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There were more protests in the North African nation — which was the cradle of the Arab Spring.

The unrest comes in response to the assassination of major opposition leader Chokri Belaid. He was gunned down in front of his home Wednesday in Tunis.

The funeral is set for Friday and there have been calls for massive demonstrations and a general strike.

The country’s prime minister had earlier announced plans to dissolve his government and replace it with a unity coalition.

But the prime minister’s own Islamist party rejected the plan — throwing the country into political chaos.

Freelance journalist Fadil Aliriza in Tunis says that the post-revolutionary reforms have left much to be desired.

And as the new system has not lived up to people’s expectations, he says, Chokri Belaid’s murder puts the Tunisian revolution itself at stake.

The current turmoil in Tunisia is all too reminiscent of the civil war with Islamists that swept Algeria in the 1990s, she says.

That conflict took some 200,000 lives.

The January hostage siege at Algeria’s In Amenas gas field has only deepened Algerians fear of militant Islam, according to Walt.

“The great specter is that there will be a return of Islamic parties, and militant Islamic organizations which is what the civil war focused on in the 1990s,” Walt says. “Everybody you meet in Algeria has lost loved ones in some terrible, violent conflict, and they look over at Tunisia and they see what they might become if there’s a popular uprising here.”

“In the long journey Spain has undertaken to rediscover a part of herself, few occasions are as moving as today,” he said. “The measure we’re announcing will let anyone who can prove their Sephardic origins obtain Spanish nationality.”

In 1492 the Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabela, expelled the Jews from what is now modern day Spain. Those who stayed were forced to convert to Catholicism.

Some 200,000 chose to leave. More than five centuries later, very few have come back.

Today in Spain there are only some 40,000 Jews. The head of the Spanish Federation of Jewish Communities told Spanish TV that the new offer of immediate citizenship for descendants had created a buzz in Jewish communities around the world.

“I can tell you that in less than a month we have received about 6,000 inquiries, among which I would highlight one from an American member of Congress,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the Federation could not say who that Congressman was. But one American who has looked into the possibility of becoming Spanish is Doreen Carvajal, a reporter with the New York Times in Paris.

Some years ago she learned she had Sephardic Jewish roots. She began to investigate, even moved to Spain and wrote a book about her experience, called “The Forgetting River.”

“My initial reaction was that it was a really thrilling moment,” Carvajal said. “That it was an act of justice. They held this news conference with top ministers to offer automatic citizenship to descendents of all Sephardic Jews who left during inquisition. Point blank done. 363 It was a romantic notion on my part. I told my husband, I think I’m going to try and get the passport because it closes a circle. It was very poetic,” Carvajal said.

But Carvajal says that when she contacted Spain’s Jewish Federation, she learned she didn’t qualify. Not yet anyway.

Part of Carvajal’s family was Sephardic Jew. But when they left Spain for Costa Rica, they converted to Catholicism, at least officially, out of fear of Spanish Inquisitors. The Inquisition hunted down and persecuted Jews even in the far-off Spanish colonies.

So, Carvajal is technically the descendent of converts or, conversos. She’s not a practicing Jew herself. She says she was told she’d have to convert to become Spanish.

“I felt like another it was act of being forced,” she said. “Here are the these people, the descendents of the anousim, the forced ones, the conversos, being told you have to do this, you have to be a certain religion? So what happens if you’re a secular Jew? It was a bittersweet moment for me when I realized there were a lot of clauses there and it really wasn’t an automatic offer for everyone.”

Isaac Querub, the president of Spain’s Jewish Federation, did not respond to multiple requests for interviews. Nor has Spain’s Justice Ministry commented on why some descendants are excluded from the citizenship offer.

Carvajal says she’s been left to wonder whether Spain just wants to attract Jewish wealth, from known Sephardic enclaves that have survived in place like Venezuela and Turkey.

Maria Josep Estanyol, an historian on Jews at the University of Barcelona, says she’s not sure why Spain is splitting hairs now. But she says it is well known that when Spain expelled the Jews in 1492 it had disastrous effect on the economy.

Many Iberian Jews were wealthy textile traders and jewelers and bankers.

“At the time of the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan was said to have commented that he couldn’t understand why a great Spanish king like Ferdinand would go without the Jews, who were such a source of wealth, and just give them to him. The Sultan was very pleased to receive these Jewish families, who went on to enrich his empire,” Estanyol said.

In theory, enticing them back now might give a boost to Spain’s shrinking economy. Although, Estanyol doubts many families would reestablish roots in Spain.

