BlackBerry 10 camera software revealed, including built-in Instagram-like photo filters [video]







Just when we start to think we know everything there is to know about BlackBerry 10, new details leak. Mobile blog The Gadget Masters on Friday published a video revealing the new BlackBerry 10 camera software included on a pre-release version of the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone. While the software on this prototype phone likely isn’t final, several new features that will be included in RIM’s (RIMM) new BlackBerry 10 camera software are displayed in the video. Among the highlights is a built-in photo editor that includes cropping, rotation and Instagram-like photo filters. The full video follows below.


[More from BGR: RIM heats up as BlackBerry 10 launch nears]






This article was originally published on BGR.com


Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News




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Selena Gomez vs. Justin Bieber: Who Sang It Better?















01/20/2013 at 06:00 PM EST







Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber


Bryan Bedder/Getty; Steve Mack/FilmMagic


Selena Gomez didn't officially comment on the status of her relationship with on-again, off-again beau Justin Bieber at her New York City acoustic concert benefit for UNICEF. She didn't have to: her song choices seemed to do all the talking.

Along with a cover of industry pal Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble," she also performed a rousing rendition of Justin Timberlake's ultimate breakup anthem: "Cry Me a River."

"I’ve kind of been through a lot these past couple of months, and it’s been really interesting and fun at the same time – and weird and sad, but cool," Gomez, 20, told the audience gathered Saturday night before launching into the 2002 pop single. "This song has helped me through a lot, and if anybody knows 'N Sync or, you know, some J.T., you’re gonna know what I’m talking about. But this song definitely speaks to me."

Of course, true Be-liebers know who made the first move: At his November concert in Boston, Bieber, 18, grabbed his acoustic guitar for a stripped-down version of Timberlake's hit, which takes on the feeling of finding out a partner has been cheating. (According to Vulture, he also covered the song in 2008.)

Watch the former couple try their hands at Timberlake's tune, and tell us in the comments below: Who deserves a standing ovation?

Reporting by GABRIELLE OLYA

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Flu season fuels debate over paid sick time laws


NEW YORK (AP) — Sniffling, groggy and afraid she had caught the flu, Diana Zavala dragged herself in to work anyway for a day she felt she couldn't afford to miss.


A school speech therapist who works as an independent contractor, she doesn't have paid sick days. So the mother of two reported to work and hoped for the best — and was aching, shivering and coughing by the end of the day. She stayed home the next day, then loaded up on medicine and returned to work.


"It's a balancing act" between physical health and financial well-being, she said.


An unusually early and vigorous flu season is drawing attention to a cause that has scored victories but also hit roadblocks in recent years: mandatory paid sick leave for a third of civilian workers — more than 40 million people — who don't have it.


Supporters and opponents are particularly watching New York City, where lawmakers are weighing a sick leave proposal amid a competitive mayoral race.


Pointing to a flu outbreak that the governor has called a public health emergency, dozens of doctors, nurses, lawmakers and activists — some in surgical masks — rallied Friday on the City Hall steps to call for passage of the measure, which has awaited a City Council vote for nearly three years. Two likely mayoral contenders have also pressed the point.


The flu spike is making people more aware of the argument for sick pay, said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values at Work, which promotes paid sick time initiatives around the country. "There's people who say, 'OK, I get it — you don't want your server coughing on your food,'" she said.


Advocates have cast paid sick time as both a workforce issue akin to parental leave and "living wage" laws, and a public health priority.


But to some business owners, paid sick leave is an impractical and unfair burden for small operations. Critics also say the timing is bad, given the choppy economy and the hardships inflicted by Superstorm Sandy.


Michael Sinesky, an owner of seven bars and restaurants around the city, was against the sick time proposal before Sandy. And after the storm shut down four of his restaurants for days or weeks, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that his insurers have yet to pay, "we're in survival mode."


"We're at the point, right now, where we cannot afford additional social initiatives," said Sinesky, whose roughly 500 employees switch shifts if they can't work, an arrangement that some restaurateurs say benefits workers because paid sick time wouldn't include tips.


