Meet Heather Poe


This is Heather Poe. She?s a young woman, living in Los Angeles and attending college there, though it isn?t her hometown. She?s kind, happy, eager to please and a little bit geeky. She?s also one of the best features of one of my favourite games, Troika?s Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

You find Heather in the hospital, where she?s been rushed into the emergency room for some strange neck wound. As a newly turned vampire yourself, you know that there?s more to this story than meets the eye, but your heightened senses also tell you that she?ll survive her undead encounter if she just gets some fresh haemoglobin. Unfortunately, there isn?t a doctor to hand and the hospital is criminally understaffed.

Earlier, a friend of yours told you that vampire blood has certain special characteristics when drunk by humans ? mainly as a healing elixir. You pause, then slit your wrist to save her young life before disappearing back into the night. You have errands to run, after all. Little do you know that this isn?t the last time you?ll be seeing Heather.

She shows up a few nights later, grabbing you on the street and desperate to thank you. She?s babbling and doe-eyed and she knows far too much about you and your kind ? you?ll suffer reprisals if you don?t take this matter in hand, but now is not the time. You send her back to your haven ? that grotty motel in Santa Monica ? and tell her to wait for you.

You have a choice now. Your blood is mixing with Heather?s and creating a potent, mind-altering brew. The more time she spends with you, the more she falls under your thrall, whether you want her to or not. You know you should send her away, break the bond and tell her to forget all this silliness about vampires. You know you should, but a lot of reasons run through you mind for why you shouldn?t ? a lot of excuses.

You?re little more than a servant for others at the moment, so the idea of cultivating your own slave does have a certain appeal. Letting her go may bring the wrath of your superiors if she exposes you. You wonder about the direction you could steer Heather, making her serve you in a way that seems repugnant in the daylight hours.

That?s what's great about being a vampire; not casting a reflection. You can avoid a lot of guilt and shame when you don?t have to meet your own gaze.


Over the next few days or weeks, Heather changes. Sometimes you're the one pushing, telling her how to dress or to surrender her life savings. At other times, it?s the blood that changes her. She was eager to please at the beginning, but now her devotion is fanatical. One day you find she?s bought you home some food - still alive and locked in the bathroom. The longer the ?relationship? lasts, the more you get the idea that it isn?t going to end well, but the harder it becomes to end it.

Heather?s fate ultimately lies in your hands. She?s a nice, likeable person and you want to do well by her. At the same time, though, the rest of LA is working to reshape you. You may have been just an average guy a few weeks ago, but now you?re a vampire; suffering and cruelty is your stock and trade.

As you acclimatise to this new existence, you start to adapt. You already don?t have to look at yourself in the mirror, but now you?re learning to hide the rest of yourself behind your new definition of what you are. You are a demon. Once you accept that, it becomes very easy to do very nasty things to a very nice person.

Then, when the game ends, you realise what?s happened and you learn something about yourself. That?s why Vampire: Bloodlines is one of my favourite games.

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Blog - How To Make Graphene Paper

Carbon fibres were developed in the 1950s and have since helped to revolutionise the design, manufacture and performance of everything from yachts and planes to cars and bicycles.

Now, 60 years later, a new material looks set to have a similar impact: graphene paper.

For the moment, it's only possible to make graphene in tiny scraps. So the trick in scaling it up is to find ways to stack these sheets and bond them together to make something larger. Trouble is nobody has yet managed this feat.

Today, Yilun Liu and pals at Tsinghua University in Beijing, calculate from first principles what such a material might be like.

The trick in making graphene paper strong is to find ways to bind small sheets of graphene together end-to-end to make a larger sheet but also to bind layers together using bonds between them. Many biological materials use the same trick to increase their strength, materials such as bone, teeth and nacre.

Of course, these materials are only as strong as their weakest link. So Yilun and co have calculated what sort of strength we can expect from graphene paper.

Their answer is that it depends on the types of cross-links, their strength, number and whether they reform quickly after they are broken as epoxy and hydroxyl groups do.

This approach allows engineers to design the material accordingly. In fact, the new model can be used to design other papers too so it may be possible to improve the properties of all kinds of thin, layered sheets.

