World briefs

SOUTH KOREA Police detained more than 50 protesters and were seeking out others yesterday after violent clashes marred the largest anti-government demonstrations in South Korea’s capital in more than seven years. Police fired tear gas and water cannons on Saturday to disperse about 70,000 people allied with labor, civic and farmers’ groups, who took to the streets to rally against conservative President Park Geun-hye.

NORTH KOREA-USA The Treasury Department has blacklisted North Korea’s ambassador to Myanmar for alleged involvement in illegal weapons trade. Treasury says Ambassador Kim Sok Chol is paid by the Korea Mining Development Trading Corp., a state-owned arms dealer and exporter of equipment related to ballistic missiles.

AFGHANISTAN A drone strike in a volatile southern province of Afghanistan bordering Pakistan has killed 12 Taliban, an official said yesterday.
India An Indian man threw acid at a 23-year-old Bulgarian woman on Friday after she reportedly spurned his marriage offer in a northern Indian city popular with foreign tourists, an official said. District Magistrate Rajmani Yadav said Darya Yurieva was hospitalized with severe eye injuries in Varanasi, a holy Hindu city on the banks of the Ganges river in Uttar Pradesh state.

SYRIA A Syrian legislator praised parts of an international plan for ending Syria’s conflict yesterday, saying elements of it are similar to those of President Bashar Assad’s government. Foreign ministers of 19 nations agreed in Vienna on Saturday to an ambitious yet incomplete plan that sets a Jan. 1 deadline for the start of negotiations between Assad’s government and opposition groups.

TURKEY President Barack Obama pledged yesterday to redouble U.S. efforts to eliminate the Islamic State group and end the Syrian civil war that has fueled its rise, as world leaders struggled to offer concrete proposals for how to escalate the fight in the wake of the extremist group’s horrifying terror spree in Paris. “The killing of innocent people, based on a twisted ideology, is an attack not just on France, not just on Turkey, but it’s an attack on the civilized world,” Obama said.

FRANCE A high-speed train undergoing a test derailed, burst into flames, split apart and plunged into a canal in northeast France, killing at least seven people and gravely injuring at least 10 others in what officials said appeared to be an accident. There were no immediate indications that Saturday’s crash into the Marne au Rhin canal had anything to do with the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris a day earlier, said spokeswoman Viviane Chevallier of the Bas-Rhin region.