Those wacky Europeans -- here are two news items that Americans can only scratch their heads about: are these people crazy or what?

1. Those wacky French students:
Paris Flambé
On Thursday, some 250,000 demonstrators took to the streets with more than 300 arrests made. The student violence is the worst since 1968.

Two weeks into the violent protests, the rage of French students shows no signs of subsiding. How angry are they? So angry that they're even carrying protest banners written in English in the anglophobic Republique. "Villepin: Give Up, in France You Are not the King!" and "We Shall Never Surrender!" The Academie francaise surely won't be pleased, but the banners do help ensure the maximum international media impact.

On Thursday, the violence intensified in Paris, where police reported that 46 security officials were injured -- 11 seriously enough to require hospital treatment. Police arrested more than 300 protestors across the country, including 180 in Paris, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy reported. Nationwide, hundreds of thousands attended demonstrations.

For several weeks now, students in France have been protesting a new law introduced by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin that makes it easier for employers to fire young workers under the age of 26 from their first jobs. De Villepin's logic is that companies will be more inclined to hire younger workers if they know they also have the option of laying them off. More than 20 percent of France's 18-25 year olds are jobless, and that figure rises to 50 percent in the Parisian suburbs where rioting broke out last autumn. Though the autumn riots were dominated by immigrant youth, they do share a common theme with the March protests: Whether Muslim, Catholic or Jewish, France's young are desperate for better career prospects. That's the emotion fueling the current protests, which have erupted in violent scenes reminiscent of the student rioting that took place in France in 1968.

In Paris on Thursday night, hundreds attended a rally at the Place de la Sorbonne -- in front of the famous university -- where they set fires and vandalized cars. Protesters also vandalized nearby cafes and burned down a bookstore, filling the area with clouds of smoke. Police sought to break up the violent crowd using tear gas and water cannons and said that right-wing extremists had also infiltrated the demonstrations, running through the streets with face masks and attacking other protesters with sticks.

Violent protests also spread to other cities across France. In the western city of Rennes, organizers said 15,000 people attended a peaceful demonstration. But even there several dozen youth were reported to have set trash cans on fire, vandalized cars and attacked police.

Police estimate that close to 250,000 students took to the streets across France on Thursday, but student groups have put that figure at about 500,000. In Paris alone, police estimated a total of 33,000 protestors; organizers said there were 120,000. In Bordeaux, 25,000 stormed the barricades; 15,000 in Marseille; 12,000 in Lille; 10,000 in Clermont-Ferrand and Angers and 8,000 in Lyon.

At demonstrations planned for Saturday, those numbers are expected to swell dramatically as unions and members of France's leftist parties join the students. On Tuesday, last time the two groups converged, organizers estimated there were a total of 1.1 million protesters.

French officials, though, are showing no signs of budging on the new measure. Prime Minister de Villepin says he is "open to dialogue, in the framework of the law, to improve the first job contract," but he has not indicated he would withdraw the measure. However, French Labor Relations Minister Gerard Larcher told RTL radio that the two-year trial period in the new contracts was not "hard and fast," and employers and unions could still negotiate the exact terms.

On Wednesday, 46 university heads called on students and the government to open a dialogue. And on Friday evening, de Villepin planned to meet with the heads of France's universities in an effort to deescalate what is fast becoming a national crisis. According to student organizations, students are on strike at 66 of France's more than 80 universities.


2. Those wacky Germans: Want to be German? Name three philosophers
-- by JAMES MACKENZIE

GERMANS have reacted sceptically to a proposed citizenship test revealed this week that would ask candidates to name three philosophers, name the doctor who found a cure for cholera and identify a Nobel laureate.

The test, proposed by the conservative state government of Hesse, includes 100 questions covering German history, politics and civic institutions and is intended to ensure new German citizens share a basic cultural knowledge.

"Anyone who wants to acquire German citizenship should have gone through an extensive consideration of our country and our system of values and have accepted them," the state's interior minister, Volker Bouffier, said.

But the questions, which would be in addition to other requirements such as language skills, aroused widespread mockery and prompted the mass-selling daily Bild to ask its readers: "Could you become a German?"

Germans wonder increasingly about how to integrate the country's large immigrant population, in which many people live in communities cut off from mainstream society and speak German badly or not at all. The proposal faces a period of public debate before it can be implemented.

It is not the first time state governments, which are responsible for citizenship issues, have courted controversy on the issue in a country that, since the end of the Second World War, has prided itself on openness and tolerance.

Under a proposed model in the state of Baden-Württemberg, widely assumed to be aimed at Muslims, officials were to ask candidates if they thought a wife should obey her husband.

Another question asked for opinions on the 9/11 attacks.

Some commentators welcomed the Hesse test, saying it would reinforce a shared cultural understanding. Others, such as the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau , which characterised the test as "Who wants to be a Germanaire?", dismissed it as superficial and irrelevant.

Candidates would be asked to identify three non-Alpine German mountain ranges, say which composer's ninth symphony ends with the Ode to Joy and name the assembly that met in Frankfurt's Paulskirche church in 1848.

They would also have to explain the term "Holocaust", say when the Nazis held power and when the Berlin Wall fell.