Workers and activists across the world used May Day rallies to press demands as varied as strengthened labor rights, an end to the war in Iraq and reunification of the Koreas.
In the only apparent violence on international workers' day, clashes erupted Saturday between youths and police in Berlin after a peaceful leftist demonstration. About 170 people were arrested.
Besides the usual workers' calls for fair wages, pensions and benefits, Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov lashed out at the US-led military campaign in Iraq.
PHOTO: AP
"Today it is important to protest the war unleashed by America and NATO in Iraq," Zyuganov told several thousand supporters in Moscow at a Communist and trade union-organized rally.
In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, about 20,000 people attended Communist- and Socialist-organized rallies, though hundreds broke away to take part in a sing-along led by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko.
"We want to sing. We are tired of political rallies," said Vadym Shkavro, 33, standing in line with his 2-year-old daughter Lena in his arms.
In neighboring Moldova, President Vladimir Voronin reduced the price of a loaf of bread by 5 percent to US$0.23 for the day.
Clashes in Berlin broke out when groups of chanting and whistling youths, some wearing face masks, hurled cobblestones and bricks at police, who responded with tear gas and baton charges. Cafes and shops rolled down their shutters as the street fighting lasted into the night.
Earlier in the German capital, some 2,300 supporters of the far-right National Democratic Party staging their annual anti-May Day march were blocked by 300 stone-throwing opponents.
Traditional labor-organized May Day rallies drew about half a million supporters across Germany, the main DGB union federation said.
DGB head Michael Sommer said the gap between Germany's rich and poor had widened and demanded that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder end his unpopular drive to trim the welfare state.
"We don't want a Europe where one needs three jobs just to get by," Sommer told the cheering crowd in Berlin.
In Spain's capital, thousands chanted "Terrorism, no" during a May Day march dedicated to the victims of the Madrid train bombings last month that killed 191 people.
Elsewhere, thousands of striking transport workers marched through Athens, demanding greater protection of workers' rights. Demonstrators marched to the US Embassy -- a traditional target of many protests in the Greek capital.
In the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, 600 workers from South and North Korea held a joint May Day celebration, expressing hopes for reunification of the divided Korean Peninsula.
The workers were joined by 2,000 Pyongyang citizens, the South's Yonhap news agency said in a report from the Northern capital.
About 20,000 Thai workers and labor activists wearing red shirts and waving flags denounced a government plan to partially privatize the state electricity company.
In Havana, President Fidel Castro said Cuba would defend itself "to the last drop of blood" and declared himself unafraid of what he called new US measures to change the island's four-decade-old socialist system.
At the annual May Day celebration, Castro warned US officials to be "calmer, more sensible, wiser and more intelligent" before the expected release of a report by the US government's Commission for a Free Cuba.
The report is to include recommendations about hastening a democratic transition in Cuba and providing assistance afterward.
Across Brazil, hundreds of thousands of workers filled the streets of major cities, protesting unemployment they blame on leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's austerity program.
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