Trump warns North Korean leader ‘to behave’

"We're not going back to the shutdowns of March of 2020," says White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, as the US national average of daily coronavirus cases tops 60,000 and is rising rapidly.

The White House announced plans to hold a virtual summit for democracy in December. Leaders of the world's democracies are set to take part.

Heavy rain and flooding in provinces along North Korea's east coat have inundated wide swathes of farmland as the impoverished country organizes relief efforts.

North Korea appears to have restarted activities at its main plutonium-producing reactor in Yongbyon, the UN atomic agency, IAEA, has said in an annual report. The apparent resumption of operations comes as Pyongyang has been voicing threats to expand its nuclear arsenal amid continued tensions with the United States.

Hurricane Ida "continues to rage and ravage everything it comes in contact with" after it made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 4 storm, US President Joe Biden says during a visit to the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington. Powerful Hurricane Ida has battered the southern US state of Louisiana and plunged New Orleans into darkness, leaving at least one person dead 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

The US president had long wanted to end the 20-year US engagement in Afghanistan, but the speed of the Taliban's return to power has led to widespread criticism.

Analysts say cash-strapped Pyongyang is returning to its strategy of trying to obtain concessions from the international community by threatening nuclear proliferation.

"We will get you out. We will honor your service," vows White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki after a former interpreter to Joe Biden begged him to save him and his family in a Wall Street Journal news article. The interpreter, who helped rescue Biden in a 2008 Afghan snowstorm, is in hiding after failing to join the Kabul evacuation airlift, according to the Journal.

North Korea escapee Hiroko Saito says she and 97,000 others were deceived into relocating to the North in the 1960s with promises of "paradise on Earth." Instead, she suffered starvation, repression and loss.

Pyongyang has said it would take action if a new Indo-Pacific alliance between the US, Australia and the UK had "even the smallest negative effect" on North Korea's security.

South Korea has said the North fired an unidentified projectile as Pyongyang's UN envoy defended the rogue country's right to test weapons. North Korea is currently under UN sanctions banning weapons tests.

North Korea's ambassador to the UN tells the General Assembly that "nobody can deny" the nuclear-armed country the right to test weapons. Kim Song's comments at the world body headquarters in New York come just moments after South Korea's military said the North had fired an "unidentified projectile" into the sea off its east coast.