Yilun and co's model makes a number of interesting predictions. For example, it says the links between graphene layers will increase the distance between them, thereby reducing the density to about half that of graphite. So graphene paper is not only going to be strong but also very light.

All it needs now is somebody to go ahead and create a sheet of this stuff. And if it can one day be made cheaply and easily enough we'll see it everywhere--both inside and outside our bodies.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1105.0138: Mechanical Properties of Graphene Papers

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Political Memo: A Brief Victory Lap Before Budget Fight Strains ?Unity? Call

While Mr. Obama heads to Manhattan to pay his respects at ground zero, his designated budget negotiator, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., will open talks at Blair House with six House and Senate leaders ? two Republicans and four Democrats ? on how to reduce the projected growth of deficits, for a savings of at least $4 trillion in the first decade. A deal would ease the way for reluctant members of Congress to vote this summer to increase the government?s debt limit, as they must eventually do lest they provoke a financial crisis.

Yet even before the news broke on Sunday night that American forces had killed the world?s most feared terrorist ? igniting the burst of national pride and unity that Mr. Obama spoke of ? few people in either party saw much chance that he could reach a deal with House Republicans on spending and taxes any time soon, perhaps not before the 2012 elections. And Bin Laden?s death has not altered expectations, even as Mr. Obama enjoys the predicted bounce in polls of his public support.

?I don?t see it fundamentally changing the politics or the dynamic of the budget,? said John Podesta, a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and founder of a progressive research group, the Center for American Progress.

Because Republicans? and Democrats? differences on spending and taxes are so basic as to define their respective parties, they have ?very different strategies for the economy and investment by the federal government and how one controls the cost of health care,? Mr. Podesta added. ?I don?t think that any of that changes because Osama bin Laden has been killed.?

That calculation underscores the difficulty that Mr. Obama faces in pressing his advantage with Congress more broadly, and in fully coming out of the defensive crouch he was forced into after Democrats? big losses in the midterm elections last November. Mr. Obama?s popularity rose slightly after December, when he defied expectations in a lame-duck session of Congress and won major bipartisan victories on tax cuts, repeal of the ?don?t ask, don?t tell? law against openly gay people serving in the military and approval of an arms reduction agreement with Russia.

But his approval ratings soon inched back below 50 percent in national polls, dragged down again by economic issues ? now in the form of high gasoline prices averaging about $4 a gallon nationwide. In the wake of the Bin Laden news, Mr. Obama ?deserves a victory lap,? said Tom Davis, a Republican strategist and former congressman from Virginia. ?But this will have no bearing on the budget negotiations. The big issues are going to continue to be the economy and the deficit.?

New polls since Sunday show that Mr. Obama indeed has a higher public approval rating, as well as higher marks for his handling of foreign policy and antiterrorism issues. But his marks on handling the economy remain depressed. And a week that began with the Bin Laden stunner will end on Friday with the monthly government report on unemployment for April; even if improved, it is likely to show that about one of 12 Americans remains out of a job.

The latest survey for The New York Times/CBS News found an 11-point jump since just last month in the percentage of Americans who approve of Mr. Obama?s overall job performance ? to 57 percent from 46 percent. The president got similar increases for his handling of foreign policy, terrorist threats and Afghanistan in the poll. Yet a majority, 55 percent, disapproved of his handling of the economy ? a number virtually unchanged since April, allowing for the poll?s margin of error.

And people in both parties, including White House advisers, agree that Mr. Obama?s Bin Laden bounce in the polls is likely to be short-lived, like most such spikes in the wake of major crises or celebratory events. Meanwhile, the economy is expected to grow slowly at best, or perhaps stall again, and the presidential election is 18 months away.

Referring to Bin Laden, Mr. Davis said, jokingly, ?I was surprised they didn?t keep him on ice and pull him out in October a year from now.?

No surprise, then, that even as Republicans have praised Mr. Obama for his leadership on the Bin Laden operation, they have dug in against him on budget issues. The House majority leader, Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican who is one of the budget negotiators, dared Mr. Obama this week to seek a House vote on the president?s proposal for a ?clean? measure to increase the federal debt ? without the companion package Republicans want making trillions of dollars in spending cuts in coming years. That way, Mr. Cantor said, the House would prove to the president that a clean bill is dead on arrival.

