More than 70 arrested during Athens riots after Molotov cocktails thrown at police
Molotov-wielding protesters clashed with police in Athens, engulfing the area in flames at the weekend.
Footage shared on social media shows multiple burning vehicles in Exarchia, a neighourhood in the popular British tourist destination.
Fireworks and stones were also thrown at the district police station, local media reports, with parked cars and motorbikes set alight.
Athens police detained 72 people and reported one officer was injured during the turmoil, according to Greek channel EPTNews.
The disturbances started after a music performance in a nearby park, with the rioting extending to other streets, witnesses told the broadcaster.
According to Greek Police, a series of violent incidents took place late Saturday night in the Exarchia district.
Just before midnight, unidentified individuals launched attacks on officers stationed at the junction of Kallidromiou and E. Benaki streets, The Standard reported.
The assailants reportedly used Molotov cocktails and stones, prompting the police to respond with chemical agents.
The riots began just days after a bomb exploded near the offices of Hellenic Train, Greece's main railway services operator.
The explosion Friday evening resulted in limited damage and no injuries. The perpetrators had forewarned of the explosion by calling two media organizations about 40 minutes before it happened.
It follows widespread public anger over a 2023 railway disaster, Greece's worst, in which 57 people were killed and dozens more injured when a freight train and a passenger train heading in opposite directions were accidentally put on the same track.
The deadly accident exposed severe deficiencies in Greece's railway system, including in safety systems, and has triggered mass protests led by relatives of the victims against the country's conservative government around the accident's second anniversary.
Greece has been experiencing ongoing demonstrations in the past month.
Last week, thousands of Greeks gathered in Athens to demand higher wages to cope with rising living costs and a one-day strike left ferries docked at ports, flights grounded and trains at a standstill.
The conservative government has increased the monthly minimum wage by a cumulative 35 per cent to 880 euros since 2019. But many households still struggle to make ends meet amid fast-rising food, power and housing costs, Greece's largest labour unions say.
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NBC News
an hour ago
- NBC News
Some far-left groups have encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent, experts say
It was approaching nightfall in Los Angeles on Sunday when black-clad demonstrators began to torch a row of self-driving Waymo taxis. Within minutes, videos of the fiery scenes began to pop up on social media. 'MORE. MORE AND MORE AND MORE,' a group known as Unity of Fields posted on X, along with a video of the flaming vehicles. The post wasn't an anomaly. Since the start of the demonstrations against immigration raids in Los Angeles, the Unity of Fields X account has been pumping out messages urging people to wreak havoc in the streets and 'give 'em hell.' It's part of a far-left online ecosystem that has proliferated in recent years, experts say. Some of the groups behind the accounts express contempt for peaceful resistance and glorify acts of violence — and even murders, like those of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and two Israeli Embassy staffers. The leftist networks tend to be different from right-wing groups in that they are typically decentralized with no leadership structures. But they can be highly adept at using social media, and some have been working hard to amplify and celebrate the acts of violent protesters in Los Angeles. 'Whether they directly threw a Molotov cocktail is actually not as essential as the ecosystem of encouragement and coordination they have created,' said Joel Finkelstein, a co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that tracks online extremism. The unrest in Los Angeles follows a pattern that has played out in numerous cities over the past five years in which protests that break out remain mostly peaceful during the day, but at night agitators engage in fiery clashes with police. That dynamic tends to distract from the focus of the demonstrations — in this case, workplace immigration raids by federal agents — and provide fodder to people who oppose them. In this case, that's President Donald Trump and his supporters, who have sought to dismiss the broader protest movement as the work of 'paid insurrectionists.' 'What's concerning is the attempt to conflate the individual actors who do commit violence with the mass movement as a whole,' said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. He said the narrative pushed by some people on the right — in his words, that there's a 'roving band of antifa groupies who are following protests from city to city' — doesn't comport with reality. But, Lewis added, there has no doubt been a normalization of violence in parts of the left, although it is more fractured than in right-wing groups. 'It's a little bit of anti-capitalist stuff in one case. A little bit of antisemitic stuff in another case,' he said. 'I think that reflects the nature of those online leftist movements where there is no cohesive, central structure.' More than 300 people have been arrested since the demonstrations broke out Friday in Los Angeles, police say. The charges include failure to disperse, looting, arson and attacks on police officers. Police Chief Jim McDonnell said demonstrators have shot commercial-grade fireworks at police officers and hurled pieces of concrete at them. Were they the acts of lone wolves seizing an opportunity to target police? Or was there a level of coordination and planning among the instigators? Experts say it's likely to be a combination of both. 