The Syrian authorities accused "terrorist gangs" of carrying out the killings in a bid to intensify pressure on
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Oppressor of the Syrians and the Lebs...
's regime at a meeting at the United Nations
...an international organization whose stated aims of facilitating interational security involves making sure that nobody with live ammo is offended unless it's a civilized country...
on Monday of foreign ministers of the major powers.
At the meeting Western governments stepped up their pleas to Russia and China to end their blockage of action by the U.N. Security Council action over the Syrian government's deadly assault on protest cities.
But Russia showed little sign that it would change its stance, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov slamming "risky recipes" which he said risked increasing conflict in the Middle East.
International peace envoy Kofi Annan
...Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh and so far the worst Secretary-General of the UN. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for something or other that probably sounded good at the time. In December 2004, reports surfaced that Kofi's son Kojo received payments from the Swiss company Cotecna, which had won a lucrative contract under the UN Oil-for-Food Program. Kofi Annan called for an investigation to look into the allegations, which stirred up the expected cesspool but couldn't seem to come up with enough evidence to indict Kofi himself, or even Kojo...
, in Ankara after a weekend mission to Damascus
...Home to a staggering array of terrorist organizations...
, acknowledged that a settlement in Syria would "not be easy" but renewed his demand for an immediate halt to the "unacceptable" killings of civilians.
U.N. chief
the ephemeral Ban Ki-moon... of whom it can be said to his credit that he is not Kofi Annan...
called on Damascus to respond "within the next few days" to the set of concrete proposals which his predecessor handed to Assad in their talks on Saturday and Sunday.
The grisly murders in Syria's third-largest city Homs came less than two weeks after regime troops stormed its rebellious Baba Amr neighborhood, following a month-long bombardment in which activists say 700 people were killed.
Activist Hadi Abdallah told Agence La Belle France Presse the bodies of 26 children and 21 women, some with their throats slit and others bearing stab wounds, were found after a "massacre" in the Karm el-Zaytoun and al-Adawiyeh neighborhoods of the besieged central city.
"Some of the children had been hit with blunt objects on their heads, one little girl was mutilated and some women were raped before being killed," he said.
Activists posted videos online that showed graphic images of charred bodies and children with mutilated and bloodied faces.
The Local Coordination Committees, which organize protests on the ground, called for a day of nationwide strikes on Tuesday in mourning for the dead.
Syrian state television
... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe?
also aired gruesome footage showing homes with white walls splattered with blood, bodies of women and kiddies piled on top of each other, and several men, with bullet wounds to the head, lying facing down in a disused building, their hands tied behind their backs.
Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said news of the killings in Homs had prompted hundreds of families to flee the city.
Syrian state TV said the weekend killings were a clear ploy by "armed terrorist gangs" to grab the spotlight ahead of the meeting of major powers in New York.
"We are used to them committing more crimes before meetings of the U.N. Security Council," it said.
But at a meeting in Istanbul, the opposition Syrian National Council called for "urgent Arab and international military intervention."
Reading from a prepared text, senior SNC official Georges Sabra called for the creation of a "no-fly zone" over all of Syria and "strikes" against the Syrian armed forces.
At the U.N. Security Council meeting in New York, there was no sign of any narrowing of the rift between Western governments and Beijing and Moscow on how to respond to the crisis.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said: "It is unacceptable that our council be stopped from assuming its responsibilities.
"After months of blocking, I appeal to China and Russia to hear the voices of the Arabs and the world conscience and join us."
But Lavrov maintained his argument against "unilateral" U.N. action, and repeated Russia's condemnation of NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collection of multinational and multilingual and multicultural armed forces, all of differing capabilities, working toward a common goal by pulling in different directions...
's air strikes in Libya to justify its opposition to the West's campaign on Syria.
Change in the Arab world "must not be achieved by misleading the international community or manipulating the Security Council," Lavrov said.
"There is no doubt whatsoever that the Syrian authorities bear a huge share of responsibility for the situation," Lavrov said, but he added that the government was now fighting gangs, not just unarmed protesters.
The U.N. chief called for the major powers to unite behind Annan's peace mission as joint envoy of the world body and the Arab League
...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing...
"I appeal to the Security Council to unite strongly behind ending the violence and supporting Mr. Annan's mission to help Syria pull back from the brink of a deeper catastrophe," Ban said.
In Ankara, Annan acknowledged that the situation in Syria was "complex" but he was confident that talks for a settlement of the year-old crisis, which human rights
...which often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless...
monitors say has claimed more 8,500 lives, would eventually succeed.
"We will launch a political process and we will reach a settlement," Anatolia news agency quoted him as saying.
As the Britannia-based Observatory reported 22 dead in new violence on Monday, the head of a U.N. human rights probe said that civilians trapped by the fighting in besieged protest cities were facing a "desperate situation."
"The intensification of armed confrontations has widened the trail of suffering," the president of the U.N. Human Rights Council inquiry Paulo Pinheiro said.
"Unimpeded humanitarian access should be granted as a rule, rather than an exception."