In Spain, tens of thousands of people, mainly students, took to the streets to reinforce a nationwide trade union strike in protest at the war.

In the capital Madrid, an estimated 50,000 demonstrators marched, waving banners that read "Against the imperialist war."

Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar was among them and said he was taking part in support of "everyone who says they hate and curse war."

The Prado museum in Madrid closed for two hours, with a reproduction of "Guernica," Picasso's famed anti-war painting, placed at its doors.

Further north in the Mediterranean city of Barcelona, at least a further 30,000 people hit the streets, chanting "Not a soldier, not a euro, not a bullet for this war."

In Greece, nearly 600 journalists stopped work for two hours and marched to the US embassy to protest the war and the casualties it has caused among their colleagues in the media.

"Americans, murderers of peoples", "Americans, murderers of reporters," chanted the demonstrators.

Eleven journalists and a Kurdish translator working for the BBC have been killed since the US-led war began on March 20, and another two are missing.

In Athens, organisers have barred Britain from participating at a book fair where it was due to be the honored country, because of its participation in the "illegal US invasion" of Iraq.

Instead, the fair, a popular annual event to be held on May 9-25, would be dedicated to anti-war books, the Athens Publishers' and Booksellers' Association said.

In Paris, a hundred demonstrators snuck into the building housing the American Express offices and hung an anti-war banner on the first floor, organisers said.

In Germany, a McDonald's party bus and an advertisement for the food chain on a motorway were set alight in apparent anti-war protests.

In Indonesia, some 150 protestors gathered outside the compound of the US firm Caltex on Sumatra island, demanding the firm's US employees condemn the war within 24 hours or face expulsion from the country.

In Britain and France, organisers vowed to go ahead with weekend anti-war protests planned in London and Paris.

"We are organising meetings in many parts of the country which are bigger than those which took place before the war started," said Andrew Murray, the chairman of the British Stop the War Coalition.

The group has called a march through London on Saturday, during which participants are to lay flowers outside Downing Street in memory of those who have died in the conflict.

On March 22, two days after US and British troops invaded Iraq, between 200,000 and 700,000 people marched in the British capital against the war.

Meanwhile anti-war activists in the United States were planning to refocus their message from anti-war to anti-occupation.

Organisers say the rallying cry of protests will now be an end to the impending occupation of Iraq by coalition forces.

"It's more urgent and more important than ever that there be a mobilisation" said Sara Flounders, co-director of the New York-based International Action Center who is helping to organise a demonstration this weekend.

Americans supporting the war in Iraq gathered meanwhile at the "Ground Zero" site of the devastated World Trade Center for a rally in support of US troops in Iraq.

The organisers, an umbrella group of construction unions, said they expected as many as 50,000 people, which would make it the largest pro-war event in New York since the fighting in Iraq began

SPACE.WIRE