G20 Arrest Total Soars Above 500

Police in Toronto conducted a large raid and rounded up more protesters today in an effort to quell further violence at the global economic summit after black-clad youths rampaged through the city, smashing windows and torching police cruisers. Police said they have arrested more than 500 demonstrators, many of whom were hauled away in plastic handcuffs and taken to a temporary holding center constructed for the G20 summit.

Thousands of police in riot gear formed cordons to prevent anti-globalization demonstrations from breaching the steel and concrete security fence surrounding the summit site. A rep said police made at least 50 arrests in a morning raid on a University of Toronto building, seizing a cache of "street-type weaponry" such as bricks, sticks and rocks. "What we saw yesterday is a bunch of thugs that pretend to have a difference of opinion with policies and instead choose violence to express those so-called differences of opinion," a spokesman for PM Stephen Harper said. (More G20 stories.)