BBC News with Julie Candler

Riot police in Algeria have broken up an opposition demonstration by dozens of people in Algiers, who’ve been calling for greater freedom. Officials say 19 people were injured. The opposition puts the figure at more than 40. Several arrests were also made. Some of the demonstrators were waving Tunisian flags that link to the unrest in neighbouring Tunisia. Chloe Arnold in Algiers says the protest was short-lived.

It was broken up almost before it had begun. There were people wearing Tunisian flags and Algerian flags, but an enormous police presence here. I’ve never seen so many riot vans on the streets, helicopters circling overhead. And not actually that many protesters. I mean we are talking about a few hundred at most. But it just shows the extent to which the government is concerned about what’s happening in neighbouring Tunisia that they put on so much of the security force to clamp down on this demonstration.

In Tunisia, several thousand demonstrators including a number of police officers have taken to the streets of the capital Tunis, from where Magdi Abdelhadi reports.

This is a dramatic and extraordinary turn of events in the Tunisian uprising that forced the president to flee the country a week ago. Members of the police, who last week were defending the old regime, have now joined in the demonstration. They say they are victims of the ousted president as much as any other ordinary Tunisian. Despite promises by the interim government to introduce genuine democratic reforms and to hold free and fair elections, the protests don’t seem to end.