BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: From France now, high fuel prices contributing to high tensions -- fishermen in France, angry over fuel prices that have tripled in the past year and a half, threw up blockades in protest. Those blockades starting to come down now, now that the French government has responded. From our Paris bureau, here's our bureau chief, Peter Humi, now with an update on what's happening there. And Peter, we saw the videotape. The lines were definitely long at the borders.</s>PETER HUMI, CNN PARIS BUREAU CHIEF: They certainly were, and it has been a very frustrating two days or so for a lot of mainly British tourists trying to get back to Britain after spending their holidays in France or least on continental Europe, and also for a lot of truck drivers that also have been snarled up by the French blockade. Now, the blockades have been both by boat and also by vehicles, preventing access for all these vehicles to get onto ferries or cross on the shuttle service in the Channel tunnel. Now, the fishermen appear to have got their way. The government says it will compensate the fishermen for the dramatic increase in the past 18 months or so of diesel costs, about 150 percent increase, in fact. So there will be various forms of compensation. It's a fairly complicated package, but the fishermen appear to be happy with what they've been offered, and they're now beginning to lift the blockade. And we expect that cross-Channel traffic will resume in the next few hours, although it probably won't return to normal until tomorrow morning or so. So the strike does, or rather the protest action does appear to have been ended now. The government has satisfied the fishermen, but there are other sectors -- the agricultural industry and also truck drivers themselves -- they're concerned about the rise in fuel. They're promising protest action. So we might be seeing similar action, although the government says it's determined to try and control the cost of fuel, diesel fuel, which they say to some extent is beyond their control, based on the international market price for oil. Back to you.</s>HEMMER: All right, Peter Humi from Paris there.
In France, High Fuel Prices Contributing to High Tensions