May Day marked by worldwide protests

Thousands of people across the world took to the streets as part of Traditional May Day protests.

In Germany, some 8,000 people marched to the Brandenburg Gate in the capital Berlin. At least 71 were arrested in pre-May Day rowdiness.

Dozens of radical Swedish youths smashed shop windows and clashed with police as they turned a Stockholm May Day parade violent, police and local media said. A police spokesman told a radio station that 130 youths were arrested after they rampaged through a central shopping street in the capital, hurling café chairs into shop windows.

Swedish media said the demonstrators were from the Reclaim The City group, an anti-establishment organisation which had clashed with police at its May 1 demonstrations in the past.

Turkish police detained scores of pro-Kurdish and leftist protesters yesterday after violence flared during traditional May Day demonstrations in Istanbul and several other cities.

A leftist May Day demonstration in Istanbul's central Taksim Square turned into a brawl, with police using pepper spray and truncheons against protesters waving red flags.

CNN Turk television said 34 people were detained in the unauthorised demonstration.

Some 25,000 Russian trade unionists, and several thousand Communists, marched in Moscow for social welfare. Overall, about 1.5 million Russians participated in rallies across the country, according to police estimates.

More than 1,000 protesters carrying banned flags marched through Belarus's capital yesterday to demand the release of jailed opposition leaders who had pledged to work for the removal of President Alexander Lukashenko.

Car workers for the Peugeot factory in the UK attended the May Day rally in London to protest at plans to cut 2,300 jobs.

Meanwhile, protesters in more than a dozen cities in Indonesia demonstrated against proposed changes to the labour law that would make it harder to strike, as workers across Asia held demonstrations for better conditions.

More than 10,000 people in Jakarta rallied against government plans to revise a 2003 labour law that businesses say gave workers so many benefits and so much freedom to organise and strike it dealt a blow to Indonesia's economic competitiveness and attractiveness to investors.

Thousands of Iranian workers yesterday lambasted the growing use of short-term employment contracts in the most vociferous May Day demonstration in the Islamic state for years. The protest came as a reminder to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that, although embroiled in an international dispute over his country's atomic ambitions, he was elected to improve living conditions for the poorest echelons of society.