Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced Monday that we was going to propose a unity government in 24 hours in order to quell popular protests calling for his immediate resignation.  However, opposition leaders immediately rejected that call.

The "opposition decided to stand with the people's demand for the fall of the regime, and there is no going back from that," said Mohammed al-Sabry, a spokesman for a coalition of opposition groups.

Saleh has already promised not to run for re-election in 2013, when his present term expires, but popular demonstrations have so far not been content with the concession.

The move to create a coalition government is a "last ditch effort to try and appease the mounting tension here in the capital and across the country," according to Al Jazeera's Yemen correspondent Hashem Ahelbarra.  Ahelbarra also reports that, should opposition groups reject the offer to form a unity government -- as they already have -- President Saleh will "contact independent personalities and invite them to join this national unity government that would lay down the groundwork for dramatic constitutional reforms."

It is unclear who those "independent personalities" would be.