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Yemen protests swell as 180,000 join rallies nationwide
Protests in Yemen mushroomed Friday into the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in the nation's history, as more than 180,000 people marched in streets and squares calling for the ouster of longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
About 30,000 anti-government protesters, 10 times as many as have gathered in recent days, convened in front of Sana University here in Yemen's capital in peaceful, joyful demonstrations. More than 150,000 others convened in other cities and provinces across Yemen, according to local news reports.
The protests in Yemen were the largest on a "day of rage" across the Arab world Friday. Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Jordan, Bahrain, Iraq and Algeria. Even in Tunisia and Egypt, which have already seen longtime leaders fall, people were out in force, demanding accountability from their new governments.
In Sana, the mood near the university was markedly different Friday from that of the last week, in part because of the surge of tens of thousands of people and the diversity they brought to the two-week-old protests.