Police fired teargas at rioters who threw rocks and firecrackers in central Athens as thousands gathered to mark the first anniversary of the police shooting of a teenager.

Clashes broke out as about 3,000 people, mostly students, anarchists and leftists, began a march to parliament. More protests were expected tomorrow. An evening memorial service was planned in the Exarchia district, where 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot dead.

Violence also broke out in Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, where demonstrators threw petrol bombs at police and smashed the front of a Starbucks cafe.

More than 6,000 police were deployed across greater Athens amid fears that the demonstrations under way in the capital and other Greek cities would turn increasingly violent. Concern was heightened by reports that far-left groups and anarchists from other European countries have travelled to Greece for the protests.

Grigoropoulos was shot by a policeman on the evening of 6 December 2008, in Exarchia, a central Athens neighbourhood of bars and cafes popular with anarchist groups. Within a few hours of his death, riots spread from the capital to several cities, taking the government by surprise. An embattled police force took a passive approach as rioters looted and burned shops in violence that lasted two weeks.

The new socialist government, which has faced a spate of attacks by far-left and anarchist groups, since coming to power in October, has vowed not to tolerate any violence during today's anniversary.

BUCHAREST, Romania -- Romanians voted Sunday in a hotly contested presidential runoff that could resolve almost two months of political crisis and unfreeze an international loan Romania needs to emerge from recession.

Centrist President Traian Basescu is running for a second five-year term. His main rival is former Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana, who heads the leftist Social Democrats and is head of the Senate. Analysts say the race is too close to call.

Both candidates claim they will lift Romania out of its deepest political and economic crisis in 20 years, eradicate corruption and restore public trust. Almost 18 million people are eligible to vote. Voting was brisk with more than 24 percent of voters casting their ballot in the first six hours, election authorities said.

The first round of elections on Nov. 22 was marred by allegations of multiple voting and votes being bought.

Of all the millions of words written about the marathon trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher, some of the most revealing appeared in a dispatch from Italy's leading news agency, Ansa, on Wednesday.

"Certainly, the decision facing the [judges and jurors] will not be an easy one," wrote Ansa's reporter, Matteo Guidelli, as he looked ahead to the final phase of the trial of Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.

"Sentencing to life imprisonment two young people, aged 22 and 25, would mean destroying their lives forever," he continued, "but letting them off would mean gainsaying not only the entire investigation, but also the judges who have reached decisions before them."

It hardly needs to be said that the "danger" of contradicting police and prosecutors would not exactly weigh heavily in the deliberations of a British or American jury. But Italy is not Britain or the US.

For the "Anglo-Saxon" reporters who followed the trial, it was about bloodstains and DNA; contradictory statements and suspicious omissions. So it was for their Italian counterparts.

But for them, as for their readers, there was always a further dimension. Italy is a country in which the preservation of "face" is of enormous importance. And in this case there were many people with reputations at stake: the detectives who investigated the murder, Perugia's prosecutors, who oversaw their inquiry, and the judges who indicted Knox and Sollecito and decided that the evidence was sufficient to keep them locked up for more than two years. [...]

Moscow, Russia (CNN) -- Suspects in an explosive inferno at a Russian nightclub that killed at least 112 people will face charges Monday, authorities have said.

The fire broke out Friday night in the Ural Mountain area industrial city of Perm, sweeping through a party in full swing at the Lame Horse, a nightclub celebrating its eighth year in business. An estimated 300 people were in the club.

Authorities have cited five suspects. Three people are suspected of violating fire safety regulations, and the director of the company that supplied and installed fireworks equipment in the nightclub could face manslaughter charges, said Marina Zabbarova, head of the Perm territory branch of the Investigative Committee. Authorities detained those four suspects.

Another suspect was hospitalized, in critical condition. "He is the owner of the Lame Horse premises," Zabbarova said.

Otto Graf Lambsdorff, a prominent and controversial figure in West German politics, has died aged 82. Although retired for years, his voice continued to carry weight in German politics.  

