Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is out of intensive care in neighboring Saudi Arabia where he is being treated for bomb blast wounds, state media said, prompting celebratory gunfire by his supporters that left dozens wounded.

Fireworks rang out over the Yemeni capital during Wednesday night as Saleh loyalists took to the streets of Sanaa "feting the success of the surgery... and his transfer from intensive care to a royal suite" in a military hospital in Riyadh, the official Saba news agency said.

Saudi Arabia's consultative Shoura council has recommended allowing women to vote in the next local polls, in at least four years, without being permitted to run for office, a member said Tuesday.

Saudi men in the ultra-conservative kingdom will vote in September to elect half the members of municipal councils across the country, but Saudi women who are deprived of many basic rights, remain banned from voting.

Protesters demanded a swift transfer of power from Ali Abdullah Saleh as his deputy said the veteran Yemeni president would return within days after surgery in Riyadh for blast injuries.

EU foreign policy Chief Catherine Ashton on Monday urged Saleh to act "in the best interest of his people" while the White House called for an "immediate transition."

King Abdullah has issued a decree limiting work in lingerie shops to Saudi women only in a bid to reduce high female unemployment in the conservative kingdom, state media reported Monday.

SPA news agency said the king also made employment at certain industrial facilities, including drug manufacturers, exclusive to Saudi women, and backed a program to encourage production by families.

Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Mujawar and three other senior Yemeni officials wounded in shelling of the presidential compound were transferred to Saudi Arabia for treatment on Saturday, a medic said.

The condition of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was hospitalized at Sanaa's military hospital after also being wounded in Friday's attack, was "stable" and "of no cause for concern," the medical official told Agence France Presse.

Saudi King Abdullah inaugurated on Sunday the largest women-only university campus in the ultra-conservative kingdom which applies strict segregation between men and women.

The $5.3-billion new campus of Princess Nora bint Abdulrahman University, spread over eight million square meters (26 million feet) on the outskirts of the capital, could host up to 50,000 students in its 15 departments.

A Saudi diplomat was killed in a drive-by shooting near the consulate in Karachi on Monday, the second attack on Saudi interests in Pakistan's biggest city in less than a week, officials said.

The motive of the attack was not immediately clear, but authorities said they were investigating whether it was connected to the death of Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, who was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan on May 2.

Saudi Arabia is unlikely to boost oil production quickly to ease the rise of crude prices, because it needs high prices for its own increased spending, analysts at an international banking think tank said Tuesday.

After producing 8.6 million barrels a day in 2010, the world's leading oil supplier will only kick up production to about 8.9 million barrels this year, said analysts at the Washington-based Institute of International Finance.

Yemeni tribesmen released Tuesday a Saudi diplomat kidnapped last month in the capital Sanaa over a trade dispute involving a Saudi businessman, one of the mediators for his release told Agence France Presse.

"Saeed al-Maliki was released by his abductor," Abd Rabbuh Naser Ahmed al-Salimi, a member of Beni Dhabian tribe, said Mohammed Naser al-Melqati.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has imposed new media restrictions and threatened hefty fines and closure of news organizations allegedly undermining national security, press reports said on Saturday.

Under a decree issued on Friday, the media will be prohibited from reporting anything that contradicts the strict Islamic sharia law or serves "foreign interests and undermines national security," Agence France Presse reported.