Europe freeze

Heavy snow has left at least 11,000 villagers cut off in remote areas of Serbia amid a European cold snap that has claimed more than 130 lives.

At least six people have died in Serbia, with emergency services expressing concern for the health of the sick and the elderly in particular.

Temperatures are below -30C (-22F) in parts of Europe and 63 people have died in Ukraine and 29 in Poland.

In Italy, weather experts say it is the coldest week for 27 years.

Emergency services in Serbia have described the situation, close to the country's south-western borders with Kosovo and Montenegro, as very serious.

In places, the snow has reached a depth of 2m (6ft 6in). Fourteen municipalities are affected, emergency official Predrag Maric told the BBC.

Helicopters have helped move several people to safety, and food and medicines have been airlifted to isolated areas.

Snow began falling in Serbia on 7 January and has hardly stopped since, says BBC correspondent Nick Thorpe. Serbian media say further snow is expected in the coming days.

Ukraine has seen the highest number of fatalities, many of them homeless. Over a 24-hour period, as many as 20 people died.

Food shortages have been reported in the capital, Kiev, because lorries have been unable to transport supplies.

Trapped overnight

Heavy snow has also caused widespread disruption in northern and central Italy.

More than 600 passengers were trapped on an unheated train in the Apennine mountains for seven hours on Wednesday night, when the brakes and electrical cables froze.

The coldest temperatures have been recorded in Russia and Kazakhstan. 

In the Urals and Siberia, the temperature fell to -40C (-40F) while in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana, a forecaster told Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency the wind-chill factor meant the real temperature was down to -52C, even though the air temperature was -35C.

In southern Russia, cars and lorries became stuck in snow drifts between Novorossiisk and Krasnodar.

Heavy snow has also hit Turkey, with 50cm falling in Istanbul on Wednesday. An avalanche in the south-east of the country killed a woman in her home, reports say.

Another avalanche blocked a main road connecting the provinces of Bitlis and Diyarbakir.

Rescuers in Germany were unable to save an elderly woman after she had gone swimming in the frozen waters of a gravel pit in Lower Saxony. Reports said she had often swum in the lake.

Russia says will veto "unacceptable" Syria resolution

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday it would veto any U.N. resolution on Syria that it finds unacceptable, after demanding any measure rule out military intervention to halt the bloodshed touched off by protests against President Bashar al-Assad's rule.

The political violence in Syria has killed at least 5,000 people in the past 10 months and activists say Assad's forces have stepped up operations this week on opposition strongholds, from Damascus suburbs to the cities of Hama, Homs and the border provinces of Deraa and Idlib.

Arab and Western states urged the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday to act swiftly on a resolution backing an Arab League plan calling for Assad to hand powers to his deputy and defuse the 11-month-old uprising against his family's dynastic rule.

"If the text will be unacceptable for us we will vote against it, of course," Russian U.N. envoy Vitaly Churkin told reporters in Moscow via a videolink from New York.

"If it is a text that we consider erroneous, that will lead to a worsening of the crisis, we will not allow it to be passed. That is unequivocal," he said.

His remarks came hours after Russia's envoy to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, said there was no chance the Western-Arab draft text could be accepted unless it expressly rejected armed intervention.

Russia and China, both veto-wielding Security Council members, have resisted a Western push for a resolution condemning the Syrian government's crackdown on unrest.

U.N. Security Council ambassadors met in New York on Wednesday to discuss ways to overcome their disagreements on the wording of the European-Arab draft resolution that Morocco submitted to council members on Friday.

The closed-door negotiations ended without a final agreement and will resume on Thursday, Germany's U.N. mission said. The draft will be updated to reflect Wednesday's discussions, which the mission said were "rather constructive."
A council diplomat at the meeting told Reuters, however, that Churkin reiterated to council members that the expression of full support for the Arab League plan in the current draft was "unacceptable." He also made clear Moscow could not accept the expression of concern in the draft about arms sales to Syria unless there was a waver for weapons transfers to the Syrian government, the diplomat said.
"It's way too soon in my judgment to know whether ultimately there will be agreement," U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice told reporters, adding, "It's long past time for this council to take meaningful action."

Despite the Russian comments, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said a "window of hope" had opened. "We will work furiously in the next few days to try and get a resolution that will allow the Arab League to forge ahead in finding a solution," he told parliament in Paris.

Russia says the West exploited fuzzy wording in a March 2011 U.N. Security Council resolution on Libya to turn a mandate to protect civilians in the North African country's uprising into a push to remove the government, backed by NATO air strikes, that led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.

Russia has also expressed concern that the draft's threat of further measures against Syria could lead to sanctions, which it opposes.

'WHOSE SIDE?'

Western envoys in New York said the main sticking point was likely to be not military intervention, on which they said a diplomatic fix was possible, but the resolution's support for the Arab League plan demanding that Assad give up power. That is seen by Moscow as tantamount to regime change.

The envoys said their biggest challenge would be to reword the draft so that it still endorses the plan but in a way that is weaker than the current version.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters: "Every member of the council has to make a decision: Whose side are you on? Are you on the side of the Syrian people? ... Or are you on the side of a brutal, dictatorial regime?"
An activist group said Syrian troops killed eight people in the central city of Homs and that 15 government soldiers were killed in a clash with a defector unit. Syria's state news agency, SANA, said a general, Rajeh Mahmoud, was killed along with three soldiers on the outskirts of Damascus on Wednesday.

Syrian insurgents said Assad's forces extended a military sweep overnight to counter a rebel threat that had reached the gates of the capital, sending armor into eastern and northern suburbs that Assad's forces took over this week. An activist group said at least 25 people had been killed in that sweep.

In Wadi Barada on the edge of the capital, four people were killed in a tank bombardment on Wednesday to flush out rebel Free Syrian Army units operating near the capital, activists said. A rebel spokesman put the death toll at 15.

SANA said troops killed 11 members of an "armed terrorist group" outside the southern city of Deraa, and that government forces discovered bomb factories and field hospitals in a raid on armed cells in Irbin and Sabqa, Damascus suburbs where insurgents had appeared recently.

It was not possible to verify the reports as Syria restricts access for independent media.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the policy of isolation and trying to remove the government risked igniting a "much bigger drama" in the Middle East.

"The people who are obsessed with removing regimes in the region, they should be really thinking about the broader picture," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"And I'm afraid that if this vigor to change regimes persists, we are going to witness a very bad situation much, much, much broader than just Syria, Libya, Egypt or any other single country."