AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EDT

By The Associated Press

Kim Jong Un: ‘Deranged’ Trump will ‘pay dearly’ for threat

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in an extraordinary and direct rebuke, called President Donald Trump “deranged” and said he will “pay dearly” for his threats, a possible indication of more powerful weapons tests on the horizon.

Hours later, North Korea’s foreign minister reportedly said that his country may be planning to test a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean to fulfil Kim’s vow to take the “highest-level” action against the United States.

Kim, in his statement, said Trump is “unfit to hold the prerogative of supreme command of a country.” He also described the U.S. president as “a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire.”

The dispatch was unusual in that it was written in the first person, albeit filtered through the North’s state media, which are part of propaganda efforts meant to glorify Kim. South Korea’s government said it was the first such direct address to the world by any North Korean leader.

Some analysts saw a clear sign that North Korea would ramp up its already brisk pace of weapons testing, which has included missiles meant to target U.S. forces throughout Asia and the U.S. mainland.

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10 Things to Know for Friday

Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about Friday:

1. KIM’S RESPONSE TO TRUMP’S SPEECH AT U.N.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is calling President Donald Trump “deranged” and says in a statement carried by the state news agency that he will “pay dearly” for his threats.

2. TRUMP ADDS ECONOMIC ACTION TO NORTH KOREA MILITARY THREATS

President Donald Trump added economic action to his fiery military threats against North Korea, authorizing stiffer new sanctions in response to the Koreans’ nuclear weapons advances.

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Powerless: Puerto Rico faces weeks without electricity

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The sky was darkening Thursday afternoon as 10-year-old Sarah Jimenez laid out three plastic buckets on her grandmother’s patio in hopes of capturing rainwater.

“We can use it to at least flush the toilets,” she told her grandmother.

A day after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, flooding towns, crushing homes and killing at least two people, millions of people on the island faced the dispiriting prospect of weeks and perhaps months without electricity. The storm knocked out the entire grid across the U.S. territory of 3.4 million, leaving many without power to light their homes, cook, pump water or run fans, air conditioners or refrigerators.

As a result, Jimenez and others hunted for gas canisters for cooking, collected rainwater or steeled themselves mentally for the hardships to come in the tropical heat. Some contemplated leaving the island.

“You cannot live here without power,” said Hector Llanos, a 78-year-old retired New York police officer who planned to leave Saturday for the U.S. mainland to live there temporarily.

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Mexico shocked by news: Girl trapped in rubble didn’t exist

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Hour after excruciating hour, Mexicans were transfixed by dramatic efforts to reach a young girl thought buried in the rubble of a school destroyed by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake. She reportedly wiggled her fingers, told rescuers her name and said there were others trapped near her. Rescue workers called for tubes, pipes and other tools to reach her.

News media, officials and volunteer rescuers all repeated the story of “Frida Sofia” with a sense of urgency that made it a national drama, drawing attention away from other rescue efforts across the quake-stricken city and leaving people in Mexico and abroad glued to their television sets.

But she never existed, Mexican navy officials now say.

“We want to emphasize that we have no knowledge about the report that emerged with the name of a girl,” navy Assistant Secretary Angel Enrique Sarmiento said Thursday. “We never had any knowledge about that report, and we do not believe — we are sure — it was not a reality.”

Sarmiento said a camera lowered into the rubble of the Enrique Rebsamen school showed blood tracks where an injured person apparently dragged himself or herself, and the only person it could be — the only one still listed as missing — was a school employee. But it was just blood tracks — no fingers wiggling, no voice, no name. Several dead people have been removed from the rubble, and it could have been their fingers rescuers thought they saw move.

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Despair rises for relatives of the missing in Mexico quake

MEXICO CITY (AP) — As painstaking attempts to reach survivors in quake-ravaged buildings across Mexico City stretched into a third day Thursday, desperation mounted among loved ones who earlier had high hopes for quick rescues and some complained they were being kept in the dark about search efforts.

And what many had clung to as the unlikely triumph of life over death was revealed to be a case of some very high-profile misinformation: A top navy official announced there were no missing children at a collapsed Mexico City school where the purported plight of a girl trapped alive in the rubble had captivated people across the nation and abroad.

President Enrique Pena Nieto’s office raised the death toll from Tuesday’s magnitude 7.1 earthquake to 273, including 137 in the capital. In a statement, it said there were also 73 deaths in Morelos state, 43 in Puebla, 13 in the State of Mexico, six in Guerrero and one in Oaxaca.

More than 2,000 were injured and more than 50 people rescued in Mexico City alone, including two women and a man pulled alive from the wreckage of a building in the city’s centre Wednesday night.

Still, frustration was growing as the rescue effort stretched into Day 3.

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US beefs up NKorea sanctions, Kim Jong Un insults Trump,

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump added economic action to his fiery military threats against North Korea on Thursday, authorizing stiffer new sanctions in response to the Koreans’ nuclear weapons advances. Its leader Kim Jong Un issued a rare statement, branding Trump as “deranged” and warning he will “pay dearly” for his threat to “totally destroy” the North if it attacks.

