Day of protests

Workers and activists across the world used May Day rallies Saturday to press demands as varied as strengthened labor rights, an end to the war in Iraq and reunification of the Koreas.

In the only apparent violence on International Workers Day, clashes erupted between youths and police in Berlin after a peaceful leftist demonstration. About 170 people were arrested.

Besides the usual calls for fair wages, pensions and benefits, Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov lashed out at the U.S.-led military campaign in Iraq.

"Today it is important to protest the war unleashed by America and NATO in Iraq," Zyuganov told several thousand supporters in Moscow at a communist and trade union-organized rally.

'Yankees out of Iraq'

In El Salvador, thousands of workers, some with signs reading "Yankees out of Iraq," marched through San Salvador to protest Salvadoran troops in the U.S.-led coalition. "Bring the troops home!" many chanted.

In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, about 20,000 people attended Communist- and Socialist-organized rallies, though hundreds broke away to take part in a sing-along led by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko.

Some 8,000 German police deployed in cities kept violence at a lower level than on previous May Days. In Berlin, however, clashes broke out when groups of chanting and whistling youths, some wearing face masks, hurled cobblestones and bricks at police.

Police fired tear gas and sprayed water cannon to disperse the rioters after they set fire to trash in the streets.

Traditional labor-organized May Day rallies drew about half a million supporters across Germany, the main DGB union federation said.

DGB head Michael Sommer said the gap between Germany's rich and poor had widened and demanded that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder end his unpopular drive to trim the welfare state.

"We don't want a Europe where one needs three jobs just to get by," Sommer told the cheering crowd in Berlin.

In Spain's capital, thousands chanted "Terrorism, no" during a May Day march dedicated to the victims of the Madrid train bombings last month.

Elsewhere, thousands of striking transport workers marched through Athens, demanding greater protection of workers' rights.

In the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, 600 workers from South and North Korea held a joint May Day celebration, expressing hopes for reunification of the divided Korean Peninsula.

About 20,000 Thai workers and labor activists wearing red shirts and waving flags denounced a government plan to partially privatize the state electricity company.

In Havana, President Fidel Castro said Cuba would defend itself "to the last drop of blood" and declared himself unafraid of what he called new U.S. measures to change the island's four-decade-old socialist system.

At the annual May Day celebration, Castro warned U.S. officials to be "calmer, more sensible, wiser and more intelligent" before the expected release of a report by the U.S. government's Commission for a Free Cuba.

The report is to include recommendations about hastening a democratic transition in Cuba and providing assistance afterward.

Across Brazil, hundreds of thousands of workers filled the streets of major cities, protesting unemployment they blame on leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's austerity program.

About 80 women from a rural workers' group marched toward the Amazon port of Santarem to protest the expansion of soy farming they say is destroying the rain forest.

In the Costa Rican capital of San Jose, union leaders and students broke through security barriers in front of the federal congress to protest a pending U.S. trade agreement.

In Honduras, thousands of workers marched peacefully in the capital, Tegucigalpa, and five other cities to protest both the trade agreement as well as a proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, which would extend from Alaska to Argentina.