United States

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Boston on Saturday to protest a "free speech" rally featuring far-right speakers a week after a woman was killed at a Virginia white-supremacist demonstration.

President Donald Trump disbanded two high-profile business advisory councils after several chief executives quit in protest over his remarks blaming weekend violence in Virginia on anti-racism activists as well as white nationalists.

Donald Trump denounced neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan as criminals and thugs, bowing to mounting political pressure to condemn such groups explicitly after a white-nationalist rally turned deadly in Virginia.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has moved to reassure Australians the nation would not automatically be drawn into any war between North Korea and the United States.

US President Donald Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in affirmed in a telephone call that North Korea poses a growing threat to most of the world after recent intercontinental ballistic missile tests.

The US Senate confirmed former Justice Department lawyer Christopher Wray as FBI chief, nearly three months after the agency's previous director, James Comey, was fired by President Donald Trump.

North Korea fired a missile that experts said was capable of hitting Los Angeles and other US cities and the United States and South Korea responded by staging a joint missile exercise.

Technology that allows alteration of genes in a human embryo has been used for the first time in the United States, according to Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland, which carried out the research.

A Los Angeles man was arrested after federal prosecutors said he arranged to smuggle into the United States three live, highly venomous king cobra snakes hidden in potato chip canisters.