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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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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Your iPhone Can Buy Your Groceries

An iPhone app launching today provides a glimpse into the future of shopping. Created by Modiv Media, the app lets customers scan items while they shop, presents them with personalized offers as they go, and speeds up their checkout. One of the first companies to deploy the app is Stop & Shop, which operates more than 375 supermarkets in the eastern United States.

Stop & Shop's version of the app, called Scan It!, relies heavily on loyalty-card numbers for its smarts. Users install the app, load in their loyalty card by capturing it with the phone's camera, and then take the phone to the store. The phone's camera captures the bar codes of items the person puts in a shopping cart and adds their prices to a running total. The user bags items while shopping, thus avoiding having to unload and reload the cart at the register. A store might sometimes have employees perform checks to make sure users are paying for everything in their carts, but for the most part it's an honor system.

The app uses data from the loyalty card to present offers based on the user's past purchases and current location in the store. It works in addition to the existing loyalty program, offering savings on top of the deals already advertised on store shelves.

When the user has finished shopping, the app sends information about the contents of the shopping cart to the store's point-of-sale system. The user can go to any register, scan the loyalty card, and pay for the order.

"The technology in the app puts you in control of the shopping experience," says John Caron, Modiv Media's senior vice president of marketing.

Caron says that Modiv always intended to launch a smart-phone shopping device but that until recently phones weren't able to capture bar codes clearly enough. Instead, Modiv introduced in-store handsets that customers could use to scan items. Now that phone cameras have improved, Caron says, the company has been able to launch its app (which works on the iPhone 3GS and later models). Having the app stored in a user's phone rather than on a special device lets retailers stay in closer touch with their customers, and vice versa. For example, a customer who's installed the Stop & Shop Scan It! app on an iPhone can view personalized offers while making a grocery list at home, not just while walking the store's aisles.

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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 2 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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Controlling Prosthetic Limbs with Electrode Arrays

To design prosthetic limbs with motor control and a sense of touch, researchers have been looking at ways to connect electrodes to nerve endings on the arm or leg and then to translate signals from those nerves into electrical instructions for moving the mechanical limb. However, severed nerve cells on an amputated limb can only grow if a structure is present to support them?much the way a trellis supports a growing vine. And they are notoriously fussy about the shape and size of that structure.

"Cells are like people: they like furniture to sit in that's just the right size," says David Martin, a biomedical engineer at the University of Delaware. "They're looking for a channel that's got the 'Goldilocks'-length scale to it?how far apart the ridges are, how tall they are, how [wide] they are."

Ravi Bellamkonda's lab at Georgia Tech has designed a tubular support scaffold with tiny channels that fit snugly around bundles of nerve cells. The group recently tested the structure with dorsal root ganglion cells and presented the results at the Society for Biomaterials conference earlier this month.

The scaffold begins as a flat sheet with tiny grooves, similar to corrugated iron or cardboard. It is then rolled to form a porous cylinder with many tiny channels suited for healthy nerve-cell growth. The floors of the conduits double as electrodes, brushing up close to the nerve bundles and picking up nerve signals. "The thing that's different is that the patterns can be much more precisely controlled, and the orientation of the nerve bundles is essentially perfect here," says Martin. "It's a nice model system, and the ability to control nerve growth is what's really going to be valuable."

The ultimate goal is to enable two-way communication between the prosthetic limb and the wearer. Eventually, this design could separate the two kinds of nerve cells within a bundle, so neural cues directing hand movement would travel along one channel and information about touch and temperature from the prosthetic limb would travel to the brain along another channel. "The 'jellyroll' should in principle allow [them] to select through those channels?that to me is where the real excitement is," says Martin. "That's news for the future, but you've got to be able to walk before you can run."

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Lawmakers Seek to Unclog Road to Confirmation

The proposal to end Senate review of about 200 executive branch positions would be the most serious effort in recent years to pare the chamber?s constitutional power of advice and consent. It amounts to a rare voluntary surrender of Congressional clout, and it has high-caliber, bipartisan support with the endorsement of the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

?We are losing very good people because the process has become so onerous, so lengthy and so duplicative,? said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and a leading advocate of the bill. ?Why should there be a full F.B.I background check back to age 18 for an individual serving on a part-time board??

Ever since the Senate rejected President George Bush?s selection of John G. Tower as secretary of defense in 1989, Senate confirmations have become bruising public affairs that delve deep into a nominee?s background. President Obama?s initial picks for several cabinet posts withdrew their nominations after the process turned up embarrassing details.

