This week Tunisia’s constitutional assembly elected 66-year-old Moncef Marzouki, a former dissident who was imprisoned and then exiled in France, as Tunisia’s first president after the fall of Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali. Marzouki told Tunisians he “represents a country, a people, a revolution ... I know you will hold me to account.” As president, he will be a progressive secular counterweight to the moderate Islamist party Al-Nahda (renaissance), now Tunisia's dominant political force.

As people of conscience around the world marked the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, ever new actions help bring Palestinians closer to achieving a state of dignity, says Eric Walberg

Just in case there was an iota of doubt left in your mind, Israel was officially declared an apartheid state during a session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Cape Town on 7 November.

US friendly fire knows no bounds. The deaths of Pakistan soldiers and civilians is just the tip of the iceberg, which will only disappear in the heat of a national uprising, putting an end to Pakistan's neocolonial dependency, says Eric Walberg

Morocco beats the other Arab Spring nations to a constitution and elections, with mixed results

Israel got a taste of the new people’s Egypt with the arrest of an Egyptian journalist on the flotilla to Gaza and plans for the biggest aid convoy yet, reports Eric Walberg

The ongoing Freedom Waves campaign to break the siege of Gaza hit the world headlines last week with the attempt by the Canadian Tahrir and the Irish Saoirse -- Arab and Irish for freedom -- to bring aid to Gazans directly. This time the boats left from Turkey, not Greece, where last June authorities refused to let the Freedom Flotilla depart. “Our efforts in Greece only fuelled our determination to challenge the imprisonment of the people of Gaza. We said we would continue to sail and so we are,” according to a Freedom Waves press statement.