'You have the organized protests by people who are committed to a particular cause, and then you have radical fringes,' said Dan Byman, the director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 'They might put on airs and call themselves anarchists or something like that, but they're young people who like destruction.' The Network Contagion Research Institute has been analyzing the rise of what it calls 'anarcho-socialist extremism.' It has found that the chaos and violence that have broken out at some of the major protests in recent years, like those against the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, weren't as spontaneous as they might have seemed. 'What we found in our research is there are groups that were attempting to exploit the situation, oftentimes after dark, and their coordination was somewhat sophisticated,' said Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser to the Network Contagion Research Institute. That involved demonstrators' surveilling police movements and sharing tips about making the most destructive Molotov cocktails, Goldenberg said. 'They were trying to exploit an already volatile situation in an attempt to provoke violent clashes with police, create viral moments to inflame tensions and draw in others through emotional triggers,' he said. Soon after it launched in 2019, the Network Contagion Research Institute focused on right-wing threats like the Boogaloos, a loose-knit anti-government movement that calls for violence against law enforcement and political opponents. But it soon found that left-wing groups were using many of the same tactics to incite violence. A 2022 report by the institute found that animus toward law enforcement among anarchist types had been proliferating online for years. The appearance of posts with anti-police outrage and/or memes and coded language increased over 1,000% on Twitter and 300% on Reddit during the period of the Floyd protests in 2020, the report found. 'Assassination culture' One anti-police group, the People's City Council Los Angeles, has taken to calling out the actions of officers at the protests, using expletives and slights. Just before 1 a.m. Tuesday, it posted on X the name and picture of a police officer it said was firing rubber bullets at protesters. He is 'f-----g unhinged and unloading on protesters at point blank range,' the post read. 'F--K THIS PIG!!' On Sunday, the group posted a video showing a line of police officers in riot gear. 'LAPD trying to kettle right now,' the group wrote, referring to a crowd control tactic used by police. 'Oink oink piggy piggy, we going make your life s----y…' The violent demonstrators seemed to represent a mishmash of causes. Many of the people seen hurling objects at police and setting fires were dressed in all black, their faces covered in masks. Some waved Mexican flags, others Palestinian flags. At least one man was photographed wearing a Hamas armband. 'Angelenos throwing Modelo Molotovs at ICE while wearing Keffiyehs,' read a post on X by Unity of Fields. 'We are locked the f--k in, folks.' Unity of Fields, which was formerly known as Palestine Action US, describes itself as a 'militant front against the US-NATO-zionist axis of imperialism.' 'The Unity of Fields concept comes from the Palestinian resistance,' the group said last year in a blog post announcing the name change. 'It refers to the coordination between all the factions on the battlefield despite their geographic fragmentation or ideological differences.' Finkelstein, the co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, said such groups and the people who follow them represent what he described as 'assassination culture' — in which targeted killings are considered acceptable by those who harbor an array of grievances. Unity of Fields, for example, is helping raise money to cover legal costs for Elias Rodriguez, the Chicago man accused of fatally shooting the Israeli Embassy workers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington last month. 'My sense is that beneath these grievances is a shared sense of loss of control,' said Finkelstein, who is a psychologist and a neuroscientist. 'Who are the people that really feel a sense of hopelessness in their lives? Most are looking for significance, and they think they found it here.' In response to a request for comment, Unity of Fields wrote: 'We will never condemn people who fight to free themselves. When the masses in Los Angeles began using direct action as a means of halting ICE-gestapo disappearances, the media saw only the violence of resistance and never the violence of the status quo.' It added: 'All acts of resistance to state violence are justified and all power belongs to the masses.' The People's City Council Los Angeles didn't respond to a request for comment. While the violent parts of the protests in Los Angeles began to die down Monday, demonstrations against the Trump administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants have spread to several other cities, including Boston, Chicago, Dallas and New York. So far, none has experienced violence at the levels in Los Angeles, but whether that will remain the case is an open question. Unity of Fields has made it clear it's hoping for a repeat in cities like New York. 'NYC, how are you gonna let Angelenos beat you at your favorite pastime (terrorizing police officers)?' the group said Monday on X. 'Hamas Marxist Army get down there and show them what New Yorkers can do when they put their heads together!"
