A poverty-stricken cigarette vendor set himself on fire in the centre of Tunis on Tuesday, suffering extensive burns but not endangering his life, witnesses and medics said. Officials named the man as 27-year-old Adel Khadri and said he hails from an extremely poor family in Jendouba in northwestern Tunisia. He arrived in the capital a few months ago to look for work. Witnesses told AFP that Khadri eked out a living peddling cigarettes in the streets of Tunis.

A man set himself on fire Tuesday in central Tunis, an AFP reporter witnessed, hours before the country's lawmakers were to vote on a new government tasked with pulling Tunisia out of a deep political crisis. "This is a young man who sells cigarettes because of unemployment," shouted the man before immolating himself on Habib Bourguiba avenue, according to a witness. The badly burned man was still conscious when emergency services rushed him to hospital. alf/jds/bpz

An electro-dance craze that has gone viral on the Internet is sparking insults and fisticuffs in Tunisia, where secularists and Islamists are battling for the soul of a nation widely viewed as the Arab world's most progressive. The social divide in this small North African country was sharply punctuated on February 6 when a lone hooded gunmen shot to death leading leftist opposition figure Chokri Belaid outside his home in the capital.

Thousands of people protested in central Tunis on Saturday shouting pro-Islamist and anti-French slogans, a day after the funeral of a murdered opposition figure became a mass rally against the ruling Islamist party. "France get out!" and "The people want to protect the legitimacy" of the government were among slogans chanted by Ennahda party supporters who numbered more than 3,000, AFP journalists estimated. "Enough, France! Tunisia will never again be a French colony," proclaimed some of banners waved by protesters.