Several presidents, frustrated by delays, have sought to bypass the process by making so-called recess appointments while Congress is not in session. Mr. Obama used that tactic last summer to install the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Backers of the confirmation measure say they want to ease what they call an arduous chore for midlevel nominees trying to navigate the Senate in a supercharged partisan era. While it would not affect senior positions, the legislation, and a related proposal to expedite filling about 250 part-time positions, is intended to reverse an explosion in confirmable posts from about 280 when President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961 to 1,400 today.

Yet it is never easy to tinker with the rules in an institution renowned for its resistance to change.

Looking at the list of assistant secretaries, department directors, chief financial officers and advisory board members who would be removed from the Senate docket, some conservatives see an effort to give the White House carte blanche to extend bureaucratic sprawl. The change would also limit the leverage that lawmakers have over the administration by reducing the number of appointments they could block in order to win concessions or other considerations.

Writing for the conservative Heritage Foundation, David S. Addington, who served as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, urged defeat of the bill, saying the drafters of the Constitution ?did not give the president the kingly power to appoint the senior officers of the government by himself.?

Conservative senators have raised similar objections.

?Allowing the president to appoint czars and bureaucrats without Congressional oversight adds to the problem of an ever-expanding, unaccountable government,? said Moira Bagley, a spokeswoman for Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who has expressed objections to the measure.

Others worry that officials exempted from confirmation will lose stature among colleagues who will consider the posts to be downgraded.

And some say the Senate, where the slow pace and partisan maneuvering over confirmations has kept high-level offices vacant for extended stretches, is being too timid and should consider more far-reaching changes for all presidential appointees.

?This is a start, but it doesn?t address the real problems with the rules or with the confirmation process,? said Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, who has proposed shortening the time that lawmakers can debate a nomination after cutting off a filibuster to 4 hours from 30. ?These are baby steps.?

Mr. Udall helped push the Senate into considering an overhaul of the confirmation process early this year when he threatened to force a floor fight on a proposal to limit filibusters. To avert a showdown, the leadership agreed to look at procedural changes, and the proposal to cut the number of Senate confirmations was one result.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican in the chamber and a former cabinet secretary, said the jump in jobs that require confirmation has cut into the Senate?s time for more pressing issues and put an unnecessary burden on nominees.

?We drag some unsuspecting citizen through this gauntlet of investigations and questioning,? said Mr. Alexander, who has dubbed the process the ?innocent-until-nominated? syndrome. ?They are very fortunate if they get all the way through without being made to appear a criminal.?

The legislation, which cleared the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this month, would remove roughly 200 positions ? many of them public affairs or Congressional-relations jobs for various agencies ? from Senate scrutiny. Among the more notable positions on the list are the United States treasurer, which officials say has become a mainly ceremonial position, and the director of the Mint.

Authors of the bill said they picked positions they did not consider central to setting policy or spending money. For instance, the list includes the assistant secretary of agriculture for Congressional relations; the assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration; and the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, among others. The bill also proposes to end confirmation of the chief financial officers in many agencies.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who leads the governmental affairs committee, said the reduction in jobs requiring confirmation should enable presidents to fill vacancies more quickly.

?Eighteen months into the Obama administration, 25 percent of his nominees were still unconfirmed,? Mr. Lieberman said. ?This is not an aberration.?

In addition to exempting the 200 jobs, the measure would create a working group in the administration to report within 90 days on proposals to create a single ?smart form? intended to allow nominees to ?answer all vetting questions one way, at a single time.?

The legislation ? which would need to be approved by both chambers of Congress, though the House generally defers to the Senate on such matters ? is intended to be supplemented by a new Senate rule that would automatically place the names of dozens of appointees to boards and commissions on the Senate calendar for approval once they have submitted a required questionnaire. Senators would have 10 days to intervene.

?Instead of spending our time confirming an appointment to the Literary Society Board or the Morris K. Udall Scholarship Fund, we should be working on reducing the debt,? Mr. Alexander said. ?We still end up with more than 1,000 nominees, which is more than President Clinton had and four times more than President Kennedy appointed.?

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In a Life Filled With Firsts, One More

Rebecca, 11, who like most of her peers has embraced the eye roll as a punctuation mark, announces she is wearing leopard-print flats to school.

