Protesters call for end to French rioting

POLICE tightened security in central Paris yesterday with riot forces and bomb squads placed along the Champs-Elysees.

Meanwhile, the angry residents of riot-torn suburbs staged a sit-in near the Eiffel Tower, calling for an end to more than two weeks of arson and vandalism across France.

The moves came as the wave of violence that spread outward from Paris’s impoverished outlying neighbourhoods appeared to be calming in other French cities but remained persistent in the capital.