Employees without sick days are more likely to go to work with a contagious illness, send an ill child to school or day care and use hospital emergency rooms for care, according to a 2010 survey by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that a lack of sick time helped spread 5 million cases of flu-like illness during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.


To be sure, many employees entitled to sick time go to work ill anyway, out of dedication or at least a desire to project it. But the work-through-it ethic is shifting somewhat amid growing awareness about spreading sickness.


"Right now, where companies' incentives lie is butting right up against this concern over people coming into the workplace, infecting others and bringing productivity of a whole company down," said John A. Challenger, CEO of employer consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.


Paid sick day requirements are often popular in polls, but only four places have them: San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and the state of Connecticut. The specific provisions vary.


Milwaukee voters approved a sick time requirement in 2008, but the state Legislature passed a law blocking it. Philadelphia's mayor vetoed a sick leave measure in 2011; lawmakers have since instituted a sick time requirement for businesses with city contracts. Voters rejected a paid sick day measure in Denver in 2011.


In New York, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer's proposal would require up to five paid sick days a year at businesses with at least five employees. It wouldn't include independent contractors, such as Zavala, who supports the idea nonetheless.


The idea boasts such supporters as feminist Gloria Steinem and "Sex and the City" actress Cynthia Nixon, as well as a majority of City Council members and a coalition of unions, women's groups and public health advocates. But it also faces influential opponents, including business groups, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has virtually complete control over what matters come to a vote.


Quinn, who is expected to run for mayor, said she considers paid sick leave a worthy goal but doesn't think it would be wise to implement it in a sluggish economy. Two of her likely opponents, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Comptroller John Liu, have reiterated calls for paid sick leave in light of the flu season.


While the debate plays out, Emilio Palaguachi is recovering from the flu and looking for a job. The father of four was abruptly fired without explanation earlier this month from his job at a deli after taking a day off to go to a doctor, he said. His former employer couldn't be reached by telephone.


"I needed work," Palaguachi said after Friday's City Hall rally, but "I needed to see the doctor because I'm sick."


___


Associated Press writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.


___


Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz


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Euro zone surveys to offer hope as Japan eases


LONDON (Reuters) - The prospect of stronger European manufacturing surveys and decisive monetary easing in Japan this week ought to bolster confidence that the global economy can look forward to better days.


It is definitely not yet time to break open the champagne.


The index derived from polls of purchasing managers across the euro zone, though recovering, is likely to remain well below the 50 threshold that signals expansion.


If the Bank of Japan bows to political pressure and relaxes policy more boldly, it is because the country's noxious cocktail of a huge debt burden, deflation and dwindling external surpluses threatens an eventual fiscal crunch.


And an expected contraction in Britain's economy when fourth-quarter figures are released on Friday will be a reminder, as was Germany's grim end to 2013, that Europe has to dig itself out of a deep hole.


"The real hard economic data are still very negative," said Bert Colijn, an economist in Brussels with the Conference Board, a business research group. "There are improvements, but it still doesn't look that bright."


However, he said the economic news from the euro zone rim was not quite as troubling, and the mood was brightening among the core countries of the single currency area.


Lena Komileva, managing director of G+ Economics, a London consultancy, said it was hard to argue against investors' new-found appetite for riskier assets given that the volatility of equity prices was approaching historical lows and yields on corporate bonds had fallen sharply.


"Financial stress indicators signal a significant improvement in the health of the global economy," she said.


Friday's solid fourth-quarter economic data from China reinforced that view.


PURCHASERS' PROGRESS


Economists polled by Reuters expect an uptick in Thursday's advance purchasing managers' indexes for France and Germany as well as for the euro zone as a whole.


Germany's IFO business confidence survey on Friday is also projected to have risen for the third month in a row.


"The fact that business confidence measures are coming in more positive is a good sign," Colijn commented.


Commerzbank said its leading indicator for the German economy reached an all-time high in December after the European Central Bank's pledge to buy the bonds of troubled economies eased fears of a break-up of the euro.


