UNITED NATIONS Russia and China vetoed on Saturday a U.N. resolution that backed an Arab plan calling on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to quit, stalling global efforts to end his bloody crackdown on unrest after hundreds were reported killed in the city of Homs. 
 
 The high-level diplomatic setback came after world leaders and Syrian opposition activists accused Assad's forces of a massacre in a sustained shelling of Homs, the bloodiest episode in 11 months of upheaval in the pivotal Arab country. 
 
 Russia and China joined in a double veto of a Western- and Arab-driven resolution at the U.N. Security Council endorsing the Arab League plan for Assad to hand power to a deputy to make way for a transition towards democracy. 
 
 The other 13 council members voted for the resolution that would have said the council "fully supports" the League plan aimed at stopping Syria's bloodshed, whose sectarian overtones threaten stability in the wider Middle East region. 
 
 Russia complained that the draft resolution was an improper and biased attempt at "regime change" in Syria, which is Moscow's sole major Middle East ally, an important buyer of Russian arms exports and host to a Russian naval base. 
 
 With an eye to events in Homs, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice dispensed with the usual diplomatic courtesies and declared she was "disgusted" by the Russian-Chinese veto, adding that "any further bloodshed that flows will be on their hands". 
 
 Shortly before the Security Council voted, U.S. President Barack Obama denounced the "unspeakable assault" on Homs, demanded that Assad leave power immediately and called for U.N. action against Assad's "relentless brutality". 
 
 "Any government that brutalizes and massacres its people does not deserve to govern," Obama said. 
 
 He and other Western and Arab leaders exerted unprecedented pressure Russia to allow the Security Council to pass the Arab League-backed resolution that calls for Assad to relinquish his autocratic powers and end the violence. The U.N. says over 5,000 civilians have been killed. 
 
 SECOND VETO IN FOUR MONTHS 
 
 But Russia, and China following Moscow's lead, weighed in to torpedo U.N. action on Syria for the second time in four months. In October, they vetoed a European-drafted resolution condemning Syria and threatening it with possible sanctions. 
 
 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it had not been possible to work constructively with Russia ahead of the vote, even though military intervention in Syria - fiercely opposed by Moscow - had been absolutely ruled out. 
 
 "I thought that there might be some ways to bridge, even at this last moment, a few of the concerns that the Russians had. I offered to work in a constructive manner to do so. That has not been possible," she told reporters at a Munich conference. 
 
 Clinton warned that the risk of more bloodshed and civil war in Syria had risen after the collapse of the U.N. resolution. 
 
 The uprising pits Syria's majority Sunni Muslims against Assad's minority Alawites, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, who have dominated the country's power structure for decades. 
 
 After what U.S. officials called "vigorous" talks between Clinton and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Moscow announced that he and its foreign intelligence chief would fly to Syria on Tuesday to meet Assad, though the trip's goal was not given. 
 
 Moscow objected that the resolution contained steps against Assad, but not against his armed opponents, Lavrov said in Munich before the vote. "Unless you do it both ways, you are taking sides in a civil war." 
 
 In New York, Western delegations rejected what they called "wrecking amendments" by Russia to add language blaming the opposition along with the government for violence and diluting calls for Syria to withdraw its security forces from cities. 
 
 Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin denied that Moscow's amendments were last-minute, or that Russia was standing in the way of a peaceful resolution of the crisis. 
 
 "Some influential members of the international community, unfortunately, including those sitting around this table, from the very beginning of the Syrian process have been undermining the opportunity for a political settlement," Churkin said. 
 
 Syrian U.N. envoy Bashar Ja'afari criticized the resolution and its sponsors, which included Saudi Arabia and seven other Arab states, saying nations "that prevent women from attending a soccer match" had no right to preach democracy to Syria. 
 
 He also denied that Syrian forces killed hundreds of civilians in Homs, saying that "no sensible person" would launch such an attack the night before the Security Council was set to discuss his country. 
 
 Residents of Homs' battered Baba Amro district, speaking by telephone, denounced the Russian-Chinese veto, some chanting "Death, rather than disgrace". 
 
 One resident who identified himself as Sufyan said: "Now we will show Assad. We're coming, Damascus. Starting today we will show Assad what an armed gang is." Assad has called his opponents "armed gangs" and "terrorists" steered from abroad. 
 