Otto Graf Lambsdorff, once one of Germany's most influential politicians, has died aged 82 in a clinic in Bonn, sources in his pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) said Sunday.

The exact cause of death was unclear, but Lambsdorff was reportedly suffering from various ailments.

Lambsdorff was honorary chairman of the FDP, which currently is junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right governing coalition.

The head of the International Monetary Fund has threatened Nicolas Sarkozy with legal action over a dirty tricks campaign that, he claims, the French leader's lieutenants have mounted to discredit him as a potential rival in the next presidential election.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French Socialist politician who heads the IMF in Washington, took Sarkozy to task over the spread of rumours about his alleged extramarital exploits when they met during a G20 summit in Pittsburgh on September 25.

According to one account, an indignant Strauss-Kahn erupted in fury at Sarkozy when he bumped into him in the lavatory. He told the French leader that he was fed up with gossip about his private life and talk of photographs of him with women that the Elysée Palace supposedly could use to smear him in an election campaign.

"I know that all of it comes from the Elysée," he told a dumbfounded Sarkozy, according to Le Point magazine. "Tell your boys to stop it or I'll go to court."

Antoni Ruiz, 50, has become the first Spaniard to receive official recognition of his suffering more than three decades after he was imprisoned for his sexual orientation.

An estimated 5,000 men served prison sentences during the dictatorship of Gen Franco when homosexuality was made illegal but Mr Ruiz was one of the few sentenced for the crime following the death of the dictator in November 1975.

In 1976, at the age of 17, Mr Ruiz, from Valencia, told family members that he was gay. At the time homosexuality was still banned and when his parents confided in a Catholic monk, he denounced their son to the authorities.

France has triggered a fresh row over EU power-broking by excluding Britain from key-Europe wide talks on the future of farm subsidies to be held in Paris this week.

The French government has summoned a meeting of what it called the "G22" - senior ministers from 22 European states - in an attempt to influence a rethink of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

However, it has not invited Britain or other so-called "reform nations" - the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Malta - all of which have argued for a full overhaul of EU farm subsidies.

Bruno Le Maire, the French agriculture minister, said the aim was to "produce a battle plan to defend a strong common agriculture policy, to support a renewed CAP."

The British Government is under growing pressure to demand the return from US custody of two Pakistani men who were captured by British forces in Iraq, handed over to US forces and then sent to the infamous "Dark Prison" at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.

In February the Government admitted that British forces captured the men in 2004 and handed them into US custody. They were then taken to Bagram, where both remain without trial. However, the Government had refused to reveal their identities.

The two men have now been identified by human rights workers as Amanatullah Ali, from Punjab in Pakistan, and Salahuddin, who was raised in the Gulf states but is a Pakistani citizen believed to be from Baluchistan.

Neither man has had access to a lawyer since their capture by the SAS during a raid in Baghdad in Iraq in 2004, and Mr Salahuddin is reported by other prisoners to have undergone a complete mental breakdown during his five-year incarceration. He is now held in the mental health wing of Bagram prison.

Experts dismiss the former prime minister's claim that Azerbaijan methanol factory is 'the way forward' for green energy.

Tony Blair has triggered an outcry on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit by endorsing a fossil-fuel power plant that is owned by an Azerbaijan oligarch.

The former prime minister was paid by millionaire Nizami Piriyev to fly to the former Soviet state to visit his AzMeCo factory last week - prompting further questions about Mr Blair's intricate private arrangements.

Mr Blair also faced criticism for holding private talks, accompanied by Prince Andrew, with the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, who has banned the BBC from broadcasting in his country and whose election was declared to be undemocratic by international observers.

Speaking to local reporters in the capital, Baku, last week, Mr Blair said the AzMeCo methanol plant, which is backed by £73m of funding from a European development bank, part-owned by the Treasury, was a sign of Britain's interest in Azerbaijan. His comments appeared to blur the line between his status as a private individual and a former prime minister campaigning for British investment in foreign countries.