French violence smoulders
From Anne Lyon

PARIS—Police have invoked emergency powers to ban public meetings in Paris, amid rumours of plans to bring France’s smouldering suburban violence into the centre of the capital. The measure, which came into force at 10:00 am. (0900 GMT) Saturday and lasts till Sunday at 8:00 am. (0700 GMT), prohibits “all meetings likely to start or fuel disorder.” Some 2,000 police and gendarmes were patrolling the city, with heavy deployment at railway stations, after the authorities intercepted a series of Internet and text messages calling for “acts of violence” in the capital on November 12. At midday there were no reports of trouble in the capital and all appeared calm.
The ban on public gatherings is authorised under a 50-year-old emergency law activated by the government on Tuesday and applied across large parts of the country, including Paris. The same law has authorised night-time curfews for minors in some 30 localities nationwide. Reinforcements were also due in the vicinity of the Stade de France national stadium in the troubled Seine-St-Denis area of the northern Parisian suburbs, where the French and German national football teams were to play a friendly Saturday evening.The centre of the capital has been largely spared the violence which has raged for more than two weeks around France’s poor suburbs, where mainly black and Arab youths have burned cars, destroyed property and attacked police with stones.