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/ 3 November 2005
France’s government faced mounting pressure on Thursday after suburban rioters fired at police and firefighters, hurled rocks at trains and torched buses and car dealerships. Nine people were injured in Seine-Saint-Denis and 315 cars were torched across the Paris area where acts of violence ranged from stone-throwing to torching vehicles.
Thousands of journalists in some of the most press-hostile countries held marches and sit-ins on Tuesday to demand an end to government censorship and jailings and to highlight the threat of killing, kidnapping and other abuses they face.
Several events were under way or scheduled for the 15th annual World Press Freedom Day.
People jumped from windows or screamed for rescue from flames as a pre-dawn fire on Friday roared through a Paris hotel used by local government to house needy African families, killing at least 20 people, half of them children. More than 50 people were injured, 11 seriously, in the blaze that was thought to have started in a first-floor breakfast room of the one-star Paris Opera hotel.
Careless overloading appears the prime cause in Africa’s deadliest ferry disaster, military investigators said on Wednesday — describing the MS Joola tumbling over when passengers rushed to take cover from a sudden gale.
Senegal abandoned recovery of victims from the MS Joola on Tuesday, with only 80 of 970-plus identified – saying its next step might be to sink the doomed ferry together with its dead to the Atlantic Ocean floor.