India monsoon flooding, South Korea space launch, WHO pandemic warning

Yahoo Finance's Akiko Fujita breaks down today's top stories from around the world.

Video transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: In our worldview today, monsoon floods have killed more than 150 people in India and Nepal. The northern state of Uttarakhand in India has been hardest hit with 48 deaths confirmed so far, while at least 77 people have died in Nepal. Both countries have been battered by torrential rain and flooding for days now, damaging roads and bridges and triggering landslides. Monsoon season typically runs from June to September, but the extreme weather has extended well into October this year. The interior minister of India says crops have been wiped out in some of the hardest hit communities, adding to the economic toll residents are already facing from the pandemic.

Well, South Korea launched its first homegrown rocket into space. But the test launch didn't exactly go as planned. The Nuri rocket launched from the Naro Space Center early Thursday evening. That went off without a hitch, but the rocket shut down about 40 to 50 seconds earlier than scheduled. That meant the test payload didn't reach the speed it needed to launch into orbit. Officials are now investigating the cause of the shutdown. The Korean Aerospace Research Institute plans to conduct five more test launches before Nuri is ready to carry real payloads regularly.

And the World Health Organization says the pandemic is expected to drag on for another year, largely because poorer countries haven't gotten the vaccines necessary a senior leader at the WHO said the health crisis could, in his words, easily drag on deep into 2022, with less than 5% of Africa's population vaccinated. He pointed to new numbers released by a group of charities, highlighting that one in seven doses promised by drugmakers in wealthy countries have actually reached developing nations. The UK alone has only met about 10% of the 100 million vaccines it promised to deliver.