Powerball payout in history, behind a $1.58 billion payout in 2016 shared by three winners. The drawing Wednesday night snapped a string of 20 in a row without a Powerball jackpot winner.

In addition to the big winner, many more hopefuls will come away with something from the drawing. Six people won $2 million each and 34 more won $1 million. Grand prize winner aside, 9,397,723 other tickets won more than $135 million, lottery officials said.

More: You won't want to win the $700 million Powerball jackpot after reading these horror stories

More: Here's what you could buy if you won the $700 million Powerball

There are 292,201,338 possible Powerball combinations, making the odds of winning 1 in 292,201,338.00. So, at $2 a ticket, it would cost someone $584,402,676 to buy every possible combination.

The overall odds of winning any prize from one $2 ticket are 1 in 24.87.

There have been two other Powerball jackpots of at least $430 million this year. A jackpot in June reached $448 million, while another in February was worth $435 million.

The jackpot for Saturday's drawing drops to a mere $40 million. Powerball is played in 44 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Contributing: Hillard Grossman, Florida Today.
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$758M Powerball jackpot winner: 'My pipe dream came true!'

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CLOSE A Massachusetts hospital worker who considered winning the lottery a "pipe dream" cashed in the most valuable ticket in U.S. history Thursday, hours after her numbers came up for the $758.7 million Powerball jackpot. "My pipe dream came true," Mavis Wanczyk, of Chicopee, said at a news conference Thursday afternoon, adding that the first thing she wants to do is "hide in my bed."

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In no other place in America would there be a traffic jam like this.

On U.S. 90 east of Houston on Wednesday morning, hundreds of trucks, many of them towing boats, were in bumper-to-bumper traffic fording six inches of floodwater - the remnants of Tropical Storm Harvey's second swing at south Texas.

These drivers weren't fleeing the still-swirling storm. They were headed straight for it.

The last five days of serial hurricane assaults have prompted Texas volunteers to mobilize what some are describing as their own Dunkirk -the epic World War II rescue in which an ad hoc civilian armada helped ferry the British army out of France. For days, amateur navies of boaters have flocked toward the center of Harvey's wrath from all over Texas and beyond, offering fishing boats, air boats, private catamarans and pleasure craft as boats of salvation.

Todd Terrell, a team leader for one of the groups loosely organized as the "Cajun Navy," said Wednesday that his group has mobilized 763 boats and more than 1,500 volunteers operating in different parts of Texas.

"There are people who haven't had food or water for three and four days," he said. "Right now, some of the water is so bad and so high, we're bringing them supplies until we can pick them up tomorrow. It's so widespread, we are just trying to stabilize everybody and rescue tomorrow."

As Harvey's rains headed toward the Gulf Coast town of Port Arthur, so did the amateur flotilla that for the last several days has been working in and around Houston's flooded canals, rivers and fields.

But the floodwaters that seemed to cover nearly everything made Port Arthur difficult to drive into; boaters clogged the roads looking for a fully flooded area that could serve as a place to berth a boat.

Two air boat clubs from the Fort Worth area gathered in a Wal-Mart parking lot where emergency helicopters were making quick landings. The men got out of their trucks and gathered around the town's deputy police chief, Maj. Cory Cole. They didn't just come to listen. They came to take orders.

Cole directed the boaters to where a large number of residents had been stranded. "It's just so crazy down there," he said. "We can't get the trucks to get 'em."

But now, Port Arthur had its own navy.

"You see the area better than me," Cole told the boaters. "You're going to be my eyes and ears out there."

Then he sent them off. "Do what you can do, man," he said.

The boaters fanned back out to their trucks. A bright yellow fan boat painted with the words "SHO NUF" took the lead, with the rest of the boaters forming a column in their trucks down the flooded highway. When they could go no further, they began sliding their boats into the water. The big fan engines on the shallow-draft air boats made an enormous roar as they ignited, and the rain-soaked roads were transformed into canals.

It was an impromptu effort. Brad Cowling, 38, a car dealership owner from Abilene, Texas, was volunteering as a crew member on another man's boat. "We just met today in Houston," he said. "We just drove four hours down here to do rescues."

As to why, Cowling didn't think it required much explanation. "We're Texans, dude. We're ... crazy. We help each other."

Not all of them were Texans. Mike Ivancic, 48, a former Army medic, traveled from Kansas City, Mo.

"It's like an adrenaline thing," Invancic said. But it was not only that, he said. "We're all of one mind," he said. "We all want the same thing."

By afternoon, the roads were filled with rescue boats.