The exchange of super-heated rhetoric and unusually personal abuse between the adversaries will escalate tensions that have been mounting as North Korea has marched closer to achieving a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike America. The crisis has dominated the Trump’s debut at this week’s annual U.N. General Assembly meeting.

Kim’s statement, carried by North Korea’s official news agency in a dispatch from Pyongyang early Friday, responded to Trump’s combative speech days earlier where he not only issued the warning of potential obliteration for the isolated nation, but also mocked the North’s young autocrat as a “Rocket Man” on a “suicide mission.”

Kim offered choice insults of his own.

He said Trump was “unfit to hold the prerogative of supreme command of a country.” He described the president as “a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire.” He characterized Trump’s speech to the world body on Tuesday as “mentally deranged behaviour.”

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UN Peacekeepers: Congo leads world in sex abuse allegations

BUNIA, Congo (AP) — She had been orphaned by a brutal conflict, but the 14-year-old Congolese girl found refuge in a camp protected by United Nations peacekeepers.

The camp should have been safe the day she was raped. A delegation from the U.N. was paying a visit, and her grandmother had left her in charge of her siblings. That was the day, the girl says, that a Pakistani peacekeeper slipped inside their home and assaulted her in front of the other children.

But that was not the end of her story. Even though she reported the rape, the girl never got any help from the U.N. She did become pregnant, however, and had a baby.

If the U.N. sexual abuse crisis has an epicenter, it is the Congo, where the scope of the problem first emerged 13 years ago – and where promised reforms have most clearly fallen short. Of the 2,000 sexual abuse and exploitation complaints made against U.N. peacekeepers and personnel worldwide over the past 12 years, more than 700 occurred in Congo, The Associated Press found. The embattled African nation is home to the U.N.’s largest peacekeeping force, which costs a staggering $1 billion a year.

The raped teenager’s experience is grimly emblematic of the underbelly of U.N. peacekeeping, and the organization as a whole. During a yearlong investigation, the AP found that despite promising reform for more than a decade, the U.N. failed to meet many of its pledges to stop the abuse or help victims, some of whom have been lost to a sprawling bureaucracy. Cases have disappeared or been handed off to the peacekeepers’ home countries — which often do nothing with them.

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For Rohingya Muslim child refugees, too many losses to count

BALUKHALI REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh (AP) — Children make up about 60 per cent of more than 420,000 people who have poured in to Bangladesh over the last four weeks — Rohingya Muslims fleeing terrible persecution in Myanmar.

They have seen family members killed and homes set on fire. They have known fear and terror. And they have endured dangerous journeys through forests and on rickety boats.

Sometimes they’ve done it alone. UNICEF has so far counted more than 1,400 children who have crossed the border with neither parent.

Now they’ve traded the fear and terror of Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state for the chaos of refugee camps in Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of strangers live cheek by jowl in normally uninhabitable places are hardly the safe havens that nurture a childhood.

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Jimmy Kimmel transforms debate, and shows comedy’s new role

NEW YORK (AP) — If the latest Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare doesn’t work, it may become known as the Jimmy Kimmel Non-Law.

The comic’s withering attacks this week have transformed the debate over the bill (sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy) and, in the process, illustrated how thoroughly late-night talk shows have changed and become homes for potent points of view.

“Late-night has really become an important part of the civic conversation,” said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, on Thursday.

Kimmel’s monologues on Tuesday and Wednesday were deeply personal. His newborn son underwent surgery in May for a heart defect and faces two more operations. He felt a sense of personal betrayal from Cassidy, who was on the show this spring after Kimmel talked about his son’s medical problems, and felt that Cassidy lied to him about Republican health care plans. Cassidy said the comedian was misinformed.

Kimmel kept it up Thursday, saying that critics who say he’s not qualified to talk about health care are right, but he wonders why some senators aren’t listening to the various health organizations that have come out against the bill.

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Megyn Kelly hopes for a Trump-free zone with new show

NEW YORK (AP) — Megyn Kelly says she left Fox News Channel to bring more joy to her life. NBC hopes that starting Monday, she can spread some to the network and its viewers.

The former Fox News Channel star and Donald Trump foil debuts her talk show at 9 a.m. EDT, nestled into the four-hour “Today” show block and competing in most of the country with Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest’s “Live!”

Kelly hosted a Sunday-night newsmagazine this summer to middling ratings, and it returns next spring. It’s the daily talk show, in the lucrative morning market, that will ultimately determine the wisdom of NBC News’ decision to hire her. She promises that “Megyn Kelly Today,” shown live with a studio audience, will be an information-packed hour with a sense of fun.

“It will be very similar to the ‘Today’ show, but we’re going to have a lot more elbow room,” she said in an interview.

Ellen DeGeneres initiated Kelly into daytime TV this week by having her awkwardly toss pizza dough, stuff herself into a fat suit and dance with the audience; Kelly smiled and played along. It was a long way from her Fox life of pressing the future president at debates, enduring his Twitter taunts and being the ringleader for an hour of politics each weeknight.

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