Tag: Riot

Paris police said 133 people were injured, including 23 police officers, as crowds trashed the streets of the capital Saturday. Officers fired tear gas and used water cannon to tamp down the violence as protesters torched cars, smashed windows, looted stores and tagged the Arc de Triomphe with spray paint. Some radical far-right and far-left activists were involved in the riot, as well as a “great number” of protesters wearing yellow jackets, Delpuech said. The fluorescent jackets, which French motorists are required to have in their cars for emergencies, are an emblem of a grassroots citizens’ movement protesting fuel taxes. At the security meeting, the French leader asked his interior minister to consider making “adaptations” to security procedures to try to contain ongoing protests sparked by rising fuel taxes, Macron’s office said in a statement. Macron also asked Prime Minister Edouard Philippe to meet with the heads of France’s major political parties and representatives from the grassroots movement behind the protests. “It’s difficult to reach the end of the month. People work and pay a lot of taxes and we are fed up,” said Rabah Mendez, a protester who marched peacefully Saturday in Paris. Speaking in Buenos Aires before he flew home to Paris, Macron said he welcomed the views of protesters but vowed that those who participated in wreaking havoc would be held responsible for their behavior. “(Violence) has nothing to do with the peaceful expression of a legitimate anger” and “no cause justifies” attacks on police or pillaging stores and burning buildings, Macron said.

Fifty years ago, on the day before St. Patrick’s Day, Robert F. Kennedy announced that he was running for the presidency of the United States. “I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies,” said Kennedy, who four years earlier had been elected U.S. senator from New York. For a brief period it seemed Bobby was the only one who could bring a deeply divided America together. Assassinations, riots, war, protests. In American Pastoral, his beautiful, chaotic novel about how these events tore apart the seemingly perfect marriage of an Irish American beauty queen and a Jewish American striver, Philip Roth refers to 1968 as the high-water mark of “the indigenous America berserk.” And Irish Americans -- from Bobby Kennedy to blue collar workers - -were central players. On the national stage, two Irish Americans -- Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy -- began the year as political outsiders, challenging the Vietnam War policy of President Lyndon Johnson, who would eventually shock the world by not even running for re-election. But out in the working class ethnic neighborhoods of New York and Boston and Chicago an anger was bubbling. Consider a small moment from Chris Mathews' recent book Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit. Kennedy was campaigning in Manhattan. Just five months after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, it was Richard Nixon who skillfully figured out how to tap into this anger, and move into the White House.