Thread: Immigrant Protest Turns Violent in Southern Italy

Immigrant Protest Turns Violent in Southern Italy

Friday, September 19, 2008 4:30 PM



ROME -- Hundreds of African immigrants took their anger over the alleged mafia killing of six Africans to the streets on Friday, hurling rocks and smashing windows in a town north of Naples.

Several hundred people participated in the demonstration, which continued into the evening, police said.

Television footage broadcast on Italian SkyTV24 showed protesters marching in the rain and blocking traffic. They taunted police who were deployed in vans and riot gear to control them as they marched more than six miles along a state highway.

One protester threw himself in front of a car before being pulled away by a police officer.

The ANSA news agency reported that some people in the crowd were armed with broken bottles and shouted insults about Italians.

The demonstrators were protesting the shooting deaths of six immigrants from Ghana, Togo and Liberia late Thursday in what authorities say may have been a hit by the Camorra crime syndicate _ punishment for trying to compete in the drug trade.

The victims were slain by automatic gunfire as they stood outside a store that sold ethnic goods in Castel Volturno, a town of 22,000 people about 20 miles north of Naples. A seventh immigrant was being treated for injuries suffered in the shooting, ANSA reported.

The protesters denied the victims were involved in drug trafficking, news reports said.

http://www.newsmax.com/international/eu ... 32595.html

Spain: Jobless Immigrants Paid to Go Home

Friday, September 19, 2008 3:30 PM

MADRID, Spain -- Spain will pay jobless immigrants to go home under a decree approved Friday, more evidence of how its once-booming economy has quickly gone bust.

Labor Minister Celestino Corbacho said the Cabinet approved the measure under a fast-track procedure and it will take effect in about a month.

The plan targets tens of thousands of non-European Union citizens who have been laid off in Spain and are entitled to unemployment benefits. It offers them a lump sum payment of 40 percent of that money once they renounce their work and residency permits, and the rest once they get home.

The voluntary program applies to people from 19 non-EU countries with which Spain has signed bilateral accords under which social security benefits accrued in one nation can be paid in the other.

Those who sign up for it must agree not to return to Spain for three years, with the promise they will be able to recover their work and residency permits after that.

Spain is grappling with ever-swelling jobless ranks in an economy that had posted more than a decade of solid growth but is now flirting with recession. Unemployment is now an EU-high of 10.7 percent, according to the bloc's statistical agency.

The government said in July it believed some 10,000 jobless non-EU citizens _ out of a total of 165,000 recorded as of that month _ would go along with the plan.

http://www.newsmax.com/international/eu ... 32576.html

Yea, we see how great that "free flow of people and goods" works. No thanks SPP!

Dixie