The White House has not raised expectations for the budget talks that Mr. Obama initiated and Mr. Biden will lead on Thursday morning.

It took weeks to wrap up earlier negotiations, which Mr. Biden also headed, on cutting about $38 billion in domestic spending just for the current year. The new phase is aimed at slicing more than $4 trillion from projected deficits over 10 to 12 years, including from Medicare and Medicaid, whose costs are driving the long-term projections of unsustainable federal debt.

?There will be no announcement after that meeting that a deal has been reached because this is a process,? Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters. ?But, you know, we expect progress to be made.?

The meeting will be the first on the budget between administration and Congressional officials since the lawmakers returned this week from a two-week recess. In that time, many House Republicans were assailed at home by constituents angered by the House budget plan, which eventually would turn Medicare into a voucher system and Medicaid into a block grant to states, with federal spending for both purposes cut deeply from projected levels.

The sense of Republicans? new vulnerability on Medicare has many Democrats sensing advantage ? in the 2012 campaigns if not in budget talks. Said Howard Paster, who was the chief legislative strategist early in the Clinton administration, ?That?s almost as good for the Democrats as Bin Laden.?

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Prosite simplifies online portfolio manangement

Behance Prosite is a portfolio website service for designers that easily pulls projects from a user?s Behance Network account.

Users select from a range of pre-made layouts that can be customized to taste, and tell Prosite which portfolio projects to pull in from their Behance profiles.

Prosite provides an interface for customizing every last element of their sites without using CSS, though we suspect there?s no shortage of CSS knowledge in the Behance community.

Users can add content pages in addition to portfolio items, integrate their social media accounts and set up analytics, and can publish new Behance uploads to their Prosites without leaving Behance.

The company?s offering is a full-featured, low-maintenance entry into the turnkey portfolio solutions business and is definitely worth checking out.

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President to Travel to Ground Zero to Honor Lives Lost

Mr. Obama, in his first visit as president to ground zero, plans to lay a wreath at a memorial to the nearly 3,000 victims of the 9/11 attacks. He will also meet privately with family members of the victims, firefighters and other rescue workers who died in the September 2001 attacks.

?He wants to meet with them and share with them this important and significant moment, a bittersweet moment,? the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said on Wednesday.

It is a quiet coda to a week that began with a stunning announcement by Mr. Obama, just before midnight on Sunday, that a team of Navy Seals had stormed Bin Laden?s hiding place ? a heavily-fortified compound in an affluent town not far from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Mr. Obama invited former president George W. Bush to join him at ground zero, but Mr. Bush declined. A spokesman for the former president said he appreciated the invitation but wanted to stick to his policy of staying out of the public spotlight since he left office.

For Mr. Bush, ground zero was the site of one of the iconic moments of his presidency. Days after the World Trade Center towers collapsed, he traveled to the smoldering wreckage to thank the rescue workers, delivering his speech through a firefighter?s bullhorn.

The White House was quick to say it took no offense at Mr. Bush?s decision not to attend, saying that Mr. Bush was invited in the spirit of unity that Mr. Obama said he hoped would prevail in the wake of Bin Laden?s killing, just as it prevailed after the killings perpetrated by Bin Laden nearly a decade ago.

?We?ve made clear that this is a moment of unity for Americans and a moment to recall the unity that existed in this country in the wake of the attacks on 9/11,? Mr. Carney said.

Mr. Obama visited ground zero while a presidential candidate, but he has not been there since entering the White House. He does not plan a deliver a speech, a decision that White House officials said was calculated to avoid any appearance of exploiting the families of the victims for political gain.

?NYC is about honoring the victims and their families,? one senior administration official said.

On Friday, the president will go on the road again to Fort Campbell in Kentucky for a less somber occasion: to pay tribute to those who flew the Navy Seal team to Bin Laden?s compound deep inside Pakistan. The Army?s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which provided air transportation for the Navy assault team, is based at Fort Campbell.