Daily Mirror
an hour ago
- Daily Mirror
I visited hotspot where two Brits died – what I saw on 7am run horrified me
I recently returned from a family getaway in the stunning coastal resort of Albufeira – and it lived up to expectation. The beaches were sandy, the weather was (mostly) glorious and the scenery was spectacular. However, despite having a memorable break and making it back safely, this was not the case for everyone. While I was there, two British tourists tragically lost their lives in a place some now consider just to be a nocturnal party town. Greg Monks, 38, from Glasgow, was found in a ravine in Albu feira. He was on a stag-do when he left a party early before reportedly encountering trouble when jumping a wall on his way back to his hotel. A 21-year-old man was later found at the foot of a set of steps in Albufeira's picturesque old town in what is believed to have been a drunken fall. The deaths brought the popular Algarve resort into the spotlight, with some publications subsequently reporting on the 'darker' side of Albufeira that has supposedly become a 'boozy bolthole' for wild behaviour. And while my time there passed pleasantly with my partner, Ciara, and our daughter, one observation of antisocial behaviour did stay with me. Having a toddler, early starts are inescapable, and during some sunrises, I went for runs throughout Albuferia. During one exercise excursion, I reached the mile-long neon-lit 'strip' which has reportedly been nicknamed 'The Chaos' by locals. I had already been there during the day time. While the atmosphere was raucous even then, it was relatively harmless, with people simply out having a good time, while clearly consuming lots and lots of booze. But being there at 7am, it was an entirely different story. The street was completely covered in litter. It looked like a dumping ground. In a street full of late night bars and clubs filled with tourists thirsty for fun, I didn't expect it to be spotless. But the sheer number of rubbish scattered absolutely everywhere, including bottles, glasses and takeaway food, was excessive. Some party folk were still staggered around having not yet been to bed, and while busy binmen loaded litter into a truck or deployed leafblowers to gather rubbish, one tourist was throwing up on the street. It was a miserable looking scene, with my eyes being drawn to one old lady who was carefully trying to navigate the cobbles without tripping up. Another man, clearly incredibly drunk, was attempting to walk forward, but his body was inadvertently moving backwards instead. The sight to behold reminded me of a conversation I once had with Michelle Baker, a Brit who has lived in Benidorm for 40 years, for a story. Speaking about walking along the famous party strip in the Spanish holiday hotspot for an early morning stroll, she told me: 'It really is a no man's land and I try to avoid that street like the plague. The bins have fallen and they probably have been sick in the bins as well, it is just a nasty nasty street. 'In some parts of the strip the smell of vomit is quite offensive in the morning.' Seeing the strip in the Algarve during an early morning run reminded me of her words, and it also made me think of the comparison with Benidorm. Some locals now believe Benidorm authorities tackling drunk behaviour has led to party hungry Brits seeking other destinations instead, like the Algarve. Paul Surphlis, a Brit from Newcastle who has a business by the strip, told The Sun: 'Since Spain cracked down on tourism and said they did not want Brits there, Albufeira is now getting that Benidorm crowd. They want to behave as outrageously as they did in Spain, but it won't be tolerated here.' Another local told YouTuber Wendall that Albufeira was gaining a worse reputation than Benidorm because it attracted a younger crowd with less discipline. Drug use and public nudity is reportedly on the rise in the Portuguese family favourite destination too. Wendall himself summarised in his YouTube video: 'I thought it would be a relaxing few days in the sun but this ain't my type of holiday… this is my idea of holiday hell.' But he added: 'If you want to let your hair down and go wild, like Brits abroad, then this is the place.' From