Russia, China reject UN move to rebuke Syrian president [View all]

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http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/04/10317567-russia-china-reject-un-move-to-rebuke-syrian-president

Updated at 12 p.m. ET: Amid fresh bloodshed in the Syrian city of Homs, the U.N. Security Council on Saturday failed to pass a resolution calling on the Syrian president to step down.

Russia and China vetoed the resolution endorsing an Arab League call for Bashar Assad to leave power. The other 13 council members, including the U.S., France and Britain, voted in favor of the resolution.

The vote took place as Syrian forces pummeled the city of Homs with mortar and artillery fire that activists say killed more than 200 people in one of the bloodiest episodes of the uprising against Assad's regime. The U.N. says more than 5,400 people have been killed over almost 11 months in a Syrian government crackdown on civilian protests.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/world/middleeast/syria-homs-death-toll-said-to-rise.html?_r=1&hp
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The Security Council voted 13 to 2 in favor of a resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for Syria, but the measure was blocked by Russia and China, who opposed what they saw as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty.

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Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that Moscow still had two objections to the latest revised resolution: that it did not place sufficient blame for the violence on the opposition, and that it unrealistically demanded that the government withdraw its military forces back to their barracks.

He told a security conference in Munich that adopting the current resolution would risk “taking sides in a civil war.” In a television interview quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency, he said that ignoring Russia’s objections would result in “another scandal.”

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“The scandal is not to act,” Peter Wittig, the German ambassador to the United Nations, said. “The scandal would be failure to act.”