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Hardware 22 - The Second Day Magazine

Hardware 22 - The Second Day Magazine

Posted on 23rd Apr 2011 at 09:52 by Podcast with 7 comments

It?s podcast time again, and this time we?re talking about all the lovely hardware we?ve seen in our labs over the last few weeks. Clive starts off by telling us all about the AMD Radeon HD 6790, and why it?s only likely to be around for a relatively short period of time.

We also get chance to quiz Antony on the Silverstone TJ11, which it was his pleasure to review. The case is humungous, but isn?t quite the water-cooling behemoth we expected. Paul then gives us an account of his recent trip to Istanbul to cover the MSI Master Overclocking Arena European finals. Extreme overclocking and benchmarking is a funny old world, and it?s always interesting to get to see the action first hand.

Finally, we find time to discuss some of the larger tech news stories such as Seagate swallowing up Samsung?s hard disk production division, and the rumour that AMD is planning to mass produce its Radeon HD 7000-series GPUs in May.

Hardware 22 - The Second Day Magazine

As always, we've also set up our weekly competition too, the lucky winner of which will walk away with a Speedlink Strike FX wireless gamepad. This game pad is compatible with both the PC and PlayStation 3, and functions at distances of up to 10m.

As ever, the bit-tech hardware podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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Meet Heather Poe


This is Heather Poe. She?s a young woman, living in Los Angeles and attending college there, though it isn?t her hometown. She?s kind, happy, eager to please and a little bit geeky. She?s also one of the best features of one of my favourite games, Troika?s Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

You find Heather in the hospital, where she?s been rushed into the emergency room for some strange neck wound. As a newly turned vampire yourself, you know that there?s more to this story than meets the eye, but your heightened senses also tell you that she?ll survive her undead encounter if she just gets some fresh haemoglobin. Unfortunately, there isn?t a doctor to hand and the hospital is criminally understaffed.

Earlier, a friend of yours told you that vampire blood has certain special characteristics when drunk by humans ? mainly as a healing elixir. You pause, then slit your wrist to save her young life before disappearing back into the night. You have errands to run, after all. Little do you know that this isn?t the last time you?ll be seeing Heather.

She shows up a few nights later, grabbing you on the street and desperate to thank you. She?s babbling and doe-eyed and she knows far too much about you and your kind ? you?ll suffer reprisals if you don?t take this matter in hand, but now is not the time. You send her back to your haven ? that grotty motel in Santa Monica ? and tell her to wait for you.

You have a choice now. Your blood is mixing with Heather?s and creating a potent, mind-altering brew. The more time she spends with you, the more she falls under your thrall, whether you want her to or not. You know you should send her away, break the bond and tell her to forget all this silliness about vampires. You know you should, but a lot of reasons run through you mind for why you shouldn?t ? a lot of excuses.

You?re little more than a servant for others at the moment, so the idea of cultivating your own slave does have a certain appeal. Letting her go may bring the wrath of your superiors if she exposes you. You wonder about the direction you could steer Heather, making her serve you in a way that seems repugnant in the daylight hours.

That?s what's great about being a vampire; not casting a reflection. You can avoid a lot of guilt and shame when you don?t have to meet your own gaze.


Over the next few days or weeks, Heather changes. Sometimes you're the one pushing, telling her how to dress or to surrender her life savings. At other times, it?s the blood that changes her. She was eager to please at the beginning, but now her devotion is fanatical. One day you find she?s bought you home some food - still alive and locked in the bathroom. The longer the ?relationship? lasts, the more you get the idea that it isn?t going to end well, but the harder it becomes to end it.

Heather?s fate ultimately lies in your hands. She?s a nice, likeable person and you want to do well by her. At the same time, though, the rest of LA is working to reshape you. You may have been just an average guy a few weeks ago, but now you?re a vampire; suffering and cruelty is your stock and trade.

As you acclimatise to this new existence, you start to adapt. You already don?t have to look at yourself in the mirror, but now you?re learning to hide the rest of yourself behind your new definition of what you are. You are a demon. Once you accept that, it becomes very easy to do very nasty things to a very nice person.

Then, when the game ends, you realise what?s happened and you learn something about yourself. That?s why Vampire: Bloodlines is one of my favourite games.

