[An Nahar] Eighty copperswere maimed, one seriously, after riots erupted at a Kurdish festival in Germany that attracted around 40,000 Kurds from around Europe, authorities said on Sunday.
Rioters hurled stones, bottles and fireworks at police and damaged 13 police vehicles as violence spun out of control in the western city of Mannheim. Authorities responded with pepper spray. There were 31 arrests.
Police said the violence was touched off when festival organizers tried to prevent a 14-year-old boy entering the grounds with the flag of a banned group.
As tempers rose, the organizers called the police, who were attacked on arrival. Thousands of festival-goers were involved in the violence late on Saturday, police said.
Authorities also seized four knives and a knuckle-duster.
[Reuters] Thousands of Greeks marched at an annual fair in Greece's second-biggest city on Saturday to protest against a new round of wage and pension cuts demanded by international lenders in exchange for aid to stave off bankruptcy.
The demonstration by about 15,000 trade unionists and leftists was the first major protest against a nearly 12-billion-euro austerity package being readied by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras to appease EU and IMF inspectors who arrived in Athens on Friday to review Greece's reform progress.
A few protesters burned European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... flags while others threw watermelons and peaches in support of struggling farmers, but the largely peaceful protests otherwise passed off without incident as 3,500 coppers looked on.
[Reuters] Bernard Arnault, France's richest man and chief executive of luxury group LVMH, said on Saturday he had applied for Belgian nationality, citing personal and business reasons.
Announcing the move a day after French President Francois Hollande said he would press ahead with a new tax on the super rich, Arnault said he would continue to pay taxes in France and keep his French nationality.
Hollande drew a mixed reaction in February when he announced plans for a 75 percent tax on revenue exceeding 1 million euros ($1.26 million) per year as part of efforts to cut France's public deficit to 3 percent of economic output in 2013.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[An Nahar] Eighty 
Thousands of Greeks marched at an annual fair in Greece's second-biggest city on Saturday to protest against a new round of wage and pension cuts demanded by international lenders in exchange for aid to stave off bankruptcy.
Bernard Arnault, France's richest man and chief executive of luxury group LVMH, said on Saturday he had applied for Belgian nationality, citing personal and business reasons.
