US, Russia in accord on Syria peace talks Russia and the US have agreed to push for Syria peace talks in mid-November, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday after talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry. "We advocate holding the international conference [on Syria] in mid-November," Mr Lavrov said after talks with Mr Kerry in Bali, where both are attending the APEC summit. "Today we agreed on the steps needed for both the government and the opposition to come to the conference," Mr Lavrov was quoted as saying by Russia's RIA-Novosti news agency. The so-called Geneva II peace conference aims to bring together the warring sides in a country where activists say more than 115,000 people have been killed since an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also proposed mid-November for the conference when late last month he met Syria's opposition National Coalition chief Ahmad Jarba, who said he was ready to send a delegation. News of possible talks came as inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons verified the Assad regime's destruction of missile warheads and production equipment, an official from the joint OPCW-UN mission said. The action comes a week after the UN Security Council approved an agreement to eliminate Syria's non-conventional arms following an August 21 attack on the outskirts of Damascus. "It is extremely significant that yesterday, within a week of the resolution being passed, some chemical weapons were already being destroyed," Mr Kerry said. It's also a credit to the Assad regime for complying rapidly as they are supposed to. Now we hope that will continue. It's a good beginning. The team faces the task of disposing of an estimated 1000 tonnes of the nerve agent sarin, mustard gas and other banned arms at dozens of sites in Syria by mid-2014. The experts, who arrived on Tuesday, were also "monitoring, verifying and reporting" whether Dr Assad's government provided accurate information on its chemical stockpiles. The government has denied its forces used chemical weapons in the August 21 attack that killed hundreds of civilians. In Damascus, meanwhile, a barrage of mortar rounds slammed into a Christian neighbourhood, killing eight people. AFP, Bloomberg