"We assume that increasingly more companies are gaining confidence and viewing business prospects more positively," said Commerzbank economist Ralph Solveen.


BNP Paribas is also bullish on Germany and is looking for a marked pick-up in growth.


In addition to the ECB's safety net, the global manufacturing cycle is pointing up, while a strong labor market and easy financial conditions are supporting consumption, economists Evelyn Herrmann and Ken Wattret said in a report.


"Moreover, should the global economy surpass expectations and euro zone market stress ease further, upside surprises would be likely to follow. A key issue in this respect would be higher export growth and confidence triggering a stronger rebound in investment," they said.


That is exactly what Japan would like to see, too.


To that end, the government of new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Bank of Japan have agreed to set 2 percent inflation as a new target, supplanting a softer 1 percent ‘goal', according to sources familiar with the central bank's thinking.


They said the BOJ, which meets on Monday and Tuesday, will also consider making an open-ended commitment to buy assets until the target is in sight.


FOR AND AGAINST EASING


Credit Suisse's global equity strategists said an easier monetary policy is justified to cushion the significant fiscal tightening on which Japan will have to embark before long to whittle down a government debt that has reached some 220 percent of national income.


This task is all the more pressing because Japan is moving towards a current account deficit, which will make it more reliant on foreign investors to finance its budget shortfall, Credit Suisse argued.


Trade figures on Thursday will underline the deterioration in Japan's external accounts, with economists polled by Reuters forecasting the sixth consecutive monthly deficit.


Nomura reckons the deficit for all of 2012 widened to 6.6 trillion yen ($73.4 billion) from 2.7 trillion in 2011.


Japanese equities have surged in anticipation of a more aggressive monetary policy stance, but not everyone is happy.


The accompanying slump in the yen has prompted Russia's deputy central bank governor to warn of a new round of ‘currency wars' and the medium-term risk of running ultra-loose monetary policies is likely to be a theme of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which opens on Wednesday.


"I'm pretty worried about the new policies of Japan's newly elected government," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said last week. "When you think of the surplus of liquidity on global financial markets, it is fuelled further by a wrong understanding of central bank policy.


(Editing by Susan Fenton)



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Russia Underworld Gathers for Aslan Usoyan’s Burial


Andrey Smirnov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


People lay flowers on the grave of Aslan Usoyan at a cemetery just outside the Moscow city limits on Sunday.







MOSCOW — Aslan Usoyan, a Russian underworld boss who was killed by a sniper on Wednesday as he walked out of a restaurant in downtown Moscow, was buried in a snowy plot of land under a wooden cross on Sunday in a cemetery just beyond the Moscow city limits.




The scene at Khovanskoye Cemetery — where black-clad toughs formed a procession in their Mercedes Geländewagens, and security officers told journalists to avoid the area for their own safety — was a modest one for a mobster of Mr. Usoyan’s status, perhaps in part because of the government’s efforts to avoid the pageantry that has unfolded around the funerals of Russian mob bosses in the past.


Mr. Usoyan, a Kurd born in 1937 in Tbilisi, Georgia, rose through the ranks of the Vory v Zakone, or Thieves-in-Law, a shadowy criminal organization that emerged in the Soviet prisons, to become boss of the Moscow underworld. Mr. Usoyan survived four stints in prison, the gang wars of the 1990s and two assassination attempts, including one in 2010.


Many of Mr. Usoyan’s contemporaries are interred at the best cemeteries in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but Mr. Usoyan’s relatives wanted him to be laid to rest in his birthplace. But a plane carrying Mr. Usoyan’s body was reportedly turned away from Georgia, fueling rumors that the country had refused to allow Mr. Usoyan to be buried there. (Membership in Thieves-in-Law carries a criminal sentence of more than five years in Georgia.) And then all the cemeteries inside the Moscow beltway turned away his relatives as they sought a burial place.