They gathered outside the flooded Cyprus Glen nursing home, where dozens of elderly patients had been trapped.

It was dark inside the facility, where rescuers had to slosh through flooded hallways. All over the building, patients lay in their beds in dark rooms-dry, but alone, and awaiting rescue. Some sat in wheelchairs with their feet steeped in water.

Aides and rescuers lined up more than half a dozen patients in wheelchairs at the front door, pushing them through the water toward the rescue boats queued up outside. Next, they began hauling dry mattresses to the boats so the residents would have something to rest on later. At least half a dozen patients lay waiting on gurneys.

"You ready to go?" one aide called to a patient who was sitting on the edge of her bed, her feet dangling in the water. The aide paused. "Where's your wheelchair?"

Another woman in a wheelchair shook with stress as she waited outside. She carried a small Tupperware container packed with her things, but her purse had been lost. A boater set off in search of it.

"How many people can you get?" one rescuer called to a pair of boaters. They would need to load on an emergency medical technician, he said. "We need someone to help stabilize them."

"Lift-lift-lift!" a group of six men chanted as they lifted one woman on her motorized wheelchair into a boat. Once it was done, a cheer erupted. The woman grinned, and gave one of the men a high-five.

"We're not going to charge you for this ride!" one man joked.

After a few hours, almost all the patients had been cleared. The volunteer navy outside the nursing home began to disperse and went looking for more survivors.

"I love them. It's great," said Alex Hall, 22, a local resident who volunteered to help with the rescue effort. "I didn't expect there to be this many people. Maybe in Houston."

But not in Port Arthur.

Louis Husser, a pastor from Robert, La., who joined the nursing home rescue with his 14-foot aluminum boat, said it wasn't hard to decide to come.

"I lived through Hurricane Katrina, and in some ways this is worse," he said. "It's going to take Texas a long time to come back from this. When we were in trouble 12 years ago, Texans came down to help, and so we are just loving our neighbor back."

Times staff writer Melissa Etehad contributed to this report.
matt.pearce@latimes.com Matt Pearce is a national reporter for The Times. Follow him on Twitter at @mattdpearce. More national headlines

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A 'Cajun Navy' of makeshift boats is mounting its own Dunkirk to rescue victims of Harvey

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In no other place in America would there be a traffic jam like this. On U.S. 90 east of Houston on Wednesday morning, hundreds of trucks, many of them towing boats, were in bumper-to-bumper traffic fording six inches of floodwater - the remnants of Tropical Storm Harvey's second swing at south Texas.

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Florida on Thursday put a man to death with an anesthetic never used before in a US lethal injection, carrying out its first execution in more than 18 months on an inmate convicted of two racially motivated murders.

Authorities said 53-year-old Mark Asay, the first white man executed in Florida for the killing of a black man, was pronounced dead at 6.22pm Thursday at the state prison in Starke. Asay received a three-drug injection that began with the anesthetic, etomidate.

Though approved by the Florida supreme court, etomidate has been criticized by some as being unproven in an execution. Etomidate replaced midazolam, which became harder to acquire after many drug companies began refusing to provide it for executions.

Prosecutors say Asay made racist comments in the 1987 fatal shooting of a 34-year-old black man, Robert Lee Booker. Asay also was convicted of the 1987 murder of 26-year-old Robert McDowell, who was mixed race, white and Hispanic.

Asay was asked whether he wanted to make a final statement. "No sir, I do not. Thank you," he replied.

The execution protocol began at 6.10pm. About a minute after the first drug was administered, Asay's feet jerked slightly and his mouth opened. A minute or two later he was motionless and subsequently was pronounced dead by a doctor.

The execution was Florida's first since the US supreme court halted the practice in the state after finding its method for sentencing people to death to be unconstitutional. The high court earlier Thursday had rejected Asay's final appeal without comment.

Asay was the first white man to be executed in Florida for killing a black man. At least 20 black men have been executed for killing white victims since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. A total of 92 Florida inmates had been executed previously in that time period.

Etomidate is the first of three drugs administered in Florida's new execution mixture. The etomidate is followed by rocuronium bromide, a paralytic, and finally, potassium acetate, which stops the heart. It is Florida's first time using potassium acetate too, which was used in a 2015 execution in Oklahoma by mistake, but has not been used elsewhere, a death penalty expert said.

While the state's high court has approved the use of etomidate, some experts have criticized the drug as being unproven.

State corrections officials have defended the choice, saying it has been reviewed. The corrections department refused to answer questions from the Associated Press about how it chose etomidate.

