BBC News with Marion Marshall.
The White House has announced that the US Secretary of State John Kerry will meet his Russian counterparts Sergei Lavrov on Thursday in Switzerland. As new diplomatic divisions emerge at the UN over how to put Syria's chemical weapons under international control. Nick Bryant is at the UN in New York.
It's been a fast moving day of diplomacy at the United Nations which began with France drafting a toughly worded Security Council resolution calling for the Assad regime to hand over its chemical weapons so they could be controlled and dismantled. The French have called for extremely serious consequences that the event of Syria failing to meet its obligations. But the Russians have called the threat of force unacceptable. They’ve requested a close-door meeting at the Security Council to push their own proposals for chemical weapons handover but then decided to cancel it. The White House says that America, Britain and France would prefer a diplomatic solution but have also said they continue to prepare for a full range of responses including military action.
The Syrian government has given more details of the steps it's willing to take to put its chemical weapons under international control. In a statement to Russia's Interfax News Agency, the Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem says Syria would join the chemical weapons convention which prohibits their production and use. He's quoted a saying that Syria is also prepared to show its installations to representatives of the UN, Russia and other countries. But the US Secretary of States John Kerry said Syria needed to go further. Our Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen is in Damascus.