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A priest was killed and another person was seriously wounded in an attack on a church in a northern French town, police said Tuesday.

Two men entered the church in Saint Etienne du Rouvray in Normandy and took five hostages, including the priest, who was found with his throat cut, police said.

Police surrounded the church and shot the two men as they exited the building, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said.

The assault is being treated as a terror attack by investigators, said Paris prosecutors in a statement.

France’s President Francois Hollande and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve are on their way to the small town where the attack took place, government officials said.

The attack comes less than two weeks after the killing of 84 people assembled on France’s Bastille day in Nice on the French Riviera.

This is a developing story and will be updated shortly.

Terror militia Islamic State on Monday claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in southern Germany—the latest in a string of attacks that have shattered the country’s sense of calm and stoked tensions over accepting migrants.

The Sunday night blast that injured 15 people outside a concert venue in the Bavarian town of Ansbach was the second attack to be claimed by Islamic State here in a week and the first jihadist suicide bombing in the country.

The bomber was a 27-year-old Syrian asylum applicant identified by authorities as Mohammad D., who had been in Germany for about two years but was facing deportation. Authorities said he had pledged allegiance to Islamic State’s leader in a video found on his smartphone.
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The revelations focused more attention on the security implications of the more than a million refugees and migrants who arrived in the last year-and-a-half, and raised pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel to ramp up domestic security.

“It is clear that with these attacks in quick succession, the worries and fears in our population will grow,” said Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, whose conservative Christian Social Union is allied with Ms. Merkel but has called on her to limit the number of asylum applicants.

The run of violence began July 18 when a teenager who had registered as an Afghan refugee injured five people with an ax in Würzburg, an attack also claimed by Islamic State.

On Friday, an 18-year-old Iranian-German who officials say was obsessed with mass shootings went on a shooting spree in Munich, killing nine. And on Sunday, a 21-year-old Syrian asylum applicant killed a 45-year-old Polish woman with a large knife after what police suspected was a personal dispute.

Investigators said the Ansbach attacker, whose surname was withheld under German privacy law, came from Aleppo in Syria and appeared to have war wounds, suggesting he had military experience.

SAGAMIHARA, Japan—A man broke into a residence for disabled adults outside Tokyo early Tuesday morning and stabbed to death 19 people, authorities said, one of the worst mass murders in recent decades in a country known for its low crime rate.Officials at the facility described the 26-year-old suspect, Satoshi Uematsu, as a troubled former employee who quit in February of this year after being warned to stop making abusive comments about the severely disabled people living thereThey said Mr. Uematsu broke a window in the middle of the night to gain entrance to the home, then tied up some of the caregivers before attacking dozens of residents with a knife.

Top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Mr. Uematsu surrendered himself to police shortly afterward and was arrested. Footage from a security camera aired on local television showed a person who appeared to be Mr. Uematsu returning to his car parked outside the home at about 2:50 a.m. and driving off. Public broadcaster NHK said Mr. Uematsu drove to a nearby police station to turn himself in.

Mr. Uematsu appears to have given a warning that he planned to kill disabled people.

A Japanese parliament official said a man believed to be Mr. Uematsu visited Parliament on Feb. 15 and hand-delivered a letter addressed to the lower-house speaker. The official declined to reveal its contents, but Kyodo News quoted Mr. Uematsu as writing in the letter that he wanted to carry out “euthanasia” on severely disabled people “to revitalize the global economy and prevent World War III.”

At last count, members of the European Union spent more than $200 billion a year on defense, fielded more than 2,000 jet fighters and 500 naval ships, and employed some 1.4 million military personnel. More than a million police officers also walk Europe’s streets. Yet in the face of an Islamist menace the Continent seems helpless. Is it?

Was France helpless in May 1940?

Let’s stipulate that a van barreling down a seaside promenade isn’t a Panzer division, and that a few thousand ISIS fighters scattered from Mosul to Marseilles aren’t another Wehrmacht. But as in France in 1940, Europe today displays the same combination of doctrinal rigidity and loss of will that allowed an Allied army of 144 divisions to be routed by the Germans in six weeks. The Maginot Line of “European values” won’t prevail over people who recognize none of those values.
So much was made clear by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who remarked after the Nice attack that “France is going to have to live with terrorism.” This may have been intended as a statement of fact but it came across as an admission that his government isn’t about to rally the public to a campaign of blood, toil, tears and sweat against ISIS—another premature capitulation in a country that has known them before.

Mr. Valls was later booed at a memorial service for the Nice victims. It would be heartening to think this was because he and his boss, President François Hollande, have failed to forge a strategy to destroy ISIS. But the public’s objection was that there hadn’t been enough cops along the Promenade des Anglais to stop the attack. In soccer terms, it’s a complaint about the failure of defense, not the lack of a proper offense.

“The United States is full of anglicized German names, from Smith to Steinway, from Miller to Schwartz. The reason: integration was made easier. … I think that German citizens of foreign origin should also have this possibility.” — Ruprecht Polenz, former secretary general of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union.

Non-Muslim immigrants generally choose traditional German names for their children to facilitate their integration into German society. By contrast, Muslim immigrants almost invariably choose traditional Arabic or Turkish names, presumably to prevent their integration into German society. A 2006 study found that more than 90% of Turkish parents give their German-born children Turkish first names.

A 2016 study found that 32% of ethnic Turks in Germany agree that “Muslims should strive to return to a societal order such as that in the time of Mohammed.” More than one-third believe that “only Islam is able to solve the problems of our times.” One-fifth agree that “the threat which the West poses to Islam justifies violence.” One-quarter believe that “Muslims should not shake the hand of a member of the opposite sex.”

Muslim migrants in Germany who feel discriminated against should be given the right to change their legal names to Christian-sounding ones, according to a senior German politician.

The latest innovation in German multiculturalism is being championed by Ruprecht Polenz, a former secretary general of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He believes the German law which regulates name changes (Namensrecht) should be amended to make it easier for men named Mohammed to become Martin and women named Aisha to become Andrea.

German law generally does not allow foreigners to change their names to German ones, and German courts rarely approve such petitions. By custom and practice, German names are only for Germans.

According to Polenz, who served as a member of parliament for nearly two decades, the law in its current form is “ignorant” and should be changed:

“An ignorant law: the United States is full of anglicized German names, from Smith to Steinway, from Miller to Schwartz. The reason: integration was made easier. It no longer appeared as though a family was not from the USA. I think that German citizens of foreign origin should also have this possibility.”