"I have never seen anything like this in my political career," London Mayor Ken Livingstone told reporters covering the massive antiwar rally in the city yesterday.

"Pensioners and children, veteran activists and first-timers marched on London's streets on Saturday demanding that Britain and the United States pull back from the brink of war with Iraq," read a news wire report yesterday.

"To the sounds of marching bands and under a sea of rainbow peace banners, an estimated one million people marched through the streets of Rome to oppose the threat of war on Iraq," a dispatch datelined Rome read Saturday.

"Antiwar demonstrations were planned across the United States this weekend -- including mass demonstrations to be attended by hundreds of thousands here Saturday -- as U.S. public sentiment grows against a military conflict with Iraq," an AFP report from New York said yesterday.

"It may be the largest expression of antiwar sentiment in history," said Michael Nagler, founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading force in a city which is expected to draw at least 100,000 marchers today.

"Two massive antiwar rallies, each snaking over several kilometers, filled the streets of Baghdad on Saturday, with many protestors carrying guns to demonstrate their opposition to U.S.-led military threats... Journalists estimated the turnout at hundreds of thousands but no independent numbers were available," an AFP dispatch from Baghdad read yesterday.

These were only a sampling of a flood of news reports from some 350 cities across the planet where people voted with their feet and seemed to cry in unison: "No war for oil".

All reports speak of an unprecedented global movement which its organizers hope will go on record as the "biggest day of pacifist protests in history".

In a thinly-veiled threat politicians understand well, Charles Kennedy, the leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats, told the British prime minister not get carried away with Bush's war hysteria: "Tony Blair must remember what he was elected to do. He was chosen to lead us but not to force us, against our will, into a possibly disastrous confrontation with Iraq," Kennedy wrote in an article in the Daily Mirror yesterday. London's Mayor, Livingstone, seemed to sum up the British people's mood yesterday when he told the BBC Radio yesterday: "I believe that this

[push for war] is simply about American companies getting control of Iraq's oil and I think it's absolutely obscene that we are prepared to attack Iraqis just to enrich the cronies around President Bush." We concur. We also solemnly salute all who took to the streets yesterday and let the deafening echo reverberate across this tortured world: "Not in our name". And a resounding yes to peace and the "people power."