As designers unveiled their latest creations at a first Tunis fashion show, experts from Tunisia's embattled textile sector studied ideas to revive a flagging industry. "Our main goal is to enhance the sector's image and offer a welcoming place for people to swap ideas on how to start partnerships ... and encourage new creative talent," said Samir Ben Abdallah, organiser of last week's festival. At the two-day event, models decked out in creations of young Tunisian designers strutted their stuff in front of international industry experts, artists and fashion addicts.

Moncef Trabelsi, the brother-in-law of ousted Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who was jailed for fraud, has died in custody of a brain tumour, the country's prisons chief said on Friday. "He died at the neurological hospital where he was taken (from jail) on March 18. He had been operated on for a brain tumour," the prisons chief, Habib Sboui, told AFP. Sboui added that Trabelsi, 69, had been unconscious for the past "four or five days". Trabelsi had been sentenced to prison for fraud soon after the January 2011 uprising that toppled Ben Ali.

Bonuses slashed, bullying, forced transfers -- Tunisian employees of Teleperformance angrily accused the French call centre giant of such practices during a strike over poor working conditions in Tunis. Strikes and social unrest have hampered development in the country, amid disappointment at the government's failure to improve living conditions more than two years after the revolution, which was fuelled by similar grievances.

Tunisia must find a new economic model to raise the roughly 20 percent of its people living in poverty from their quagmire, President Moncef Marzouki said on Saturday. "The objective is liberate from poverty two million Tunisians over the course of the next five years," Marzouki told a meeting of the World Social Forum, an anti-globalisation group that wrapped its first-ever meeting in an Arab country.