Europe security in focus:

America

Obama

Boosting Europe’s shaky ability to thwart jihadist attacks will be the focus at a nuclear security summit hosted by President Barack Obama in Washington Friday, amid concerns the Islamic State group is trying to get a “dirty bomb.”

The White House is worried that attacks in Paris and Brussels have exposed the inability of European intelligence agencies to deal with fighters returning from the Middle East.

On Thursday Obama spoke of the need to increase trans-Atlantic cooperation aimed at “rooting out foreign fighters, identifying potential attacks, cutting off financing.”

Fears of attack were given a nuclear edge with the discovery of 10 hours of surveillance footage recorded by Islamic State operatives of a senior Belgian nuclear scientist.

“We have had good progress in ramping up airstrikes and pressure on ISIL in Iraq and Syria,” Obama foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes said, using an alternate acronym for the IS group.

“We also believe it’s critically important that we’re working to disrupt plots, given ISIL efforts to move to more external plotting in Europe and other parts of the world.”

“I think a focal point of the discussion tomorrow is going to be on what are we doing around intelligence and information sharing? How can we make sure that that’s happening as fast as possible? How can we make sure that we are aligning our respective protocols, so that we’re able to better monitor foreign fighters who may be leaving Iraq and Syria, and trying to come not just to Europe but to other countries?”

The summit opened Thursday with Obama trying to forge consensus among East Asian leaders on how to respond to Pyongyang’s recent nuclear and missile tests, which he said “escalate tensions” in the region.

In January, North Korea detonated a nuclear device and a month later launched a long-range rocket, the latest in a series of banned tests.

Obama met with the leaders of Japan and South Korea, and separately with