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Figuring Out Whom to Please First

Pity the person who answered the phone when Heather Armstrong tried to get her washing machine fixed for the fourth time in two months. According to Armstrong, a surly customer service rep for Maytag said she didn't care that Armstrong had 1.5 million followers on Twitter. But Maytag ended up caring after Armstrong's angry tweets about the machine went viral and caught the attention of the media.

Now that ordinary people can use social media as a megaphone, companies are trying to find ways to avoid public-relations debacles like the one caused by Armstrong's Twitter tirade in 2009. At the time, if Armstrong hadn't have mentioned her following, Maytag would have been hard pressed to find out about it. But in the past two years, a handful of startups such as Klout and Peer Index have developed ways to measure a person's social-media capital and then feed that information to companies in real time.

Klout measures a person's online influence on a scale of 1 to 100.  By looking at data from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, its algorithm determines who starts conversational trends and who gets people to click, comment, or retweet. It can gather this score from public data, and it can incorporate private data as well, if subjects who are curious about their Klout scores allow it. "We have data on 75 million people?and most people who are active, most of the influencers, we'll have data on," says Klout's CEO and cofounder, Joe Fernandez. Klout also offers breakdowns of influence by category, because a tweeting sommelier in Manhattan may require closer attention from a vineyard than from an airline. Still, Fernandez admits that the tool is not foolproof; Warren Buffett, for example, is not on Twitter but certainly is influential.

Several providers of customer relationship management (CRM) software have incorporated Klout into their applications in the past year. If a customer like Armstrong calls up a company that is using such an application, the phone rep can get a quick readout of the person's score?assuming the rep has key pieces of information, such as the e-mail address that the customer uses on Twitter or Facebook. Citibank, McDonald's, Delta Airlines, and Coca-Cola are among the companies that can pull up a Klout score, according to Jesse Engle, the CEO and cofounder of CoTweet, which incorporates Klout into its CRM software and counts those four companies as customers. "Everyone engaging in social media is constantly making judgments about who to engage with and how to engage," Engle says. However, he points out that a customer's Klout score is just one metric to track, in addition to the person's buying history and customer service record.

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Intel announces 'game-changing' 3D transistors, demos Ivy Bridge

Intel has announced a significant breakthrough in chip design that opens the door to smaller, faster, more power-efficient processors. First disclosed by Intel in 2002, the company's 3D tri-gate transistors will replace the traditional two-dimensional transistors in the chipmaker's upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge processors -- the successor to Sandy Bridge.

Unlike conventional planar transistors that lay flat, tri-gate transistors use a three-dimensional fin that stands vertically from the silicon substrate. Orienting the transistors upright presents several benefits. For starters, Intel can cram more transistors into less space, which will be incredibly valuable as fabrication tech shrinks to 22nm and beyond.

In addition to doubling transistor density, the new design exposes three sides of the transistor to a gate instead of one. Transistors carry an electrical signal while gates control that flow by turning the current on and off. By increasing the surface area of the transistor that is touching the gate, it gains additional control over the flow of electricity.

The video above does an excellent job of breaking things down. All you really need to know is that the company expects 22nm chips with tri-gate transistors to reduce power consumption by more than 50% with 37% more performance than Intel's existing 32nm technology. New 22nm tri-gate wafers should be cheaper to produce, as well.

"The performance gains and power savings of Intel's unique 3-D Tri-Gate transistors are like nothing we've seen before," said Intel's Mark Bohr. "This milestone is going further than simply keeping up with Moore's Law?We believe this breakthrough will extend Intel's lead even further over the rest of the semiconductor industry," Bohr continued.

During the same event, Intel demonstrated its new Ivy Bridge processors in action. The company showed three different form factors performing separate actions: a notebook playing an HD video, a web server launching a webpage, and a desktop playing a racing game. Nothing too exciting, but it's a sneak peek at Ivy Bridge nonetheless.

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Obama Says He Won?t Release Photos of Bin Laden?s Corpse

The president?s judgment came after a brief but intense debate in his war council about the pros and cons of making the photos public, administration officials said. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned that images of a bloodied Bin Laden would pose a risk to national security. But the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, said he believed the eventual release of photos was inevitable.