 Mohammed Loulichki, the U.N. ambassador of Morocco, the sole Arab member of the 15-nation council, voiced his "great regret and disappointment" at the veto and said the Arabs had no intention of abandoning their plan. British envoy Mark Lyall Grant said there would be a new U.N. push if violence continued. 
 
 France called the Homs assault a "massacre" and a "crime against humanity". Turkey said hundreds had been killed and the United Nations must act. Tunisia expelled the Syrian ambassador, and the flag above its embassy was brought down. 
 
 Death tolls cited by activists and opposition groups ranged from 237 to 260, making the Homs attack the bloodiest so far in Assad's crackdown on protests and one of the deadliest episodes in the "Arab Spring" of revolts that have swept the region. 
 
 Residents said Syrian forces began shelling the Khalidiya neighbourhood at around 8 p.m. (1800 GMT) on Friday using artillery and mortars. They said at least 36 houses were completely destroyed with families inside. 
 
 "We were sitting inside our house when we started hearing the shelling. We felt shells were falling on our heads," said Waleed, a resident of Khalidiya. 
 
 "The morning has come and we have discovered more bodies, bodies are on the streets," he said. "Some are still under the rubble. Our movement is better but there is little we can do without ambulances and other things." 
 
 An activist in the neighborhood contacted by Reuters said: "We have dug out at least 100 bodies so far, they are placed in the two mosques." He put the total number of wounded at 500. 
 
 CONDEMNATION 
 
 Video footage on the Internet described as being from Homs showed at least eight bodies assembled in a room, one of them with the top half of its head blown off. A voice on the video said the bombardment was continuing as the footage was filmed. 
 
 As news of the violence spread, angry crowds of Syrians stormed their country's embassies in Cairo, London, Berlin and Kuwait and protested in other cities. 
 
 Syria denied shelling Homs and said the Internet video was staged. It is not possible to verify activist or state media reports as Syria restricts independent media access. 
 
 Syria's state news agency SANA quoted a "media source" as saying: "The corpses displayed by some channels of incitement are martyrs, citizens kidnapped, killed and photographed by armed terrorist groups as if they are victims of the supposed shelling." 
 
 The official Syrian account was disregarded across the globe, where international condemnation was thunderous. 
 
 French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe declared that "those responsible will have to answer for it" and, in remarks aimed at Moscow, said any country that blocked U.N. action would bear a "heavy responsibility in history." 
 
 The Syrian government says it is facing a foreign-backed insurgency and that most of the dead have been its troops. SANA reported funerals of 22 members of the security forces. 
 
 Some Syrian activists said the violence was triggered by a wave of army defections in Homs, a stronghold of protests. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Joseph Logan, Mariam Karouny and Dominic Evans in Beirut, Arshad Mohammed and Stephen Brown in Munich, Ahmed el-Shimy in Cairo, Caren Bohan and Katharine Jackson in Washington and Steve Gutterman in Moscow; Writing by Mark Heinrich and Peter Graff; Editing by Louise Ireland and Jackie Frank) ||||| BEIJING — China said Tuesday that it was sending an envoy to Syria after blocking a U.N. resolution earlier this month that threatened sanctions, and reiterated that it wants a political solution to the country's ongoing crisis. 
 
 Wu Sike, China's special envoy on the Middle East, will visit Syria and Egypt from Wednesday through Sunday, the Foreign Ministry said. 
 
 The uprising in Syria has proven remarkably resilient even though the government has tried relentlessly to crush the revolt. The United Nations says more than 3,000 people have been killed in the government crackdown on the protests, and international pressure has been building for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down. 
 
 Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Tuesday that Beijing wants all parties in Syria to resolve the crisis peacefully. 
 
 "We believe the Syrian government should deliver on its reform pledges, respond to the people's appeals and that all parties should, in a constructive manner, actively participate in the political process," Jiang said in a regular briefing. 
 
 China and Russia vetoed the already watered-down Security Council resolution criticizing the Syrian government for suppressing protests because they objected to language that left open the possibility of sanctions against Syria. 
 
 The opposition movement driving Syria's 7-month-old uprising has mostly focused on peaceful demonstrations, although recently there have been reports of protesters taking up arms to defend themselves against military attacks. There have also been increasing reports of defections from the military, highlighting a trend that has raised fears that Syria may be sliding toward civil war. 
 
