France's Youth Battles Also Waged on the Web

Violence continued unabated in many cities Wednesday night. Vandals set fire to a kindergarten near the center of the Reynerie subdistrict in the Toulouse suburb of Mirail. Unlike on previous nights of unrest in the neighborhood, however, the young men roaming the streets did not wait for the arrival of police officers to take action.

At exactly 6 p.m., a small white car zoomed through the parking lot of a high-rise apartment block to the cheers of a clutch of young men idling nearby. The car pulled up to the state-run school, and a masked man emerged and tossed a firebomb into the entryway of the single-story building. It went up quickly in hissing flames.

Police officers arrived 20 minutes later to escort firefighters to the site, but the building was already heavily damaged. There was no visible attempt to arrest or question anyone about the incident. A helicopter circled overhead shining a spotlight on the streets and alleyways.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced Wednesday that any immigrants convicted of participating in the riots would be deported, even those who are legally resident with visas. The majority of youths involved in the rampages, however, appear to be the French-born children of immigrant parents.

Police also have increased their monitoring of Web sites and blogs, authorities said Wednesday. A 16-year-old French youth and an 18-year-old Ghanaian from the northern Paris suburbs are under judicial investigation for "provoking willful property damage that posed a danger to people via the Internet," prosecutors said. A 14-year-old from the southeastern city of Aix-en-Provence was also questioned, but has been released without charges, according to authorities.

Although the youths did not know one another, each had posted blogs on Skyrock radio's Web site.

One of the blog notices urged, "Go to the nearest police station and burn it," according to authorities.

Skyrock officials said they would make no comment on the police action or their decision to close the most provocative blogs.

In an interview last weekend, the radio station's president, Pierre Bellanger, said the station, which was receiving up to 20,000 blog comments a day, "can't accept having calls to violence, blogs saying 'I want to kill the cops.' " He said a team of 30 monitors and filtering software helped ensure that violent notices were not posted.

But other Web site directors said the volume of comments funneled into the Skyrock blogs became too voluminous to control.

"Blogs are difficult to monitor," said Fabrice Rousselot, deputy editor of the newspaper Liberation's Web site. He said the site has determined it is "too risky" to have open blogs. Web monitors even have trouble controlling the comments posted in forums, he said, adding that some of the more outrageous messages can remain posted for several minutes before monitors are able to suppress them.

But many of the blog postings inciting violence were balanced against calls for halting it. One of Skyblog's writers noted, "It's a great idea, this meeting around the Eiffel Tower Friday. But we have to be calm, if not all of this will come to nothing. We have things to say, all the media will be there and no one will stop us."

Williams reported from Toulouse.