Syria followed a U.N. rebuke by pounding the city of Homs for a 14th day Friday, according to UPI. Tanks, heavy artillery, rockets and mortars barraged residential areas of Homs, a center of the resistance in western Syria, shortly after dawn, residents said. Rockets and tank shells pummeled Homs's embattled Baba Amr neighborhood, activists said. No casualties were immediately reported, but at least 22 people were killed in the flashpoint cities of Hama and Daraa Thursday, activist groups said. The regime of President Bashar Assad arrested a prominent activist journalist Thursday along with a well-known blogger and more than a dozen other journalists and activists, opposition groups said. The arrests of Mazen Darwish, who heads the Syrian Center for Media and Free Expression in Damascus, and blogger Razan Ghazzawi, a symbol of the uprising, prompted press-freedom organization Reporters Without Borders to call for their immediate release. No information was immediately available about the reasons for their arrests. Darwish and Ghazzawi have been detained by police before, the Los Angeles Times reported. The U.N. General Assembly condemned Assad's rampant crackdown on the nearly year-old uprising Thursday by a 137-12 vote, with 17 abstentions, and called for his resignation under an Arab League peace proposal to resolve the conflict. Syria tried to block the non-binding vote and severely criticized its sponsors, which included the Arab League. The league suspended Syria's participation in November 2011 because of the unrestrained crackdown. "Today the U.N. General Assembly sent a clear message to the people of Syria: The world is with you," U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said in a statement. "Bashar Assad has never been more isolated." The resolution calls for Assad to give up power to a vice president, for opposition and government representatives to negotiate, and for Syria to form a new government.