Doctors hired by Asay's attorneys raised questions about etomidate in court declarations, saying there are cases where it had caused pain along with involuntary writhing in patients.

But in its opinion allowing the drug to be used, the state's high court said earlier this month that four expert witnesses demonstrated that Asay "is at small risk of mild to moderate pain."

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Florida executes man with drug never used in lethal injection

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Florida on Thursday put a man to death with an anesthetic never used before in a US lethal injection, carrying out its first execution in more than 18 months on an inmate convicted of two racially motivated murders.

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In addition to the music, the fashion, and the competition for coveted moonwalker trophies, the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards provided a plea for an end to racism from a descendant of Robert E. Lee. Statues dedicated to the leader of the Confederate army have recently been removed from New Orleans and Charlottesville Virginia. In Charlottesville the removal of monuments resulted in violence.

"I call on all of us with privilege and power to confront racism and white supremacy head-on" - Robert Lee IV #VMAs pic.twitter.com/ko4SM9VnaU
-- MTV (@MTV) August 28, 2017

"We have made my ancestor an idol of white supremacy, racism as hate," said Robert Lee IV, who is 24, in an MTV video.

"As a pastor, it is my moral duty to speak out against racism, America's original sin. Today, I call on all of us, with privilege and power to answer God's call to confront racism and white supremacy head on."

"We can find inspiration in the Black Lives Matter movement," he continued, "the women who marched in the women's march in January, and, especially, Heather Heyer, who died who died fighting for beliefs in Charlottseville."

Lee then introduced Heyer's mother, Susan Bro, who announced the establishment of a foundation dedicated to her daughter.

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Robert E. Lee descendant denounces racism during Video Music Awards

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In addition to the music, the fashion, and the competition for coveted moonwalker trophies, the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards provided a plea for an end to racism from a descendant of Robert E. Lee. Statues dedicated to the leader of the Confederate army have recently been removed from New Orleans and Charlottesville Virginia.

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Harvey, the storm that swept into Texas as a Category 4 hurricane over the weekend, continued its relentless devastation in Houston on Monday as catastrophic flooding forced evacuations and emergency responders asked the public to donate their boats to aid in high-water rescues. We're updating here each day with photography of this event that the National Weather Service has called " unprecedented."

Monday, Aug. 28

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Harvey, the storm that swept into Texas as a Category 4 hurricane over the weekend, continued its relentless devastation in Houston on Monday as catastrophic flooding forced evacuations and emergency responders asked the public to donate their boats to aid in high-water rescues.

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When is a shoe not just a shoe?

When it is a pair of very high, needle-thin heels worn by the first lady of the United States on her way to the site of a natural disaster. Then it becomes a symbol for what many see as the disconnect between the Trump administration and reality; another example of the way in which this president and his family continue to define "appropriate" their own way; and an excuse for partisan name-calling.

Or so became apparent Tuesday morning when President Trump and his wife left the White House to fly to Texas for a briefing on the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, and Mrs. Trump appeared on the lawn in black pegged trousers, black shades, an olive green bomber jacket - and her stilettos, now a trademark. Very much the same kind of shoes, in other words, she has been wearing since long before she joined her husband on the campaign trail.

Though by the time the plane had landed Mrs. Trump looked altogether more grounded, in white sneakers and crisp white shirt, with a ponytail pulled through a black baseball cap emblazoned with the word "FLOTUS," during her time in the air the original shoes went from being mere footwear to objects of vilification thanks to social media's specific kind of alchemy.

Nothing says I'm in touch with the people like... https://t.co/ZD6cEfG0LS
- Todd Stashwick (@ToddStashwick) Aug. 29, 2017

In response to the critical reaction, Stephanie Grisham, Mrs. Trump's communications director, emailed the following statement: "It's sad that we have an active and ongoing natural disaster in Texas, and people are worried about her shoes."

That's a fair point, to a certain extent. Certainly there was a backlash to the backlash, with Chelsea Handler, for example, being attacked in turn for her tweet attacking Mrs. Trump's spikes.

Melania taking off for Houston on AF1...in stilettos.
- Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) Aug. 29, 2017

Not to mention some partisan crowing about the sneakers.

Look at that - Melania in Jeans/Sneakers - Fake News Strikes Out again. Thank you POTUS & FLOTUS for showing support to the people of TX! pic.twitter.com/vqLw727ISy
- DARSAVMO (@darsavmo) Aug. 29, 2017

But to dismiss all this as merely much ado about heels, or an example of the pettiness of our divided electorate, is to ignore the reality of the current conversation around the president - to pretend not to notice how sensitized everyone has become to his unpredictable reactions to major events, and to deny the power of the telling detail to invite applause, condemnation or misinterpretation.

