World briefs

N KOREA Key North Korean websites were back online yesterday after an hours-long shutdown that followed a U.S. vow to respond to a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures that Washington blames on Pyongyang. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council has placed N Korea’s bleak human rights situation on its agenda.

FRANCE A driver crashed his van into a crowded Christmas market in western France, injuring 11 people, and then stabbed himself several times. French authorities urged calm after the attack, the latest in a series of violent incidents across the country that they say are not connected by any terrorist motive.

USA A member of the Sinaloa drug cartel who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute and possess cocaine has been sentenced in New Hampshire to nine years in prison. Jesus Gonzalo Palazuelos Soto of Mexico was arrested in Spain in 2012. One of a group indicted in New Hampshire, he pleaded guilty in September and was sentenced yesterday.

MYANMAR Villagers refusing to leave their homes for the expansion of a Chinese-backed copper mine in northwestern Myanmar remained in a tense standoff with security forces for a second straight day

ALGIERS In a late night operation, Algeria’s army killed the leader of an Islamic State splinter group blamed for the kidnapping and beheading of a French hiker, the Ministry of Defense said yesterday. The militant, Abdelmalek Gouri, was killed together with two associates in the army ambush late Monday in the town of Isser near the city of Boumerdes, 40 km east of Algiers

MEXICO Local police in San Fernando were involved in the 2011 massacres of 193 mainly Central American migrants whose bodies were found in mass graves, according to federal prosecutors. The claim appeared in a memo sent by Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office to the National Security Archive, a Washington D.C.-based research organization that solicited the information under Mexican transparency laws. It published the memo on its website yesterday.

TUNISIA An 88-year-old political veteran is elected president of Tunisia, a country that electrified the world when it overthrew its dictator in 2011, triggering the Arab Spring uprisings. After four hard years of democratic transition, violence and religious tensions, this one-time revolution of the youth has turned to a symbol of the old regime.

UK A soccer coach accused of murdering an off-duty police officer has appeared in an English court. Christopher Spendlove was fired as assistant coach of Oklahoma City Energy, which plays in the USL PRO league, after being charged by authorities in his native Liverpool. The 30-year-old Spendlove and 28-year-old Andrew Taylor are both accused of attacking officer Neil Doyle in Liverpool city center early Friday. A post-mortem examination found that Doyle died from a fatal bleed around the brain.