U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set to urge the U.N. Security Council to support an Arab League peace plan for Syria, after Washington strongly condemned escalating violence by President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Clinton will join the foreign ministers of France and Britain at Tuesday’s Security Council session.  Western powers have been working on a draft resolution endorsing the Arab League plan, which calls for Assad to step aside as a way to resolve the crisis. Syria has rejected the proposal as a violation of its sovereignty. Clinton said in a statement Monday the Security Council “must act” by showing the international community views Syria’s crackdown on a 10-month opposition uprising as a threat to peace and security. She said the United States condemns what it calls “violent and brutal” Syrian government attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians in the past few days. British Prime Minister David Cameron urged Russia to back the draft resolution, saying it is time for Security Council members to stop “shielding those who have blood on their hands.” Council members Russia and China vetoed a Western-backed resolution last October that would have condemned the Syrian government’s crackdown on the uprising. But Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said Moscow “cannot support” the proposed resolution because it is biased against Mr. Assad’s government, a long-time Russian ally and buyer of Russian military supplies. In an interview with Russia’s Interfax news agency, Gatilov also said the document “leaves open the possibility of intervention” in Syrian affairs, which Moscow has vowed to oppose. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said the Moroccan-sponsored resolution backed by the West does not threaten sanctions or the use of force against the Syrian government, as some critics have alleged. A French diplomatic source told Western news agencies that at least 10 Council members support the draft. Russia also said Monday the Syrian government agreed to send a delegation to Moscow for proposed peace talks with the Syrian opposition.  But members of the opposition Syrian National Council quickly rejected the idea.  In a statement emailed to VOA, SNC member Ausama Monajed said the group “does not negotiate with terrorists.” In fighting Monday, opposition activists said government troops re-took control of several Damascus suburbs and also clashed with rebels in the central province of Homs.  They said Monday’s violence across Syria killed at least 28 people, mostly civilians. The Syrian government accuses armed terrorists of driving the anti-Assad revolt and killing 2,000 security personnel. The United Nations estimated the death toll from the unrest at 5,400 earlier this month, before it stopped updating the figure because of difficulties in obtaining information. Some information for this report was provided by AP and AFP. Join the conversation on our social journalism site – Middle East Voices . Follow our Middle East reports on Twitter and discuss them on our Facebook page.

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Cucumbers, tomatoes and cherries are on display at a market in central St. Petersburg June 9, 2011. Credit: Reuters/Alexander Demianchuk MOSCOW | Mon Aug 8, 2011 6:37am EDT MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia will lift its ban on raw vegetables from all European Union countries starting on Tuesday, August 9, the head of the country’s consumer watchdog was cited by Russian news agencies as saying on Monday. Russia banned imports of raw vegetables from the European Union on June 2 due to a deadly E.coli outbreak. Moscow later agreed to drop the ban provided it received safety guarantees and has since allowed imports from some EU nations. The EU, which exported about 600 million euros ($850 million) worth of vegetables to Russia last year, had said the blanket ban was not scientifically justified. “I took a decision to lift all the restrictions on imports of vegetables from the European Union from Tuesday, August 9,” Interfax news agency quoted consumer protection agency Rospotrebnadzor chief Gennady Onishchenko as saying. “On top of that a special regime which required an issuance of special certificates for each shipment of vegetables is also being lifted,” Onishchenko was quoted as saying. The blanket ban strained Russia’s relationship with the EU, its biggest trading partner, at a time when the country is seeking to complete its negotiations to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). (Writing by Gleb Bryanski , editing by Gareth Jones)

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BESOVETS, Russia (AFP) – A Russian plane exploded into flames after crashing on a highway just short of its airport, killing 44 and leaving eight survivors fighting for their lives, officials said Tuesday. The RusAir Tupolev 134 was trying to land at its destination of Petrozavodsk in the Karelia region of northwestern Russia in bad weather but failed to make the runway and instead hurtled onto a road two kilometres (1.25 miles) away. Investigators said it was too early to jump to conclusions but Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said the crash appeared the result of an error by the pilot who tried to spot the runway visually in bad weather, and failed. Rescuers in respirators removed unrecognisably charred bodies in black sacks from the scene of the crash, where sections of the burnt-out plane were strewn across the highway, an AFP correspondent witnessed. “The plane sustained a hard landing two kilometres from Petrozavodsk,” the emergencies ministry said in a statement on its website. “Forty-four people were killed and eight people injured.” The plane was flying from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, carrying 43 passengers and nine crew members. A column of ambulances carried survivors to Petrozavodsk’s Besovets airport where the emergencies ministry later transported five of the wounded to Moscow, an AFP correspondent saw. Among the survivors were a 10-year-old boy called Anton Terekhin and his 14-year-old sister Anastasia Terekhina, whose mother died in the crash, the emergencies ministry said. Medics decided not to evacuate the young boy due to his extremely poor state, Health Minister Tatyana Golikova told journalists. “The boy’s state is extremely serious, critical. He had a large loss of blood,” Golikova told journalists in comments reported on the ministry’s website. A Swedish national, a Dutch citizen and two Ukrainians were among the dead, as well as a family of four with dual Russian and US citizenship, the emergencies ministry said on its website. The Russians who died included a well-known football referee, Vladimir Pettai, and six nuclear energy experts. As the plane crashed, it splintered off the tops of trees and snapped power lines, before landing perilously close to houses in the nearby village of Besovets. The force of the crash scattered wreckage over a distance of 300 metres (yards), investigators said. Local resident Mikhail Osipov told Channel One television how he “heard a bang and thought at first it was some incredibly loud thunder.” He saw the plane crash in a “ball of fire” and ran out to attempt to rescue passengers. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin expressed their condolences to the victims’ families and the regional authorities announced three days of mourning. The head of the Karelia region, Andrei Nelidov, travelled to the scene of the crash and promised the relatives of the dead compensation of 1 million rubles ($35,711). Deputy Prime Minister Ivanov said that the crash appeared to be the result of “pilot error in bad weather” and the crew tried to spot the runway visually and simply landed in the wrong place. “The pilot did not land on the runway, but to the right,” he said. Controversially, Ivanov said the crash “recalls the recent Polish plane disaster at Smolensk” in western Russia that killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski and 95 others in April 2010. Russia has blamed pilot error for the crash in which the Polish Tupolev 154 presidential jet attempted to land amid thick fog, a finding that Poland has angrily disputed. The Moscow-based inter-state air commission (MAK), which investigates all air accidents in the ex-USSR, stressed it was premature to draw conclusions on the Karelia crash. The plane’s black boxes have been located. RusAir officials told Russian news agencies that the plane, made in 1981, had been completely checked before take-off and there had been no technical problems. Russia’s aviation industry remains blighted by repeated accidents involving its ageing fleet of planes, with the Soviet-era Tupolev jets having a particularly poor safety record. In September, a Tu-154 made a miraculous emergency landing on a derelict airstrip in Russia’s remote Komi region after its electrical systems failed midflight. Follow Yahoo! News on Twitter , become a fan on Facebook

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