Ex-basketball star Dennis Rodman has hung out with Kim Jong Un during an improbable journey to North Korea, watching the Harlem Globetrotters with the leader and later drinking and dining on sushi with him.

Concerns have been raised about the welfare of an American journalist reportedly detained in Syria while covering the fighting there.

North Korea needs immediate food assistance after heavy rains killed scores of people and submerged swathes of farmland, the United Nations said.

Syrian president Bashar Assad has agreed to a new UN-brokered peace plan focusing on containing the most violent areas of the country, then expanding to the entire nation, international envoy Kofi Annan said.