my own experience, I didn't necessarily agree with Wendall, especially because Albufeira had much to offer for families (boat trips and dolphin-watching being some examples) – far removed from the boozy shenanigans of youngsters. However, despite my opinions, one British tourist, Doreen Burywood, told the Daily Mail: 'We used to go every year, loved the place, but stopped when the hen and stag parties started arriving - such a shame.' Towards the end of my holiday, I found myself on another run, and once again I encountered the strip early one morning. This time, the scene was even filthier, with the hard-working binmen having not yet had a chance to reach all the junk. And while I'm sure most of the revellers had a good time in the early hours, I did feel sympathy for the workers who had to once again clean up their mess. Despite this, there have been crackdowns by Albufeira City Council to combat antisocial behaviour by rowdy tourists. This includes a stricter dress code where bikinis and swimsuits on city streets are forbidden with rulebreakers facing fines of €1,800 (just over £1,500) - if the legislation is passed at the end of this month. Spitting, vomiting or urinating in the street could also result in fines of up to £630. We reached out to Albufeira City Council regarding claims made in this story.
Scottish Sun
an hour ago
- Scottish Sun
Scots cops deployed after THIRD night of riots as petrol bombs thrown & masked yobs trash centre ‘for fleeing locals'
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) SCOTS cops have been ordered into riot torn Ballymena in Northern Ireland after three nights of 'racist thuggery'. The Police Service of Northern Ireland asked for extra support under mutual aid arrangements following violent scenes in the County Antrim town. 6 A rioter walks past flames as PSNI officers in riot gear respond to a third night of civil unrest in Ballymena, Northern Ireland Credit: Getty 6 Scots cops have been drafted in to support the PSNI Credit: Getty 6 A demonstrator faces a group of riot police vehicles as riots continue Credit: Reuters The deployment will involve an undisclosed number of public order officers who are trained to police civil unrest. A total of 32 PSNI officers have been injured since the protests over an alleged sexual assault began on Monday night. Last night (WED) unrest also spread to other towns. In Larne, masked youths attacked a leisure centre and set it on fire. The centre had been providing emergency shelter for families following the clashes earlier this week. The force's assistant chief constable, Ryan Henderson, said they would be "surging a significant number of extra officers" into affected areas. He described the violence as "racist thuggery targeted at ethnic minorities and police officers". The force confirmed the deployment, but declined to comment further. Mutual aid agreements are uncommon and are generally "incident based," according to the National Police Chiefs' Council. ACC Henderson said: "As part of my forward planning I have now activated the request for mutual aid resources from policing colleagues in Great Britain to ensure we have the necessary support to maintain public order and bring offenders to justice in the days to come." Horror moment Ballymena rioter accidentally sets himself on FIRE with Molotov cocktail as violence spreads in 2nd night Protesters in Ballymena have targeted officers with petrol bombs, bricks and fireworks during disorder on Monday and Tuesday. The first protest was organised hours after two teenage boys appeared before Coleraine Magistrates' Court . They spoke through an interpreter in Romanian to confirm their names and ages. Their solicitor said they would be denying the charges. 6 Fire burns near a demonstrator as riots continue Credit: Reuters 6 Police aim a water cannon at demonstrators Credit: Reuters 6 Fireworks thrown at Riot Police illuminate the road Credit: AFP The PSNI said there have also been sporadic incidents of disorder in Carrickfergus, north Belfast and Newtownabbey, where one man was arrested. So far, one man, aged 29, has been charged with riotous behaviour, disorderly behaviour, attempted criminal damage and resisting police after Monday's violence.