It is precisely the superficial nature of clothing, the fact that garments are immediately accessible to all, that makes them the go-to stand-in for more nuanced, complicated emotions and issues.

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Melania Trump, Off to Texas, Finds Herself on Thin Heels

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When is a shoe not just a shoe? When it is a pair of very high, needle-thin heels worn by the first lady of the United States on her way to the site of a natural disaster.

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On Tuesday, the North abandoned that restraint, lobbing an intermediate-range ballistic missile at a normal angle and sending it over Hokkaido, into a spot in the Western Pacific almost 1,700 miles away. In doing so, Mr. Kim may have been trying to show that he can hit a faraway target, for the first time conducting a more realistic test of the type of missile he had threatened to use to strike near the American territory of Guam.

Indeed, Mr. Kim warned that his government could conduct more missile tests in the Pacific, North Korea's state-run news media reported on Wednesday.

While attending the launching of the missile, a Hwasong-12, on Tuesday, Mr. Kim said North Korea needed to conduct "more ballistic rocket launching drills with the Pacific as a target in the future," according to the North's official Korean Central News Agency. Mr. Kim called the test on Tuesday "a meaningful prelude to containing Guam" and "a curtain-raiser" of the North's "resolute countermeasures against" the joint military exercises that the United States and South Korea began last week.

Mr. Kim added that North Korea would continue to "watch the U.S. demeanors as already declared and decide its future action according to them." The 11-day military drills by Washington and Seoul, which North Korea has vehemently condemned as a rehearsal for war, are scheduled to end on Thursday, a potential excuse for North Korea to de-escalate.

Because of North Korea's location - squeezed between China and South Korea, with Japan to the east and southeast and Russia to the northeast - there is essentially no way that the North can test missiles on normal trajectories, as it did Tuesday, without sending them over another nation.

"If the previous launchings were for testing technologies, this one was a realistic demonstration of an intermediate-range ballistic missile capability," said Chang Young-keun, a missile expert at Korea Aerospace University near Seoul. "In this test, the North's missile actually flew at a realistic angle and trajectory."

North Korea rattled the Trump administration last month by launching two intercontinental ballistic missiles, the second of which demonstrated the potential to reach the contiguous United States. But officials and analysts doubted that the country had mastered the technology needed to protect a nuclear warhead from intense heat and friction as it re-entered the atmosphere from space.

Tuesday's test might have been most important for the development of more dependable intermediate-range missiles. But experts say it could also provide information for the crucial re-entry technology needed for a warhead on an intermediate-range missile to survive the fiery plunge back into the atmosphere.

It is less clear whether that information could help the North pursue the especially difficult goal of developing the re-entry technology needed to build a nuclear-tipped longer-range missile that could hit the mainland United States. Those warheads would re-enter more quickly, producing much higher heats.

The Hwasong-12 is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the North says is designed to carry a large nuclear warhead. After the launch on Tuesday, the Japanese government sent a text alert to its people, advising them to take protective cover in case the test went wrong.

Japan said it did not try to shoot the missile down because it did not detect a threat to its territory. But analysts said the test nevertheless underlined some uncomfortable questions about the possibility of defending against such missiles.

The allies could do little more than track the missile Tuesday as it arched over Hokkaido and splashed into the northern Pacific. Analysts said Japan could have tried to shoot it down if its Aegis destroyers, which are armed with SM3 Block I interceptor missiles, happened to be in waters between North Korea and Japan. But because the SM3 is slower than the Hwasong-12, they would have had to make the attempt before the missile passed over the ships.

And one analyst noted that Japan could have been caught off guard entirely had the destroyers been elsewhere - for example, if Japan had ordered them south in response to North Korea's threat to fire missiles into the waters around Guam.

"After distracting attention toward Guam, North Korea fired the missile over Japan," said Shin Jong-woo, a defense analyst at Korea Defense Forum, a Seoul-based network of military experts. "By doing so, it reduced the chance of its missile being shot down, and at the same time demonstrated its ability to hit a target as far away as Guam without actually launching the missile in its direction."

The United States and Japan were wrapping up a two-week joint military exercise around Hokkaido, which culminated in the demonstration of the PAC-3 missile-defense system on Tuesday. Kim Dong-yub, a defense analyst at Kyungnam University's Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul, noted that the missile flew too high for the PAC-3 to reach.

