Unrest in Ferguson

Police in Ferguson fired teargas at protestors, despite the presence of the National Guard to restore calm in the Missouri town. Demonstrators had thrown glass bottles at the police and tried to block a street, the CNN reported.

An eye witness compared the police’s behavior to "fighting a war with unarmed citizens."

In a press briefing early Tuesday morning local time, the Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson said they had arrested 31 people, some of whom worked for the press.

Johnson also confirmed that two people had been shot and wounded, although Johnson said that officers had not fired any shots.

The police said that they had repeatedly asked journalists to clear streets where people were under threat and that the media should not "interfere" with officers doing their job.

According to the German newspaper Die Welt two German journalists, including one of its own reporters, Ansgar Graw and Frank Hermann, a writer for several other publications, had been detained for three hours by the police on Monday.

The German daily said the police had asked them to move away from an empty street. The two journalists claimed that the street had witnessed protests earlier in the evening but that it was empty and quiet when they were arrested.

In his own account of the events, Die Welt reporter Graw later wrote: "The police wanted to avoid us from completing our task of looking into the events in Ferguson. This is a violation of press freedom."

Police in Ferguson are also reported to have arrested Scott Olson, a photographer working for the photo agency Getty images. Olson was taken into custody while taking pictures of the demonstration.

Obama calls for restraint

Nearly 200 troops of the US National Guards have been deployed in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis.

On Monday, President Barack Obama emphasized that the National Guard was to be used in a "limited" manner: "To a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seem some understanding rather than simply holler at each other."

The Attorney General Eric Holder has been sent to Ferguson as the government pursues a civil rights investigation into the killing of African-American teenager, Michael Brown. The 18-year-old was shot by Darren Wilson, a 28-year-old white police officer of August 9. Post-mortem revealed that Brown had been shot twice in the head and had received six bullets in all.

Police allege that there was a scuffle between the officer and Brown. However, Michael Bade, former New York chief medical examiner said he found no evidence of a struggle between Brown and the police officer.

mg/kms (AFP, dpa)