Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

1-million protest against French law

PARIS - Rioting youths swarmed across a downtown Paris plaza, ripping up street signs and park benches and hurling stones at police at the end of the largest of massive but mostly peaceful protests Tuesday across France against a new jobs law.

Riot police fired tear gas and rubber pellets and made repeated charges into the crowds of several hundred youths at Place d'Italie on the Left Bank, carrying away those they arrested.

The clashes came as more than 1-million people poured into the streets across the country, including 84,000 in Paris, according to police. Union organizers put the figure in the capital at 700,000 - and 3-million nationwide.

As before, the Paris violence appeared to involve youths from tougher suburbs and extremists from both the far right and far left.

"It is giving them too much credit to ascribe an ideology to them. These are just hoodlums," Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said.

Police said they took 383 people into custody in Paris, where 34 people were injured - including four police officers - and another 243 elsewhere in France. The violence marred another day of protests against a law that would make it easier to fire young workers.

There were 268 marches nationwide, according to police. It was the second Tuesday that unions and student groups had mobilized so many protesters, maintaining intense pressure on President Jacques Chirac's government to withdraw the measure.

Strikers again shut down the Eiffel Tower, where tourists stood bewildered before the closed gates. Garbage bins in some Paris neighborhoods stood overflowing, uncollected by striking workers.

[Last modified April 5, 2006, 00:38:13]