On Friday, they traveled with his body to Donetsk, Ukraine, and had left for Georgia to bury him before dusk on Saturday when a Tbilisi airport denied landing rights to the plane carrying the coffin, a member of Mr. Usoyan’s family told Georgian television. The plane returned to Donetsk.


Back in Moscow, people within the mayor’s office told the news agency Interfax that “there would be no discussion” of a burial plot within the city limits.


Mr. Usoyan’s family eventually settled on a plot south of the city, where several hundred mourners, many of whom appeared to be from the Caucasus like Mr. Usoyan, arrived to pay their respects on Sunday.


It was a far cry from the 2009 funeral for the kingpin Vyacheslav K. Ivankov, better known as Yaponchik, who was shot to death in Moscow outside of a Thai restaurant.


He was buried at the Vagankovo Cemetery, several miles from the Kremlin, where some of Russia’s most celebrated artists, like the poet Sergei Yesenin and the folk singer Vladimir Vysotsky, are interred. Hundreds of rough-looking men carrying wreaths with inscriptions like “Forgive us, we could not protect you” gathered to see Mr. Ivankov buried in a coffin that was rumored to be equipped with an air-conditioner.


Russian mobsters are partial to ornate graves, and even in smaller cities like Yekaterinburg the burial markers show them wearing designer suits, casually smoking cigarettes or standing with their favorite BMW.


Mr. Usoyan, by contrast, was buried under a relatively simple Russian Orthodox cross.


On a bed of roses in front of the grave, mourners placed a black-and-white photograph of Mr. Usoyan wearing a pinstriped suit, and dozens of wreaths carrying inscriptions to “Grandpa Hassan,” Mr. Usoyan’s nickname, were stacked nearby.


Sergei Kanev, a crime reporter for Novaya Gazeta, said that the authorities had barred Mr. Usoyan’s relatives from burying his body in Moscow, to avoid what he called a “bandit spectacle,” like the one at Mr. Ivankov’s funeral.


“The government tried to do everything it could this time to avoid the sense that this is a country of thieves,” Mr. Kanev said in a telephone interview. “They could not have him buried as a hero.”


Mr. Usoyan was generally recognized as Russia’s most powerful crime boss, the successor to Mr. Ivankov. The police have not named any suspects in his killing.


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Google CEO Page on Apple’s ‘thermonuclear’ Android war: ‘How well is that working?’







Google (GOOG) CEO Larry Page seems unimpressed by Apple’s (AAPL) “thermonuclear war” against his company’s operating system. In an interview with Wired posted Thursday, Page was asked to respond to reports about the late Steve Jobs being “competitive enough to claim that he was willing to ‘go to thermonuclear war’ on Android.” Page responded with one sentence: “How well is that working?” Wired followed up by asking Page whether he though that “Android’s huge lead in market share is decisive” in the battle between the companies and Page only responded that “Android has been very successful, and we’re very excited about it.”


[More from BGR: Cable companies called ‘monopolies that stifle competition and innovation’]






While Apple’s strategy of suing Android vendors has had some notable successes for the company — particularly this past summer when it won a $ 1 billion patent verdict against rival Samsung (005930) — it still hasn’t stopped Android’s rise in both the smartphone and tablet markets, and devices such as the Galaxy S III and the Nexus 7 have proven to be among the most popular released over the past year. So when Page dismisses the significance of Apple’s legal war against Android, he’s got a good point: Some high-profile Apple victories have done very little to hurt consumer interest in Google’s open-source mobile OS so far.


This article was originally published on BGR.com


Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News




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Five Things to Know About The Lumineers















01/19/2013 at 06:00 PM EST







From left: Wesley Schultz, Neyla Pekarek and Jeremiah Fraites


Alan Poizner/PictureGroup


You already know their hit song "Ho Hey" with its catchy shout-it-out chant that sticks in your head – but what's behind Denver-based band The Lumineers' cool blend of indie rock and Americana?

Here are five things to know about the trio – Wesley Schultz (lead vocals, guitar), 30; Jeremiah Fraites (guitar), 27; and Neyla Pekarek (cello, piano), 26 – who are up for two Grammys (best new artist and best Americana album) and are also performing on Saturday Night Live this week alongside host Jennifer Lawrence.

