So Muammar Gaddafi is still alive and broadcasting messages of defiance - what's the betting that he and his son Saif al-Islam are over the border in Algeria.
The Algerian government denies this, but confirm that Gaddafi's wife, daughter, sons Mohamed and Hannibal, and various grandchildren are now there.
This news highlights the fact that unlike Egypt and Tunisia, Algeria has still not recognized Libya's Transitional National Council (TNC) as the legitimate successor to govern Libya.
Algeria are first waiting for assurances from the the TNC leadership that they will combat al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (this is the al-Qaeda cell in based in Algeria and the group responsible for the recent attacks that killed 26 people on a military base)
Oil-rich Algeria has so far adopted a strategy similar to that of the Saudi government when faced with rumblings of demands for reform, i.e. to spend more on social issues, on infrastructure and housing projects, and to give direct and indirect subsidies to combat rising costs of living and unemployment.
So far his has not been enough to prevent the high level protests, strikes and civil disturbances but the problem for Algeria is that civil unrest is commonplace and easily isolated and managed by Algeria's 170,000 highly trained internal security forces.
Algeria's opposition parties and unions have made little headway in mobilizing the kind of youth-based discontent that broke the internal regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. And young activists have shown little capacity for changing the rules of the political game themselves.
In fact over the summer months, the unemployed youth of Algiers have been engaging in their own version of gang warfare rather than in planning organized protest or resistance along Syrian or Libyan lines.
Among the unemployed and under-represented citizens of Algeria, the pressures for change are nonetheless both there and steadily growing but the corrupt mismanagement of Algeria's wealth may actually implicate, include and involve many more people that than just a single presidential family or elite cadre as in the case of Egypt or Tunisia.
This may well be one reason why a wider movement of revolt has so far made such slow progress.
This may well be one reason why a wider movement of revolt has so far made such slow progress.