?Why don?t we start with, ?Mom, is it O.K. if I wear these shoes to school today?? ? chides Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in white sneakers and head-to-toe pink sweats, her mass of curly hair pulled back. ?Choppity-chop, let?s go.?

In less than two weeks, Ms. Wasserman Schultz ? mother, wife, Girl Scout leader, legislator, fund-raiser and House vote counter ? will add another job to her monumentally orchestrated life. She will become the first woman elected to lead the Democratic National Committee, a role that requires grit, exaltation and inspiration. At 44, she will be the youngest committee leader in decades.

As the country races toward the 2012 presidential election, it will be her task to rally Democrats to give money and time, swatting away Republican barbs and defending President Obama at every turn. It is a job she is well prepared to handle, having served years on the House?s Democratic campaign committee.

Later that morning, in a nearby deli, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, now wearing a businesslike gray suit and pumps, said, ?The timing is right for a retail politician.?

But the symbolism of her selection is not lost on her.

?It?s a big deal, a very big deal,? said Ms. Wasserman Schultz, whose toughness was admired by her colleagues even before she grappled with breast cancer in 2007. ?My generation is significantly unrepresented in terms of public policy and decision making. As a woman today, it?s very different living through raising children and balancing work and family. It?s an opportunity to reach out to so many families. And women who work outside the family can say Democrats get it.?

?It doesn?t hurt that I?m from Florida,? she added. ?It?s a huge priority.?

Ms. Wasserman Schultz is a New Yorker who graduated from the University of Florida and never left the state. In her Broward County district, which includes a sliver of Miami-Dade County, she is largely beloved. In 2010, she was re-elected to the House, where she has served since 2004, with 60 percent of the vote. Before that, she served 12 years in the State Legislature, becoming ? at age 26 ? the youngest woman elected to the Florida House.

At a recent town hall-style meeting at a senior center, where she talked about Medicare?s future and what she said was the irresponsibility of Republicans, the audience swarmed her.

?I think you?re a gutsy lady,? one man said. ?I like your talking points. We need to stress what Obama has done.?

?They gave me a megaphone now and I?m going to use it,? she told him.

But not everyone in Florida is so enthusiastic about Ms. Wasserman Schultz. James Gleason, a possible opponent in 2012, said she would only increase the partisan comments in her new job and magnify the country?s polarization.

?I think to be an effective legislator, you have to come together with your own party but also work with the other side and not just be antagonistic,? said Mr. Gleason, a Republican business owner who lives in Coral Springs.

A Republican friend and colleague, Representative John Culberson of Texas, said Ms. Wasserman Schultz had always been congenial. But he, too, worried that the post may push her far from those values.

?I measure a person beginning with their heart, and she has always impressed me as having a good heart,? Mr. Culberson said. ?It?s important that you never make any of this personal. None of our debate should be personal or exaggerated or strained.?

With her trademark curls, Ms. Wasserman Schultz has long been one of the ?-est? girls: youngest, smartest, funniest, toughest. Her Democratic colleagues extol her fund-raising prowess, her ease on television and her indefatigability, which is legendary among her colleagues.

Melissa Bean, a former Congressional Democrat who shared a town house in the capital with Ms. Wasserman Schultz and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, said she came to Washington expecting a house full of slackers, at least compared with her business brethren in Chicago.

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Weekend tech reading: New discovery in tracing IP addresses

IP address can now pin down your location to within a half mile On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dogbut they might now have an easy time finding your kennel. In a research paper and technical report presented at the USENIX Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NDSI) conference at the beginning of April, researchers from Northwestern University presented new methods for estimating the exact physical location of an IP address tens or hundreds of times more accurately than previously thought possible. Ars Technica

The promise of rapture for the high-tech elite Ray Kurzweil, the influential technologist, came to the Palace of Fine Arts theater in San Francisco a few days ago to promote his vision of "the Singularity." One attendee admiringly described it as "the cult Rapture of the Nerds." It was a much more fitting prelude to the Easter holidays than Mr. Kurzweil would like to think. The Singularity, as he explains it, is a point in the near future when rapidly escalating technological advances will allow the most evolved humans (i.e., Mr. Kurzweil and his early-adopting followers) to incorporate technology into their bodies. The NY Times

Freedom on the net 2011 - A global assessment of Internet and digital media Over the past decade, and particularly in the last few years, the influence of the internet as a means
to spread information and challenge government-imposed media controls has steadily expanded. This mounting influence directly corresponds to the growth in the number of users around the world: over two billion people now have access to the internet, and the figure has more than doubled in the past five years. Freedom House (PDF)