 The United States has pulled its ambassador out of Syria, arguing that his support for anti-Assad activists put him in grave danger. Syria responded quickly Monday, ordering home its envoy from Washington. 
 
 China and Russia have also been urging the chief U.N. nuclear inspector to scrap or delay U.S.-backed plans to reveal intelligence on Iran's alleged nuclear arms experiments, in a bluntly worded confidential document obtained Monday by The Associated Press. 
 
 Asked about the Chinese-Russian diplomatic note to International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano, Jiang would only say that China believes in resolving the dispute through dialogue. 
 
 "We hope the IAEA can uphold the just and objective position, bring into full play their professional advantage, engage in contact and interaction with Iran and play a constructive role for solving the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomatic means," Jiang said. 
 
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 Associated Press writer George Jahn contributed to this report from Vienna. 
 
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 Follow Gillian Wong on Twitter at http://twitter.com/gillianwong ||||| BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian forces bombarded Homs on Monday, killing 50 people in a sustained assault on several districts of the city which has become a centre of armed opposition to President Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian National Council opposition group said. 
 
 Western countries seeking Assad's downfall scrambled to find a new diplomatic strategy after the defeat of a U.N. Security Council resolution backing an Arab League call for Assad to give up power and start a political transition. 
 
 The United States shut its embassy in Damascus and said all staff had left the country due to worsening security. Britain said it withdrew its ambassador from Syria, and would seek further European Union sanctions against Syria. 
 
 Russia fought back against blistering criticism from the West for vetoing the resolution on Saturday. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is due in Damascus on Tuesday, said condemnations of Moscow's veto had verged on "hysteria." 
 
 U.S. President Barack Obama said that, however hard Western countries are prepared to lean on Assad diplomatically, they still had no intention of using force to topple him, as they did against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya last year. 
 
 "I think it is very important for us to try to resolve this without recourse to outside military intervention. And I think that's possible," he told NBC's Today show. 
 
 The opposition Syrian National Council's (SNC) Catherine al-Talli told Reuters shelling of Homs early on Monday killed 50. 
 
 Assad's opponents say his tanks and artillery killed more than 200 people in the city on Friday night in the bloodiest incident of the 11-month-old uprising against his rule. 
 
 That attack, branded a "massacre" by France and "unspeakable" by Obama, set the stage for intense efforts over the weekend to lobby Moscow not to block the U.N. Security Council resolution. 
 
 But Russia argued the resolution was one-sided and would have amounted to taking the side of Assad's opponents in a civil war. China also vetoed the measure, by most accounts following Russia's lead. 
 
 "It is sad that the co-authors decided to hastily put the resolution to a vote, even though we appealed to them with a request to give it a few more days" until after his own planned trip to Damascus, Lavrov said. 
 
 "Some of the voices heard in the West with evaluations of the results of the vote in the U.N. Security Council on the Syria resolution sound, I would say, improper, somewhere on the verge of hysteria," Lavrov told reporters after meeting the foreign minister of Bahrain, one of the Arab states that has sought a tougher stance against Assad. 
 
 RUSSIAN ROLE 
 
 Lavrov has said Russia favors a peace dialogue in Syria that is free of outside interference and preconditions. 
 
 He repeated the message in a phone conversation with Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. Elaraby, asked in an interview with Reuters whether Russian mediation could end the crisis, said: "They believe so." 
 
 The collapse of an Arab League monitoring mission in Syria as violence surged set the stage for the U.N. standoff. 
 
 The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had the names of 43 people killed in Monday's bombardment of Homs. Television footage showed smoke rising from buildings, with explosions echoing in the background. 
 
 "This is the most violent bombardment in recent days," said one activist in Syria who was in touch with Homs residents. Another activist said government troops were using multiple rocket launchers in the attack. 
 
 Damascus denies firing on houses and says images of dead bodies on the Internet have been staged. State media said on Monday "armed terrorist groups" were firing mortars in the city, setting fire to tires and blowing up empty buildings to give the impression that Homs was under fire from Assad's forces. 
 
 State television quoted an interior ministry official as saying six security personnel died in fighting that killed tens of "terrorists," and showed brief interviews with Syrians urging the government to strike with a "fist of iron" in Homs. 
 
 State news agency SANA described attacks in the city by "terrorists" who it said killed a textile factory worker. It said they also killed three officers and abducted several soldiers in Jabal al-Zawiya in the northern Idlib province. 
 
