Riot Police

China's worst ethnic violence in years broke out Sunday in the northwestern city of Urumqi, leaving 140 people dead and more than 800 injured. The unrest pitted Uighurs, a long-aggrieved Muslim minority, against the Han Chinese, who increasingly dominate the far-flung Xinjiang region. With the death toll climbing over the course of the day, the violence appeared to be far deadlier than that last year in the Tibetan region.

Anousheh's hazel eyes burned from the smoke. She caught her breath. Up the boulevard, amid the hazy din, the riot police were beating people with batons and threatening others. Screams erupted, as young men and women ran for cover. The 29-year-old Iranian interior designer and her brother, Babak, had just been up there, at the northern end of Tehran's Africa Boulevard, where the crowds were chanting, "Death to the dictator!"

Huge swaths of the Iranian capital erupted in fiery riots that stretched into the early hours today as hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared victory in his quest for a second term amid allegations of widespread fraud and reports that his main challenger had been placed under house arrest.

Riot police used tear gas Thursday to turn student protesters away from Peru's Congress as thousands nationwide marched in support of Amazon Indians resisting oil and natural gas exploration on their land. At least 20,000 students, labor union members and indigenous Peruvians from the country's Andean highlands to its jungle lowlands joined mostly peaceful protests. In Lima, riot police fended off several hundred students, some of whom threw rocks and Molotov cocktails.

Irish nationalist gangs hurled gasoline bombs at police after three alleged IRA dissidents were arrested on suspicion of killing two British soldiers in an attack apparently aimed at triggering wider violence in Northern Ireland. Police arrested Colin Duffy, 41, the best-known Irish republican in Lurgan, a religiously divided town southwest of Belfast, and two other suspected Irish Republican Army dissidents in the mainly Roman Catholic village of Bellaghy in the attack last weekend.

Masked gunmen shot and seriously wounded a riot policeman in Athens on Monday, raising fears that weeks of unrest in Greece have given way to violence by an armed extremist group. The officer was in critical but stable condition after being struck twice in a volley of at least 30 shots as he patrolled about 3 a.m. outside the Ministry of Culture, near a van full of officers, authorities said.

Masked youths set up burning barricades and threw firebombs and chunks of marble at Athens riot police after a protest march erupted into new fighting that sent Christmas shoppers and panicked parents fleeing to safety. Mothers snatched children from a carousel in the main square. Waiters stumbled from cafes, choking on tear gas fired by police at rioters trying to burn the capital's Christmas tree, replaced days ago after another tree was torched. A slogan painted outside the Bank of Greece read, "Merry crisis and a happy new fear."

Bangkok's two main airports were surrounded by riot police early today in the government of Thailand's latest gambit to disperse protesters who have blockaded air traffic and cut the Southeast Asian nation off from the world. Police at the domestic Don Muang airport, overrun by members of the anti-government People's Alliance for Democracy, or the PAD, said early Thursday that "necessary measures" would be taken if protesters did not stand down.

Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was charged today with sodomizing his male aide. Anwar pleaded innocent in Kuala Lumpur to the charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Anwar has claimed the allegation was concocted by the government to destroy his political career and prevent him from returning to Parliament in a by-election later this month. Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has rejected Anwar's claim. Riot police backed by trucks mounted with water cannons surrounded the courthouse.