South Africa's celebrations are shattered after 70 are feared dead in bus crash

May Day demonstrations around the world

South Africa

Seventy people are feared drowned and 10 swam to safety after a bus ferrying South African workers to a May Day rally plunged into a reservoir.

One eyewitness said the driver lost his bearings in the dark and drove the bus into the dam at 5am yesterday near the town of Bethlehem. Another said the driver did not know the area.

Sixty-three people were confirmed dead. Police said about 80 people were on the bus on its way from Kimberley to the rally in Phuthaditjaba. Divers had recovered 46 bodies by yesterday afternoon.

A pall fell over celebrations in the rest of the country, where bus accidents are frequent. The President, Thabo Mbeki, Labour Minister, Membathisi Mdladlana, and acting Transport Minister, Jeff Radebe, were among those who sent condolences to the families of the dead, and injured.

"The nation is in deep mourning as we hear of the horrific tragedy that has befallen members of Cosatu [the Congress of SA Trade Unions]," Mr Mbeki said in a statement. The President, who addressed a May Day rally in Johannesburg, observed a minute of silence in memory of the dead.

Germany

Police used water cannon and baton charges to quell rioting and stone throwing by May Day demonstrators in Berlin and Hamburg. Scores of people were injured, including 30 police officers. In Berlin a midnight May Day eve party in the city's Prenzlauer Berg district turned violent just after 12am when masked anarchists attacked riot police with bottles, stones and fireworks.

Police took three hours to break up the rioting and arrested 97 people. One police officer was seriously injured. In Hamburg police arrested a further 91 protesters after they were similarly attacked.

A 7,500-strong police presence prevented further clashes that were feared during a demonstration by 1,200 members of the neo-Nazi, National Democratic Party in Berlin. The rally had been called by the party to "celebrate" a recent decision by the constitutional court to reject a government attempt to ban the organisation.

Thousands of trade union hecklers booed and whistled at Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, when he appeared at a May Day rally in Neu-Anspach, near Frankfurt, to spell out his plans to reform the economy.

Juergen Peters, the leader of Germany's powerful IG Metall trade union accused the Chancellor of "ripping off employees" and widening the gap between rich and poor through his reform plans, which aim to cut unemployment and welfare benefits and ease restrictions on company layoffs.

China

Millions obeyed the governmentand abandoned May Day holidays to help curb the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus. Farming communities on Beijing's outskirts manned barricades to keep out any outsiders who might bring Sars.

Despite the rising death toll, more than nine out of 10 people recover. Eleven people died yesterday from the disease in China, which has the most infections in the world. A further 187 new cases were reported in China yesterday.

Cyprus

Greek and Turkish Cypriots, who celebrated May Day together yesterday for the first time in 30 years, urged Turkey to end the occupation of northern Cyprus and called for a reunification of the island.

The celebrations became possible as tens of thousands of people continued to cross the United Nations buffer zone splitting the island after, on 21 April, Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, lifted a ban on Turkish Cypriots crossing the border. Since then more than 160,000 people have crossed.

Waving red banners, hundreds of Turkish Cypriot trade unionists marched from the occupied north of Nicosia, the divided capital city, to join trade unionists in the main square on the Greek Cypriot side.

France

Tens of thousands of workers marched to celebrate May Day and protest a government overhaul of the pension system, while the extreme right held its own small parade in Paris.

Trade unionists took to the streets in cities from Paris to Strasbourg near the German border to the southern port of Marseille. Marches were dominated by protests over the centre-right government's planned retirement reform – an issue that already sparked a massive public sector walkout last month.