Have a Good NEWS

. Fighting intensified in the Libyan capital
. Defiant Saif al-Islam Gaddafi appears in Tripoli
. Hunt for Muammar Gaddafi continues
. UN says more than 2,200 people killed in Syria crackdown

. Read a summary of today 's important events

1.59pm:"The battle is as fierce as ever," Luke Harding reports from Tripoli.

Before we started recording Luke said that he was lying on his balcony to take cover from stray bullets, as we talked. He said:

The battle ebbs and flows, but basically it was a mad day with intense mortar fire, artillery, rockets raining down on all Gaddafi 's connection. We have tried to get out of the hotel about an hour but we were turned back at a rebel check point. The rebels fired into the air and told us to clear off. It was not clear whether that was for our safety, or they simply want didn 't around us.

The [mortar] fire is coming from the rebel positions and it is raining down on Bab al-Aziziya. It is not clear to me whether this is a battle or whether they are just pulverising it. It is a Stalingrad-style bombardment at the moment. The mood is extremely tense, but the rebels seem to be largely in control.

Luke said rebels were run regularly around the city in convoys in part as a response to Saif al-Islam 's reappearance in the compound last night.

If [Muammar] Gaddafi is in his bunker, then it looks to me like a 1945 Berlin moment. But his whereabouts are a complete mystery.

I haven 't really heard any response fire, but it's so reverberatory here that it is hard to say.

At this point he had to cut the conversation short.

_

01:53: NATO ambassadors will meet in Brussels at NATO headquarters to discuss the way forward in Libya and see "options for a possible role of NATO" if the conflict is over, Oona has Lungescu, a spokeswoman for the Allianz announced at a press conference in the Belgian capital.

All current NATO role governed by three principles, she said:

. The leading role will the UN and Libya, the Contact Group met with NATO in a supporting role.

. There are no NATO troops will be on the floor.

Lavoire said Nato would not be providing close air support for the rebels in Tripoli.

He said "we have quite a good understanding of the movement of troops on both sides" but Nato was not coordinating in detail with the anti-Gaddafi forces.

Asked where Gaddafi was, he said:

Similarly, Lungescu played down the dramatic reappearance of Gaddafi's son Saif, saying:

FLASH: Gadhafi troops withdraw to his home town of Sirte - Al Jazeera reporter

12:58: John McCain (left), the U.S. Republican senator who ran for president in 2008 and became known in America as a foreign policy expert, has spoken only Sky News about the situation in Libya. He said, "Now we have military, have now the great challenge of building democracy will \ come." It took the U.S. for over 100 years and a bloody civil war, before he decided to "What we wanted to be a country," said McCain. When asked to become the rebel National Transitional Government Council (known as NTC or TNC), adjusted to the next government of Libya, he said:

I have great confidence in them - now we need to have several representatives from the western part of Libya in the TNC ... We must be free money as quickly as possible, so they can begin the basic functions of a government owes its people ... It 'sa lot of good people in the TNC, and it' s some people that I probably would not have voted 't.

12:48:

12.47pm: Here is a gallery of recent pictures of the battle in Tripoli.

12.35pm:

.

.

My colleague Andrew Sparrow has more on Nick Clegg's comments on Libya, following the National Security Council meeting.

10.55am:

A boat charted by the International Organisation for Migrants to rescue 300 people stranded in Tripoli can't dock because of the security situation.

_

10:07: Sky News 's correspondent Alex Crawford Tripoli confirmed Luke' s reports of heavy fighting. In an interview with a camera behind a car sat, she described many of the victims are in a hospital in the center of Tripoli. She also said supplies at the hospital were almost empty.

Sky correspondent: Many of the dead arriving at the hospital in the center of Tripoli after heavy fighting

@ AlexCrawfordSky:

After being interrupted by shelling Luke Harding in Tripoli resumes describing the battle for the city.

It is very hard to make sense of what is going on, but the battle is still going on as you can hear. I'm in the Corinthia hotel and it's a bit like being in a reverberating amphitheatre.

9.28am: "I've got a front row stall seat on the battle," Luke Harding reports above the crump of mortar shells in Tripoli.

To my left is the old city which is in rebel hands - the rebels have got the harbour, the corniche, they've got Green Square. But to my right, where the fighting is going on, there are a series of tall government buildings where the rebels have taken up positions and they are now duking it out with Gaddafi forces in Bab al-Azizya, which is Gaddafi's compound and the area where the Rixos hotel is situated. There is just a big battle going on [sound of shelling] -- That's a big mortar. It is clear that the city is not in rebel hands, nor is it entirely in government hands. What we are looking at now is a Beirut-style situation.

On the reappearance of Saif al-Islam, Luke said the it provided a psychological boost to loyalist fighters. But he added: "There isn't anywhere for them to go from here. I can't really see them recapturing the city. What I can envisage is them hanging on for some time; they have got a lot of ammunition, they've been expecting this, they've got heavy weaponry. Plus they've got all these captive journalists [in the Rixos hotel] ..."

8.50am:

#Rixos Journos have little Internet access and trying to conserve power/sat phones etc. But all ok, feel safer this am, no power though.

The lessons of what becomes of a Middle East state that suddenly loses its strongman are recent and raw. More than eight years after Baghdad fell with the same ignominious haste as Tripoli, it remains a basket case of competing agendas, a disengaged political class and citizens left with the reality that the state neither has the capacity or the will to look after them.

Speaking on Bloggingheads TV, Serwer said: "Had I been an active diplomat in this I would have worked very hard to try to get a formal turnover of power, because that's what prevents the kind of stay-behind rebellion that we suffered in Iraq."