France: Rioting continued for the 14th consecutive night in France yesterday, albeit with less intensity than at the peak of last weekend, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris. By 10 pm, Patrick Hamon, the spokesman for the national police force, said 86 cars had been burned across the country and 76 men arrested.
In one of the more serious incidents of the early evening, rioters crashed a burning car into a school in the La Reynerie neighbourhood of Toulouse. Firemen were able to save the school. In Belfort, eastern France, a group set fire to a school which was destroyed. Two of the attackers were arrested.
In the 15th arrondissement of Paris - a mostly white middle class neighbourhood - youths set fire to a scooter and a creche. Molotov cocktails were thrown at a secondary school at Chennevière, northeast of Paris, and at a bus in Marseille. A gas pipe was torn out in Amiens.
Toulouse has been especially hard-hit all week. On Tuesday night, the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited police there.
"At the beginning (of the riots)," Mr Sarkozy said, "people talked about youths. Now they talk about hooligans and delinquents. Journalists were wrong to say that the longevity of events hurt my credibility. On the contrary.
"The French are exasperated. This continuing violence is the justification for the break with the past that I call for."
Mr Sarkozy yesterday told the National Assembly that all non French citizens - including those with valid residence papers - convicted of participating in urban violence will be expelled from the country.
There are 120 foreigners among the 1,830 people already arrested.
Six men were arrested in dawn raids on their homes yesterday in Grigny, south of Paris, in connection with the five-hour battle on Sunday night in which 30 police were wounded. The director general of the national police, Michel Gaudin, said there was a "significant fall" in the number of violent incidents overnight on Tuesday, when 10 public buildings were destroyed and 617 vehicles were burned, bringing the total to over 6,000 in two weeks.
These included nine buses burned in a depot in Dole, in the Jura region, and a gas-powered bus that exploded after being hit with a petrol-bomb in Bordeaux. Two shops in the northern city of Arras were looted before they were burned on Tuesday night.
A Volkswagen dealership in Vaulx-en-Velin, outside Lyon, was also destroyed. Authorities in Lyon decided to stop all public transport at 6pm yesterday after a teargas attack in the Metro on Tuesday, the torching of a bus and the stoning of several others.
An opinion poll published by Le Parisien newspaper yesterday showed that 73 per cent of French people approve of curfews, and 86 per cent are "unhappy" or "scandalised" by the crisis in the banlieus Only one per cent expressed sympathy for the rioters.
Twenty-five of France's 95 mainland departments have declared a state of emergency, and only five have established curfews.