The week at a glance...Europe

Madrid

Massive youth protest: In a spontaneous protest, tens of thousands of young people took over central squares in Madrid and other Spanish cities this week, demanding jobs and change. The protest began with just a few hundred demonstrators in Madrid last week; after they were dispersed by police, they took to Facebook and Twitter and called for a youth movement. The protesters—who call themselves los indignados, or the outraged—are demanding a radical overhaul of the economy and politics in Spain, where the unemployment rate among those under 30 is more than 40 percent. The ruling Socialists were soundly defeated by the conservative People’s Party this week in local elections, but that outcome didn’t assuage the demonstrators, who denounced both parties as corrupt and out of touch.

Grimsvötn, Iceland

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Giant cloud of ash: Hundreds of European flights were canceled this week after an Icelandic volcano erupted, spewing ash miles into the sky. The disruption in travel from the Grimsvötn eruption is expected to be less severe than from last year’s eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which caused the closure of most of Europe’s airspace and the cancellation of tens of thousands of flights. After strong criticism from the airline industry, which lost billions of dollars in revenue from last year’s cancellations, safety officials have revised their policies and now close only the airspace affected by the denser parts of an ash cloud.