Police yesterday fired tear gas on high school students who were hurling stones and set a car on fire during nationwide strikes and protests against raising the retirement age.
A few hundred youths and nearly as many police gathered yesterday morning in the Paris suburb of Nanterre at a high school that was closed because of clashes the day before.
The teens started throwing stones from a bridge, and police responded with tear gas and barricaded the area. It was not immediately clear if there were injuries or arrests.
Photo: AFP
Strikes over the government’s plans to raise the retirement age to 62 from 60 disrupted daily life and a wide swath of industry as workers and students took to the streets once again, with filling stations running dry and many flights canceled.
The coordinated protests are the sixth in a series of days of action against French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to raise the pension age to 62, and follow days of strikes, skirmishes and full-blown street marches.
The education ministry said that 379 schools were disrupted by protests yesterday morning, the highest number yet.
“We need to be firm,” French Justice Minister Michele Alliot--Marie told Europe 1 radio. “There are rights, the right to strike, the right to demonstrate. There is no right to smash things up.”
The interior ministry said police on Monday arrested 290 rioters in various towns, and that four police officers had been injured.
Truckers staged go-slows on motorways near Paris and several provincial cities, drivers blocked access to goods supply depots and joined oil workers blocking fuel depots to defend their right to retire at 60.
With production at all France’s oil refineries shut down since last week, fuel shortages have hit more than 2,600 gas stations, or around one in five nationwide, according to an AFP tally of oil industry figures.
French fuel and heating federation FF3C said the “extremely worrying” situation “should definitely be called a shortage.”
“Fuel depots are being taken hostage in a political conflict, fuel is being exploited,” said Michel-Edouard Leclerc, who runs the E.Leclerc network of supermarkets.
“With the current rhythm of deliveries, there will be none left by the end of the week,” he said.
However, the International Energy Agency said France has “sufficient stocks.”
The interior ministry yesterday put a fuel delivery plan for the most affected regions into action, while authorities in the western region of Calvados requisitioned 12 gas stations for use by rescue and emergency services.
Half of flights from Paris Orly airport were to be canceled yesterday and around one in three at the main Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and regional airports.
Slightly over half of express TGV trains were expected to be running, while the Eurostar line under the Channel to London is expected to run normally and nine out of 10 high-speed Thalys connections will run to Belgium.
As well as train workers and truck drivers, postal workers, telephone employees, teachers and sections of the media are also on strike. Garbage collectors in the southern city of Toulouse yesterday joined striking colleagues in Marseille, where rubbish is piling up on the streets.
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