“Given how disastrous things are here today, I’d advise against it,” she said.

It’s also been suggested that Spain made the offer to appease Israel, after Madrid supported last year’s successful Palestinian bid for a seat at the United Nations.

Whatever the motivation, some Muslim scholars are denouncing the offer as unfair. They point out that their ancestors were expelled from Iberia too, just a few years after the Jews. But no one’s inviting them back.

One of those places is Cambridge’s Sapporo Ramen where Anchor Marco Werman visits for a bowl of ramen.

And he finds out more about “Where Chefs Eat” from the book’s editor, Joe Warwick.

Where Radio Hosts Eat:

London: Red Fort (try the Biryani)
Paris: L’as du Fallafel
Rome: da Baffetto (pizza),
New York: Gray’s Papaya and Yakitori Totto
Austin, TX: Smitty’s Market (actually in Lockhart, down the road)
Durham, NC: Bullock’s BBQ Restaurant
Chapel Hill, NC: Crook’s Corner
Boston, MA: Coast Café
Heathrow Airport: YO! Sushi
Montreal: Schwartz’s and Le Petit Moulinsart
Miami Beach: Joe’s Stone Crab
Jerusalem: Merkaz Hafalafel Hateimani (Yemeni falafel, the best!)

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Down a dimly lit corridor, in the only burn-unit hospital in Yemen lie the severely burned bodies of Sultan Ahmed Mohammed and Nacer Mabkhout al-Sabooly. They’re conscious, but barely able to speak out loud. Sultan, tells me his name and mutters just one sentence before closing his eyes.

“The plane struck me,” he said.

I met the two last September. They were victims of an attack that officially never happened. At the hospital, Abdelrahman Barman, an attorney who runs the Yemeni human-rights organization Hood, that advocates for the rights of drone victims, explained to me how this mini-bus driver and his cousin from a rural town in Central Yemen ended up barely conscious in a hospital in Sanaa.

“There was a mini-bus full of 14 people, including a woman and her two children,” Barman said. “They were headed to the city. Two of the airplanes-without-pilots arrived, one of them came low enough that the passengers of the bus could see it, and it released the first missile. After it hit the car there were still some people alive, and then the second missile was launched and it killed everyone except three.

Immediately after the strike the Yemeni government announced that it had killed al-Qaeda militants. Families of the civilian victims, in coordination with Hood, threatened to bring the burned corpses of the victims – which included two children and their mother – to the presidential palace. Soon after, the Yemeni government changed its tone. An official from the President’s office called the strike an “accident.”

This was a rare confession by Yemeni officials. But the US government has never officially acknowledged its role in conducting any drone strikes in Yemen, much less disclosed how many civilians have been killed. But according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drones have killed more than 1,100 people in Yemen alone.

But no one’s really sure. “Yemenis feel that they’re no longer feel safe in their homes, roads and marketplaces,” said Ibrahim Qatabi, a Yemeni-American human rights activist and a legal worker with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

He said that while its difficult to know for sure the number of civilians killed, one thing is certain: the impact the program has had on life in general in places like Southern Yemen, where drone strikes can occur weekly, is profound.

“They (Yemenis) have the feeling that any of them can be killed at any given time for crimes they didn’t commit, that there’s no rule of law that can protect them. They feel unsafe,” Qatabi said.

Many critics of the US’ covert drone program say people in Yemen today live with a collective sense of insecurity, waiting for disaster to rain down on them from the heavens at any given time.

And that, said Naureen Shah, tears apart the fabric of society. She’s director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia University Law School, and author of a report called “The Civilian Impact of Drones.”

“People are afraid of sending their children out to go to school, they’re afraid of going outside and maybe engaging with the community because of that fear. There’s a deep psychological impact on people because of the sound of drones flying overhead,” Shah said.

Under international law, governments are supposed to investigate attacks that kill civilians. But because the drone program in Yemen doesn’t officially exist, the US doesn’t acknowledge the strikes. So, no drone strikes, no dead civilians, and no compensation to survivors or the families of victims.

As a result, Ibrahim Qatabi said Yemenis lash out, looking for justice.

“What happens usually if the tribe is strong enough they will block roads to main cities, prompting the government to send some sort of mediator or government official and tribal leaders to go and work out some deals with the families of the victims,” Qatabi said.

