Police Squash Violent Hamburg Protest

[Joanne98]

While police and demonstraters continued to battle on the streets of Athens over the weekend, German police broke up a large sympathy protest after it grew violent.

Scores of German riot police confronted an estimated 950 protesters in Hamburg over the weekend who were expressing their sympathy for student protesters in Greece by marching under the banner of "Solidarity is a weapon."

Police reported that the protest actions -- which allegedly included numerous members of the far-left anarchist scene -- were broken up on Saturday after they escalated to rioting, with special police units and journalists being pelted with bottles, iron rods and fireworks. Four police officers were reported injured.

Protest actions, some violent, also continued to bring chaos to the streets of Athens over the weekend as police battled riots and lawlessness sparked by the Dec. 6 police killingof 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos.

On Saturday, a memorial service to the slain boy turned violent and led to scattered groups of masked youths showering police with rocks and Molotov cocktails and igniting at least six police vehicles and numerous garbage containers. As black smoke lofted above the skyline of the vast city, heavily armed police broke up crowds of protesters with tear gas.

Other incidents Saturday included the fire-bombing and destruction of a credit-reporting agency and clashes around the 18-meter-high (60-foot) Christmas tree in Syntagma Square between police and protesters trying to hang trash bags from its branches. The original tree was burned down by protesters on Dec. 8, the third day of riots, and replaced soon thereafter.

Although the protests were initially meant as a response to perceived police violence, they have developed into a wider protests against political corruption and diminished job prospects triggered by the current economic crisis.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,597899,00.html

These riots may have started out as a police brutality story, but they are now an economic story. Young people all over the world are finally figuring out that they have no future under the "greed is good for the rich" system. The top 1% of the world's financial elite are sitting there HOARDING everything. Corrupt politicians are nothing but whores. This will spread and explode next summer. We need to get the cops OUT OF OUR WAY NOW! We need to let them know that when this starts happening here, they are to stand there and do NOTHING!