Germany: 31-mile chain of anti-war activists
BERLIN - Anti-war demonstrators turned out in the tens of thousands Saturday from South Korea to Chile, spattering streets with paint, jeering outside U.S. embassies and in one case forming a 31-mile human chain.
More than 100,000 people protested in strongly anti-war Germany, half of them at a rally in Berlin, where banners read "Stop America's Terror." About 30,000 people held hands along the 31 miles between the northwestern cities of Muenster and Osnabrueck - a route used by negotiators who brought the Thirty Years War to an end in 1648.
Hundreds of women, some carrying placards declaring "the United States and Britain are the axis of evil," protested in San'a, Yemen. Elsewhere in the Arab world, 10,000 turned out at a rally organized by Egypt's ruling party in Port Said, and in Amman, Jordan, more than 3,000 people demanded that the kingdom expel U.S. troops.
In other demonstrations around the world Saturday:
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In the United States, 8,000 to 12,000 war supporters gathered on the steps of the Pennsylvania Capitol. Thousands also marched to support the military in Miami and on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and a few hundred people rallied for U.S. troops in San Francisco.
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About 15,000 anti-war protesters lay down in Boston streets to protest the war. Hundreds also rallied in Los Angeles, New York City, Paterson, N.J., and Boulder, Colo.
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About 3,000 protested in Santiago, Chile, and 100 demonstrated in Caracas, Venezuela. One Caracas protester said of the U.S.-led coalition: "Those wretched gringos decided to leapfrog the U.N.'s authority."
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Marchers in Rome hung black mourning banners from the city's bridges. At Vicenza in northeastern Italy, demonstrators threw red paint and flares at the walls of a U.S. military base where hundreds of paratroopers now in northern Iraq had been based.