YEMENI PROTESTERS PRESS DEMANDS

Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Yemen Sunday, demanding a transitional presidential council be created to replace embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh and that his sons and relatives leave the country.

The demonstrations came as a senior Yemeni official declared that Saleh was recovering from wounds sustained in a June 3 attack on his presidential compound and would soon return from Saudi Arabia, where he is being treated.

"The president is improving, and according to Saudi medics, he is recovering and will be back soon," Abdu al-Janadi, Yemen's deputy information minister, told reporters.

Ever since Saleh left the country, his allies have regularly announced that he would return within days, in an apparent effort to prevent his political opponents from declaring him incapable of ruling Yemen. Western diplomats have said Saleh's injuries are severe and that his return, should it happen, could take several months.

Rebels in Libya's western mountains said they have advanced and are battling Moammar Gadhafi's forces in a strategic town southwest of the capital, ramping up pressure against government troops on a second front.

The rebels' claim of an advance into the outskirts of the town of Bair al-Ghanam, about 50 miles from Tripoli, follows weeks of intense fighting in the Nafusa Mountains in which opposition forces have slowly pushed Gadhafi troops back toward the capital.

Libya's rebels control the eastern third of the country and pockets, including a number of Nafusa mountain towns, in the west.

The bulk of the fighting in recent months has been on front lines to the east of Tripoli. But a push by rebels from the Nafusa mountains could force Gadhafi to commit more troops to the southern and western approaches to the capital.

A rebel military spokesman in the Nafusa mountains, Gomaa Ibrahim, said opposition fighters and government troops have been fighting since early Sunday on the periphery of Bair al-Ghanam.

After talks with the leader of Egypt's ruling military council, Sen. John McCain on Sunday expressed confidence the council wants to transfer power to an elected government "as soon as possible."

McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in Egypt with a U.S. business delegation, said it was in the United States' interest to see Egypt become a free and democratic country.

McCain said the leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, "again indicated his absolute commitment to a transition to a civilian government at the earliest possible time after the elections have taken place."

NEWS SERVICES