Gasoline at $4 a gallon? If that was America's nightmare over the weekend as fuel prices reached a record national average pity poor Europe, where the price of oil and taxes levied at the pump combine to push prices to about double the U.S. level. In the latest show of distress, Spanish truckers Monday began a blockade of their country's border with France, lining up their rigs and slowing them to a crawl to protest the cost of diesel fuel. The strike blocked the highway in both directions in southwestern France. The protest turned ugly when would-be strike-breakers in Spain found their windshields and headlights smashed and their tires slashed. But the Spanish drivers were not the only ones feeling the pinch. French drivers slowed traffic near Bordeaux to demand lower fuel prices, offering a foretaste of a planned national strike by truckers next Monday.
See "European fuel protests widen as Spanish truckers block border with France", Dale Fuchs and Alan Cowell, International Herald Tribune, June 8, 2008