1. Most people think that 'Ho Hey' – which reached No. 1 on three different charts – is about a romantic relationship, but that's not the whole story.
"The essence of the song was that I was really struggling to make ends meet in the big city when I was living in Brooklyn and working in New York. It was a myth, this idea that you'd go there and get discovered and it would be this great place for music," explains Schultz, who, like Fraites, hails from New Jersey and moved to Denver in recent years, where they met Pekarek.

"It's about a lost love in some ways, but it's also a lost dream. It's funny that a lot of people play it at their weddings because it was written from a different place. But it's kind of a beautiful thing, actually, that people can take something I was feeling really, really down about and turn it into a message of hope."

2. They've only recently been able to quit their day jobs.
"I was working as a busser, a bartender, a barista, a guitar teacher, caterer – a lot of service industry jobs, because it allows you to get away and tour if you need to or take a night off to play," explains Schultz.

"Jer was bussing tables right along beside me. And Neyla was a hostess and a substitute teacher. She'd been offered a full-time teaching position while we were in the midst of touring – and losing a lot of money – and she still stuck with it. Somehow she chose this over that, which is absurd, but we're glad she did!"

3. They named their hit song carefully.
Were they ever concerned people might call it "Hey Ho" in a derogatory way? "Yeah, at some point we laughed about it," says Schultz. "We specifically named it 'Ho Hey' instead of 'Hey Ho' [for that reason]. If people searched for it online, we'd rather it not be something that takes you in that direction."

Do they mind when people get the title wrong? "Oh no, that would be a little pretentious!" says Schultz with a chuckle. "It's kind of a silly name to begin with."

4. That's Schultz's mom on the cover of their debut, self-titled album.
"It's my mom, Judy, as a child, and her mother," he explains. "I'd asked my mom if she had any old photos that I could look through a while back, and I fell in love with it. You know if you set up a child for a picture then can't get out of the frame in time? My mom had a funny take on it: It's our first album, kind of our baby, like this child."

Schultz thanked his mom for all her years of emotional support with some heavy metal when their album went gold. "I had the plaque sent to my mom, because she'd been really supportive of us and believed in us when a lot of people were pretty concerned. And now she's got a platinum one!"

5. Their band name has more than one meaning.
While Schultz and Fraites have been playing music together for more than eight years (previous band names include Free Beer, 6Cheek, and Wesley Jeremiah), they've only been known as The Lumineers for the last four thanks to a mistake.

"We were playing a small club in Jersey City, N.J.," explains Schultz, "and there was a band out there at the time called Lumineers who were slotted for the same time, same day, the next week. The person running the show that night [mistakenly] announced us as The Lumineers."

The name stuck. "It doesn't mean anything literally. It's a made-up word," says Schultz. Another strange coincidence they learned? "It's also the name of a dental veneer company," he adds.

So how are Schultz's teeth? "I have a pretty good smile," he says with a big laugh. "I won 'Best Smile' in high school. It's a pretty big deal."

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Lilly drug chosen for Alzheimer's prevention study


Researchers have chosen an experimental drug by Eli Lilly & Co. for a large federally funded study testing whether it's possible to prevent Alzheimer's disease in older people at high risk of developing it.


The drug, called solanezumab (sol-ah-NAYZ-uh-mab), is designed to bind to and help clear the sticky deposits that clog patients' brains.


Earlier studies found it did not help people with moderate to severe Alzheimer's but it showed some promise against milder disease. Researchers think it might work better if given before symptoms start.


"The hope is we can catch people before they decline," which can come 10 years or more after plaques first show up in the brain, said Dr. Reisa Sperling, director of the Alzheimer's center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.


She will help lead the new study, which will involve 1,000 people ages 70 to 85 whose brain scans show plaque buildup but who do not yet have any symptoms of dementia. They will get monthly infusions of solanezumab or a dummy drug for three years. The main goal will be slowing the rate of cognitive decline. The study will be done at 50 sites in the U.S. and possibly more in Canada, Australia and Europe, Sperling said.