Qatabi said that oftentimes, tribes who never had any affiliation with Al-Qaeda or any animosity towards the United States, may attack US targets to avenge the killing of their family members. Many in Yemen say that the drone war is having the effect of creating more militants than it is killing.

That point is hotly contested in the halls of Washington. But Naureen Shah, of the Columbia University Law School, said what is certain is that in places where drones are used regularly, people believe the US views their lives as disposable.

“Because the program is not being acknowledged because there’s no recognition of the harm people come away with nothing,” she said. “We’re not just talking about losing the chance at compensation, but possibly offering some dignity and recognition to the families that have been left devastated.”

Nacer can relate. He’s the mini-bus driver who survived the September 2nd drone strike in Walid Rabiaa that killed 12 civilians. His legs were so badly burned in the strike that he can no longer drive, or earn a living.

I recently reached Nacer’s brother by phone in his village in Central Yemen, to see how the survivors were getting on with life. Ahmed al-Sabooly told me that the Yemeni government provided Nacer and Sultan with just enough money to travel to Egypt to get treatment for their injuries, but not much else has been done since then.

Thank God they are okay now,” Sabooly said. “In terms of their health, they survived, but they of course feel they have been oppressed. We still don’t know why they were targeted. It was a complete shock, and no one knows why this happened except for God.”

A person involved in criminal things should be afraid, he told me, but an innocent person shouldn’t have to live in fear like this.

“What I knew about Albania, it was a communist state,” Qassim says. “I was saying to myself, ‘Albania, that’s a communist state, we already left a communist state.’”

Qassim says he fled China in 2001 to escape persecution of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority group.

Qassim was among 22 Uighurs captured near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in 2001, not long after the US began the war in Afghanistan.

Many facts in the case remain murky, including where exactly they were captured. Or why they spent time at camp in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. By some accounts, they were being trained as militants to fight for Uighur independence in China.

But years of court cases and an evolving position of the US government on the men, generally came to the same conclusion: They weren’t the enemies of the US or US forces.

Still, they remained locked up for years because they had nowhere to go. China considers the men terrorists and seeks to prosecute them. Few countries wanted to take them. Albania, a staunch US ally, agreed to take five Uighurs in 2006.

Qassim actually knew something about Albania, growing up in western China. Chairman Mao and Albania’s communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, forged close ties in the 1970s.

The result was that people in China heard a lot of Albania and its culture, especially through Albanian movies that were dubbed into Chinese.

“I had this idea that Albania would be a huge country because when I was young, I would see many [Albanian] movies on Chinese TV because of the strong relationship at the time,” Qassim says.

But when he arrived, Qassim says he had trouble believing he was in Albania, in part, because Tirana seemed too small to be the capital of a country.

“I looked at a map to find Albania. And I couldn’t find it. I asked people, “Can you point at Albania on the map?” and what they showed me was a tiny dot.”

The Albania that Qassim encountered had a changed a lot since the 1970s. The country had become a democracy, and it was also no longer an officially atheist state. In fact, the majority of Albanians are Muslim.

Another thing Qassim didn’t know was that Tirana is teeming with pizza parlors. He’d never even heard of pizza before he arrived, but he wandered into a pizzeria and somehow managed to order a pie — without speaking Albanian.

“It was delicious, and the owner didn’t charge me for it as a sign of respect,” Qassim says.

That first taste eventually inspired Qassim to become a pizza-maker. He now works part-time at a Halal pizzeria in Tirana.

“This isn’t a hard job, but it gives you pleasure when people enjoy the pizza you make, when they give you a tip,” Qassim says as he makes his speciality, the Mix Pizza, which is basically the works with a few regional touches: Albanian smoked beef and Bosnian sausage.

His newfound culinary craft also helped him adjust to life in Albania. For the first two years, he struggled with the notoriously difficult language despite taking classes. Once he started working at the pizzeria, Qassim says his Albanian improved considerably.

“At first it was a learning by trial. Sometimes I made mistakes. And guys would make fun of me. It was definitely a learning process,” he says in relatively fluent Albanian.

And when Qassim talks to customers, he makes a point of telling them about the history of Uighurs.

But it was the story of the Uighur ex-Guantanamo detainees that resonated with Ahmet Dursun, a friend of Bakker’s who owns another Tirana restaurant.

Dursun met the Uighurs by chance in 2007, when one of Bakker’s friend’s showed up at his Turkish restaurant to ask for directions.

Dursun invited the Uighurs in for a meal. They were able to communicate because the Uighur language is related to Turkish, And they told him their story.