Ubuntu Linux boosted by 10,000 seat PC win Canonical has taken the wraps off a morale-boosting deal that has seen German insurance giant LVM Versicherungen convert 10,000 PCs to use Ubuntu Linux across the company's operations. The project included the conversion of 3,000 desktop and laptop computers in LVM's Muenster HQ with a further 7,000 in the company's agencies around Germany. ITWorld

Japanese robots await call to action Japanese robots designed for heavy lifting and data collection have been prepared for deployment at irradiated reactor buildings of the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power station, where U.S.-made robots have already taken radiation and temperature readings as well as visual images... The Japan Times

Anonymous denies responsibility for PSN attack, taunts opponents Anti-Sony hacking group Anonymous has once again denied any responsibility for this week's PSN outage in the UK and US - whilst taunting their opponents. In the group's video, released on YouTube under the banner 'Message to PSN users', a disguised voice reads... CVG

A breakthrough on paper that's stronger than steel UTS Scientists have reported remarkable results in developing a composite material based on graphite that is a thin as paper and ten times stronger than steel. UTS

In the know: Should the nation's unemployed be buying new Apple computers? Panelists discuss how owning a top-of-the-line MacBook or an iPad 2 is actually essential to finding a new job. Onion News (satire)

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McCain Raises Specter of Libyan Stalemate

Speaking from Cairo, Mr. McCain, a strong advocate of intervention in Libya,  said that Al Qaeda could take advantage of an encroaching stalemate as a tenacious Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi continued to cling to power.

"I really fear a stalemate," said Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, speaking on CNN television?s ?State of the Union? program after visiting the rebel strongholds in Libya. He said the rebel fighters were ?badly outgunned in armor, in equipment, in training? against forces loyal to Col. Qaddafi.

Mr. Qaddafi?s forces bombarded Misurata on Sunday, a day after rebels celebrated a retreat of government forces from the western Libyan city, Reuters reported, citing a telephone interview with the rebel spokesman Abdelsalam from Misurata. ?Qaddafi?s brigades started random bombardment in the early hours of this morning. The bombardment is still going on,? he said.

Mr. McCain said he feared it was ?very possible? that Al Qaeda could come in and take advantage a potential stalemate, but he insisted he did not agree with calls for the United States to bomb Tripoli or put troops on the ground. ?We have tried those things in the past with other dictators, and it?s a little harder than you think it is,? he said.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, also called for robust air support for the rebels and told CNN that NATO forces should bomb Col. Qaddafi?s inner circle. ?I think the focus should now be to cut the head of the snake off,? he said.

Mr. McCain told CNN that he supported the first missile attack from a drone aircraft in Libya as fighting in the rebel-held city of Misurata became increasingly bloody. ?I?m glad the Predator is now in the fight,? McCain said. ?We need the American air assets back in a heavier way.?

The unmanned plane was used for the first time in the conflict in Libya on Saturday to attack a site near Misurata. But the Obama administration is deeply resistant to expanding American military involvement. The administration last week authorized the use of armed drones in Libya and a $25 million contribution of nonlethal military surplus for the rebel forces.

Mr. McCain?s warning of a stalemate in Libya echoed comments on Friday by the top American military officer. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that a month of airstrikes had destroyed 30 percent to 40 percent of the capabilities of the military forces loyal to Col. Qaddafi, but had not yet drastically tilted the conflict with opposition militias one way or another. He cited shifts in tactics by Libyan forces that made it difficult for NATO warplanes to distinguish them from the rebel fighters and civilians.

Britain and France have been leading air strikes against Col. Qaddafi?s forces in a NATO-supported operation mandated by the United Nations Security Council in the name of protecting civilians from atrocities.

Mr. McCain said on NBC?s ?Meet the Press? program that the United States should increase its role in North Atlantic Treaty Organization air attacks against Libya, saying that only six NATO nations were engaged in the conflict. He also reiterated his call for the United States to recognize the rebels? governing council as the country?s legitimate government, as France, Italy and Qatar have done. He has previously called for the United States to provide the rebels with money and arms on a scale similar to what the United States did in support of those who fought the Soviet Union?s occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

He also insisted that destroying Col. Qaddafi?s television broadcast capabilities could prove instrumental in depriving him of the propaganda machine he was using to try and frighten the Libyan people in submission.

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