In October, researchers said combined results from two studies of solanezumab suggested it might modestly slow mental decline, especially in patients with mild disease. Taken separately, the studies missed their main goals of significantly slowing the mind-robbing disease or improving activities of daily living.


Those results were not considered good enough to win the drug approval. So in December, Lilly said it would start another large study of it this year to try to confirm the hopeful results seen patients with mild disease. That is separate from the federal study Sperling will head.


About 35 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer's is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5 million have Alzheimer's. Current medicines such as Aricept and Namenda just temporarily ease symptoms. There is no known cure.


___


Online:


Alzheimer's info: http://www.alzheimers.gov


Alzheimer's Association: http://www.alz.org


___


Follow Marilynn Marchione's coverage at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP


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Wall Street Week Ahead: Earnings, money flows to push stocks higher

NEW YORK (Reuters) - With earnings momentum on the rise, the S&P 500 seems to have few hurdles ahead as it continues to power higher, its all-time high a not-so-distant goal.


The U.S. equity benchmark closed the week at a fresh five-year high on strong housing and labor market data and a string of earnings that beat lowered expectations.


Sector indexes in transportation <.djt>, banks <.bkx> and housing <.hgx> this week hit historic or multiyear highs as well.


Michael Yoshikami, chief executive at Destination Wealth Management in Walnut Creek, California, said the key earnings to watch for next week will come from cyclical companies. United Technologies reports on Wednesday while Honeywell is due to report Friday.


"Those kind of numbers will tell you the trajectory the economy is taking," Yoshikami said.


Major technology companies also report next week, but the bar for the sector has been lowered even further.


Chipmakers like Advanced Micro Devices , which is due Tuesday, are expected to underperform as PC sales shrink. AMD shares fell more than 10 percent Friday after disappointing results from its larger competitor, Intel . Still, a chipmaker sector index <.sox> posted its highest weekly close since last April.


Following a recent underperformance, an upside surprise from Apple on Wednesday could trigger a return to the stock from many investors who had abandoned ship.


Other major companies reporting next week include Google , IBM , Johnson & Johnson and DuPont on Tuesday, Microsoft and 3M on Thursday and Procter & Gamble on Friday.


CASH POURING IN, HOUSING DATA COULD HELP


Perhaps the strongest support for equities will come from the flow of cash from fixed income funds to stocks.


The recent piling into stock funds -- $11.3 billion in the past two weeks, the most since 2000 -- indicates a riskier approach to investing from retail investors looking for yield.


"From a yield perspective, a lot of stocks still yield a great deal of money and so it is very easy to see why money is pouring into the stock market," said Stephen Massocca, managing director at Wedbush Morgan in San Francisco.


"You are just not going to see people put a lot of money to work in a 10-year Treasury that yields 1.8 percent."


Housing stocks <.hgx>, already at a 5-1/2 year high, could get a further bump next week as investors eye data expected to support the market's perception that housing is the sluggish U.S. economy's bright spot.


Home resales are expected to have risen 0.6 percent in December, data is expected to show on Tuesday. Pending home sales contracts, which lead actual sales by a month or two, hit a 2-1/2 year high in November.


The new home sales report on Friday is expected to show a 2.1 percent increase.


The federal debt ceiling negotiations, a nagging worry for investors, seemed to be stuck on the back burner after House Republicans signaled they might support a short-term extension.


Equity markets, which tumbled in 2011 after the last round of talks pushed the United States close to a default, seem not to care much this time around.


The CBOE volatility index <.vix>, a gauge of market anxiety, closed Friday at its lowest since April 2007.


"I think the market is getting somewhat desensitized from political drama given, this seems to be happening over and over," said Destination Wealth Management's Yoshikami.


"It's something to keep in mind, but I don't think it's what you want to base your investing decisions on."


