Riot Highlights Australia Race Problems
SYDNEY, Australia - A young Aborigine dies. His family and friends bitterly blame police, and within hours gasoline bombs and rocks rain down on a Sydney ghetto. Cars and a train station are torched.
Australians like to think of their society as fair and egalitarian. But a riot in Sydney's Redfern neighborhood has dramatically highlighted problems of race that have haunted this country ever since the first white settlers arrived more than two centuries ago.
Forty police were wounded, eight of them hospitalized, in a nine-hour street battle with a mainly Aboriginal mob Sunday night and Monday morning in and around a slum known as "The Block." It's not clear how many protesters were hurt.
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Riot Highlights Australia Race Problems