“I had one of the most difficult meals of my life. When they were telling me of their experiences, it was very tragic to hear what they had gone through,” Dursun says.

Dursun decided he needed to do more than just offer hospitality. He wanted to show Albanians that the Uighurs deserved to be part of their society.

Dursun figured the best way to do that was through their tastebuds. His restaurant had a rotating special in which non-Albanians would come and cook dishes from home to raise money for a charity.

Dursan invited the Uighurs to cook, and Qassim’s veal pilaf was a hit.

“He used so many carrots, that rabbits probably went hungry that day,” Dursun recalls. “It was very tasty – delicious. It also had grilled onions. It was a mixture that I’d never seen before. Everyone enjoyed it a lot.”

Dursan also invited a TV reporter to interview Qassim and the others.

Qassim says that interview marked a turning point. Until then, he says some people were nasty to him, treating him as if he was a terrorist.

“People got to understand our plight, and from that moment on it got better,” Qassim says.

The Uighurs’ lives have improved considerably since. They no longer live in a refugee camp and lead relatively normal lives. Qassim has Albanian friends. He also has a wife here, another Uighur, and an infant daughter.

Qassim’s biggest concern now is making ends meet. He only works part-time, and the state aid he receives isn’t enough to support his new family. Qassim says it’s hard to find work — between the high unemployment and his background.

“It’s difficult when you go and apply for a job. They ask me where I’m from, and I tell them I’m an Uighur. So right away they make a connection with Guantanamo,” Qassim says.

His experience at Guantanamo continues to weigh heavily on Qassim. Three of his friends remain locked up there. “No country is willing to take them,” he says.

It’s a situation Qassim knows all too well from his four-and-a-half years at Guantanamo.

Surprisingly, Qassim doesn’t voice any resentment toward the US or the guards for his plight. He blames Pakistani forces, whom he says turned him and the other Uighurs over to the Americans for a bounty in 2007.

The Pakistanis, Qassim says, duped the Americans into thinking the Uighurs were terrorists.

“When we told the Americans we were Uighurs, the situation improved. They didn’t have any problem with us. They actually treated us quite nice. Some of our jailers would give us chocolate bars,” Qassim recalls.

Still Qassim says the conditions at Guantanamo were terrible. But he also avoids blaming anyone for the fact that he wasn’t released sooner.

“I don’t know what took so long,” Qassim says, “Maybe there were political reasons.”

Qassim, though, might be wise to avoid sounding critical of the US in Albania — an overwhelmingly pro-American country that’s hosting the Uighurs at the request of the US.

Qassim also can’t leave Albania because he’s not a citizen and doesn’t have a passport. And if he were to return to China, he would almost certainly be arrested.

She’s studying journalism in Kampala, Uganda but recently for one night she put down her books and headed out on the town to chronicle her night out.

Kemigisa was creating an audio diary out for a new series that aired this week on the BBC, “Girl’s Night Out.”

The series gives you a glimpse at a typical girls night out from five women in five countries as far flung as Ottawa and Ramallah to Rio and Melbourne.

Listen as each woman explores her trials and triumphs she navigates a typical night out:

The trains are no exception, and the Swiss are justly proud of their rail service.

But that love affair is turning sour, because of a seemingly minor change in ticketing policy.

A year ago the rail company prohibited the purchase of tickets on trains.

You can buy a ticket from a machine on the platform or by using your smartphone.

But this has led to problems.

For example, the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes was fined $210 after she bought a ticket with her phone.

Her credit card transaction did not clear until after the train had left the station, so the ticket was deemed “invalid.”

This kind of apparent injustice is affecting about 1,000 people per day, and the rail company is making an additional $2 million in revenue per month.

But Foulkes – who’s lived and worked in Switzerland for years – says the revenue is coming at the cost of customer goodwill.

Foulkes says she’s disputing the charge.

One day she met two producers who needed a singer for a demo of a song called “Back It Up.”

Emerald says, “It was just love at first sight. I just so loved this song, and I was like, “Oh My God I’m going to be the demo singer of a really really big hit.”

She says it all just clicked for her.

Emerald continues, “This moment with ‘Back it Up’ was definitely one of those moments where you just know, “This is the kind of music I would like to make.” I knew that in that second.”

So began her transformation into the smokey jazz chanteuse known as Caro Emerald.

She and the producers decided to make a full-length album and put it out on their own.

Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor is a highly stylized nod to the big bands and jazz divas of the 40s and 50s.