(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos, additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak and Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Kenneth Barry)



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In Chaos in North Africa, a Grim Side of Arab Spring





WASHINGTON — As the uprising closed in around him, the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi warned that if he fell, chaos and holy war would overtake North Africa. “Bin Laden’s people would come to impose ransoms by land and sea,” he told reporters. “We will go back to the time of Redbeard, of pirates, of Ottomans imposing ransoms on boats.”




In recent days, that unhinged prophecy has acquired a grim new currency. In Mali, French paratroopers arrived this month to battle an advancing force of jihadi fighters who already control an area twice the size of Germany. In Algeria, a one-eyed Islamist bandit organized the brazen takeover of an international gas facility, taking hostages that included more than 40 Americans and Europeans.


Coming just four months after an American ambassador was killed by jihadists in Libya, those assaults have contributed to a sense that North Africa — long a dormant backwater for Al Qaeda — is turning into another zone of dangerous instability, much like Syria, site of an increasingly bloody civil war. The mayhem in this vast desert region has many roots, but it is also a sobering reminder that the euphoric toppling of dictators in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt has come at a price.


“It’s one of the darker sides of the Arab uprisings,” said Robert Malley, the Middle East and North Africa director at the International Crisis Group. “Their peaceful nature may have damaged Al Qaeda and its allies ideologically, but logistically, in terms of the new porousness of borders, the expansion of ungoverned areas, the proliferation of weapons, the disorganization of police and security services in all these countries — it’s been a real boon to jihadists.”


The crisis in Mali is not likely to end soon, with the militants ensconcing themselves among local people and digging fortifications. It could also test the fragile new governments of Libya and its neighbors, in a region where any Western military intervention arouses bitter colonial memories and provides a rallying cry for Islamists.


And it comes as world powers struggle with civil war in Syria, where another Arab autocrat is warning about the furies that could be unleashed if he falls.


Even as Obama administration officials vowed to hunt down the hostage-takers in Algeria, they faced the added challenge of a dauntingly complex jihadist landscape across North Africa that belies the easy label of “Al Qaeda,” with multiple factions operating among overlapping ethnic groups, clans and criminal networks.


Efforts to identify and punish those responsible for the attack in Benghazi, Libya, where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed in September, have bogged down amid similar confusion. The independent review panel investigating the Benghazi attack faulted American spy agencies as failing to understand the region’s “many militias, which are constantly dissolving, splitting apart and reforming.”


Although there have been hints of cross-border alliances among the militants, such links appear to be fleeting. And their targets are often those of opportunity, as they appear to have been in Benghazi and at the gas facility in Algeria.


In the longer term, the Obama administration and many analysts are divided about what kind of threat the explosion of Islamist militancy across North Africa poses to the United States. Some have called for a more active American role, noting that the hostage-taking in Algeria demonstrates how hard it can be to avoid entanglement.


Others warn against too muscular a response. “It puts a transnational framework on top of what is fundamentally a set of local concerns, and we risk making ourselves more of an enemy than we would otherwise be,” said Paul R. Pillar of Georgetown University, a former C.I.A. analyst.


In a sense, both the hostage crisis in Algeria and the battle raging in Mali are consequences of the fall of Colonel Qaddafi in 2011. Like other strongmen in the region, Colonel Qaddafi had mostly kept in check his country’s various ethnic and tribal factions, either by brutally suppressing them or by co-opting them to fight for his government. He acted as a lid, keeping volatile elements repressed. Once that lid was removed, and the borders that had been enforced by powerful governments became more porous, there was greater freedom for various groups — whether rebels, jihadists or criminals — to join up and make common cause.


In Mali, for instance, there are the Tuaregs, a nomadic people ethnically distinct both from Arabs, who make up the nations to the north, and the Africans who inhabit southern Mali and control the national government. They fought for Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, then streamed back across the border after his fall, banding together with Islamist groups to form a far more formidable fighting force. They brought with them heavy weapons and a new determination to overthrow the Malian government, which they had battled off and on for decades in a largely secular struggle for greater autonomy.


David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo, and Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt from Washington.



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