BBC News with Iain Purdon

The media

tycoon

Rupert Murdoch has told a British inquiry into media ethics that he's never asked a prime minister for anything. Mr Murdoch said he wanted to end what he called the myth that he'd used the power or influence of one of his British newspapers to gain favourable treatment.

"Politicians

go out of their way

to impress people in the press. I think that's part of the democratic process. All politicians of all sides like to have their views known by the editors, hoping that they will be

put across

, hoping that they will succeed in impressing people. That's the game."

He said that if he was

solely

concerned with commercial interest, he would always have backed the Conservative Party because it was more supportive of business.

The French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe has said that the UN Security Council might have to consider action backed up by military force in Syria if the current peace plan fails. Activists say the violence is continuing with more than 20 people killed during the day. Jim Muir has been following events from neighbouring Lebanon.

In the city of Hama,

distraught

residents pulled from the rubble of a destroyed building the broken body of a two-year-old little girl, one of at least seven people who activists said were killed in violent shelling of the quarter by government forces. Two UN observers were a short distance away in the centre of town. There was more deadly shelling in the town and the south and deaths from sniping in suburbs of Damascus despite UN monitors being close to both places. The French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe has had enough. He said that if the Syrian regime does not comply with the