Even as the White House decided against providing visual evidence of Bin Laden?s death, new details emerged of his final moments early Monday on the top floor of a fortified house in Pakistan, cornered by a Navy Seal assault team.

Administration officials said for the first time that the commandos who entered the room on the third floor saw an AK-47 and a pistol within arm?s reach of the Qaeda leader. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because some of the details of the raid remained classified, said they could not confirm whether Bin Laden tried to grab the weapons. The commandos also suspected that he might be wearing a suicide vest, the officials added.

Shortly after the American helicopters touched down, Bin Laden?s trusted courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, opened fire from behind the door of the guest house, which was next to the house where Bin Laden was hiding, the officials said. They added that Mr. Kuwaiti was the first of the militants killed and that Bin Laden?s son Khalid was killed between the second and third floor of the main house.

When the firefight was over and Bin Laden was dead, the Americans found a trove of information: approximately 100 thumb drives, DVDs, and computer disks, along with 10 computer hard drives and 5 computers. There were also piles of paper documents in the house.

The officials said the first goal was to sift through the data to determine whether it contained information about terror plots in the works, or about the whereabouts of other top Qaeda operatives. After that, they said, analysts will try to build a picture about Bin Laden?s support network around Pakistan and look for any evidence that Pakistani officials might have facilitated his years in hiding.

The White House declined to release any additional details about the operation, saying that further information would jeopardize the military?s ability to conduct clandestine operations in the future. The administration?s reticence came after it was forced on Tuesday to correct parts of its initial account of the raid, including assertions that Bin Laden had used his wife as a ?human shield.?

?We?ve revealed a lot of information; we?ve been as forthcoming with facts as we can be,? the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said.

Mr. Carney said the president expressed doubts early on about releasing the photos, but consulted his senior advisers. All of them, Mr. Carney said, voiced concerns about the risks. Based on its monitoring of worldwide reaction to the announcement of Bin Laden?s death, Mr. Carney said, the administration also concluded that most people viewed the reports of his death as credible and that publicizing photos would do little to sway those who believed it was a hoax.

Mr. Obama was direct in an interview with the CBS News program ?60 Minutes,? to be broadcast Sunday, according to a transcript released by the network. ?It is very important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence ? as a propaganda tool.?

?That?s not who we are,? the president added. ?You know, we don?t trot out this stuff as trophies.?

?Certainly there?s no doubt among Al Qaeda members that he is dead,? Mr. Obama said in the ?60 Minutes? interview. ?And so we don?t think that a photograph in and of itself is going to make any difference. There are going to be some folks who deny it. The fact of the matter is, you will not see Bin Laden walking on this earth again.?

The deliberations were reminiscent of Mr. Obama?s decision in May 2009 to fight the release of photos documenting the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan by American military personnel. The administration said originally that it would not oppose releasing the pictures, but the president decided he would fight making them public after his military commanders warned that the images could provoke a reaction against troops in those countries.

On Thursday, the White House said Mr. Obama would take part in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Sept. 11 memorial in Lower Manhattan. He is also scheduled to meet with relatives of the victims of the terrorist attacks, but he will not make a speech. The next day, he is to travel to Fort Campbell in Kentucky to speak to troops returning from Afghanistan.

Seeking to quell any legal questions about the raid, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said, ?It was justified as an act of national self-defense,? citing Bin Laden?s role as the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

There were divided opinions on Capitol Hill about the photographs, with some lawmakers saying the United States needed to show proof that Bin Laden was dead, while others worried about the possibility of blowback against American troops.

?The whole purpose of sending our troops into the compound, rather than an aerial bombardment, was to obtain indisputable evidence of Bin Laden?s death,? said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. ?The best way to protect and defend our interests overseas is to prove that fact to the rest of the world.?

But Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House intelligence committee, said, ?Imagine how the American people would react if Al Qaeda killed one of our troops or military leaders, and put photos of the body on the Internet.?

Analysts said the administration?s decision, while understandable on security grounds, might not prevent the images from circulating. ?In the era of WikiLeaks, somebody?s going to leak it,? said Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress.

Helene Cooper and Thom Shanker contributed reporting.

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