 Reports from activists and authorities are hard to verify because Syria restricts access for independent media. 
 
 IRON FIST 
 
 Activists said there had been explosions in the Khalidiya, Baba Amro, Bayada and Bab Dreib neighborhoods of Homs. 
 
 "They want to drive the Free Syrian Army out," said Baba Amro resident Hussein Nader by telephone, referring to the force of army deserters and rebels who have held parts of Homs for months. "Rockets are falling seconds apart on the same target." 
 
 Another resident, Omar Shakir, said activists had information the shelling would continue until Thursday, when troops were expected to move into Homs. "We have no one but God - everybody abandoned us," he said. 
 
 Activists said a blast hit an oil pipeline feeding a main refinery in Homs, the second attack in a week. Separately, three people died when the opposition-held town of Zabadani, near the Lebanese border, came under fire on Monday. 
 
 Syrian army defectors announced they were organizing a new "Higher Revolutionary Council" to supersede the Free Syrian Army (FSA) as the main armed force battling Assad's rule. The new body would be commanded by General Ahmed al-Sheikh, the highest-ranking officer to defect to Turkey from government forces. 
 
 Some observers said the latest offensive by Assad's forces may have been planned for some time, noting a speech last month when he vowed to strike "terrorists" with an iron fist. 
 
 "The regime 10 days ago took a decision to confront the opposition in a different manner," said Ayham Kamel, of the Eurasia Group risk consultancy. "The tactics before were targeted. Now they are set on more direct confrontation with the FSA and opposition activists." 
 
 "KICK IN THE ASS" 
 
 The Russian and Chinese veto of the U.N. resolution was condemned in unusually harsh language by Europe and the United States, who said Moscow and Beijing would bear responsibility for future bloodshed. 
 
 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the veto a "travesty" while French Defence Minister Gerard Longuet on Monday said: "There are political cultures which deserve a kick in the ass ... To accept that a dictator can operate freely is disgraceful for governments that accept it." 
 
 The Syrian National Council said the Russian and Chinese vetoes of the resolution had given Assad a "license to kill." 
 
 Syria is a long-standing ally of Moscow, one of the few in the region, and a buyer of its arms exports. Russia clearly still hopes to play an important diplomatic role with Assad, and says it wants to encourage him to adopt reforms. 
 
 Fawaz Tello, a senior member of the opposition SNC called the Russian position "shameful" and Moscow's talk of reform hypocritical, telling Reuters: "The Russians know that such a thuggish secret police regime cannot be reformed." 
 
 The veto bore the stamp of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who intends to return in a March election to the presidency he held from 2000-2008, when he was known for firmly opposing what he saw as efforts by the West to extend its influence at Russia's expense. 
 
 China's state-run media said Western intervention in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq showed the error of forced regime change. 
 
 "Currently, the situation in Syria is extremely complex. Simplistically supporting one side and suppressing the other might seem a helpful way of turning things around, but in fact it would be sowing fresh seeds of disaster," the People's Daily said. 
 
 Clinton said on Sunday the United States would work with other nations to try to tighten sanctions against Assad's government and deny it arms in the absence of a U.N. resolution. 
 
 That will be hard without a Security Council resolution and Syria is far less dependent on oil exports than other states in the region, making it less vulnerable to an embargo. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman, Joseph Logan and Mariam Karouny in Beirut, Nastassia Astrasheuskaya and Alissa de Carbonnel in Moscow, Chris Buckley in Beijing, Arshad Mohammad in Sofia, Annika Breidhardt in Berlin, Mirna Sleiman in Dubai and Leigh Thomas in Paris; Editing by Jon Boyle)
– Russia and China once again thumbed their nose at international pressure and vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to impose sanctions on Syria today. The move drew instant criticism from Western officials; Britain's UN ambassador accused them of putting "their national interests ahead of the lives of millions of Syrians" and relying on the "broken promises" of Bashar al-Assad's regime," CNN reports. Assad himself hadn't been seen in public since a blast killed his defense minister yesterday, prompting speculation about his whereabouts until he appeared on television, swearing in his new defense minister, reports the BBC. Meanwhile, fighting continues to rage in Damascus. The head of the UN observer mission there issued a dour report today. "It pains me to say, but we are not on the track for peace," he said, according to the Washington Post.