"I don't think it was an empty threat when North Korea warned it would fire the Hwasong-12 around Guam," Mr. Kim said. "The test today was the North Korean way of saying that it would go ahead with it and would be able to do it if the United States kept dragging its feet in coming to the negotiating table under the North Korean terms."

Paul Burton, a Singapore-based director for Jane's by IHS Markit, a defense analysis firm, noted that the North launched its missile Tuesday as the Trump administration was dealing with a calamitous storm in Houston. "The timing of the test shows that the North Korean regime has an acute sense of how to cause maximum impact with its accelerated missile testing program," Mr. Burton said.

South Korea's president, Moon Jae-in, responded to the launch by ordering his military to "demonstrate a strong retaliatory capability against North Korea." Four F-15K fighter jets soon dropped two bombs each at a domestic bombing range.

Even as North Korea continues to test missiles, South Korean intelligence officials told lawmakers in Seoul this week that the North was technically prepared to conduct its sixth underground nuclear test. Officials have speculated that the North might do so on Sept. 9, a North Korean holiday called the Day of the Foundation of the Republic, or that it might launch another missile on that date. The North conducted its last nuclear test on Sept. 9.

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U.N. Condemns North Korea's Latest Missile Tests, but Takes No Action

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On Tuesday, the North abandoned that restraint, lobbing an intermediate-range ballistic missile at a normal angle and sending it over Hokkaido, into a spot in the Western Pacific almost 1,700 miles away.

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A German police investigation has found evidence that a former nurse murdered at least 86 people in his care.

"The realization of what we were able to learn is horrifying," Johan Kühme, chief of police in the northern German city of Oldenburg told news outlets, including the The New York Times. "It defies any scope of the imagination."

The nurse, Niels Högel, was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 on two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder. But during his trial, he said he had killed many others.

Högel admitted he had intentionally induced cardiac arrest in 90 of his patients by administering overdoses of heart medication. He said he enjoyed trying to revive his patients, the Times reports, but sometimes failed.

These admissions led police to launch an investigation into other times patients had died in his care.

"The special commission, launched in October 2014, combed through evidence that included more than 500 patient files," according to the Times. "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."

Police await toxicology reports in 41 cases. The actual number of those he killed may be greater still and never known, as the bodies of some of his former patients were cremated and could not be exhumed.

"The death toll is unique in the history of the German republic," said the chief police investigator, Arne Schmidt, according to The Guardian. There was "evidence for at least 90 murders, and at least as many [suspected] cases again that can no longer be proven," he said, adding that Högel had chosen his victims at random.

Högel's career as a nurse was ghastly throughout, as the Guardian reports:

"Police believe that the man whom the Bild newspaper is calling 'Germany's worst serial killer' carried out his first murder in February 2000, when he was still employed at a clinic in Oldenburg in Lower Saxony, close to the Dutch border.

"After killing at least another 35 patients, he moved in 2002 to a hospital in Delmenhorst near the north-western city of Bremen, where he resumed his grisly practice within a week of starting his new job.

"Högel would inject patients' veins with a cardiovascular drug in order to orchestrate medical emergencies that would require him to step in and resuscitate them in the hospital's intensive care unit.

"The nurse used five different drugs including ajmaline, sotalol, lidocaine, amiodarone and calcium chloride, police said on Monday. Overdoses can lead to life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia and a drop in blood pressure, causing a rapid decline in an already ill patient."

Also troubling is that Högel's lethal practices went unreported by fellow hospital staff. Though others noticed that the number of deaths in the intensive care unit at Delmenhorst doubled during his time there, nothing was done.

In 2005, a colleague saw Högel injecting a patient with ajmaline, but management didn't do anything about it for two days, during which Högel killed his final patient. Six employees at the hospital at Delmenhorst are now charged with negligent manslaughter for their failure to act. An investigation into neglect at Oldenburg is ongoing.

"The murders could have been prevented," Kühme told the Guardian, noting that Högel was given a clean reference which allowed him to move to the Delmenhorst hospital and continue killing people. "People at the clinic in Oldenburg knew of the abnormalities."

Though Högel is already serving a life sentence, he is expected to be tried on additional charges based on the investigation's findings.

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German Nurse Suspected Of Murdering At Least 86 Patients In His Care

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A German police investigation has found evidence that a former nurse murdered at least 86 people in his care. "The realization of what we were able to learn is horrifying," Johan Kühme, chief of police in the northern German city of Oldenburg told news outlets, including the The New York Times.