The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said that a conference on the Syrian settlement will take place "very soon", possibly at the beginning of June, after consulting UN Security Council permanent members.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on Saturday he welcomed a US-Russian peace initiative to end Syria's civil war but had no plans to resign.

Rights activists have found torture devices and other evidence of abuse in government prisons in the first Syrian city to fall to the rebels, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Friday.

Apparently targeting a suspected weapons site, Israel launched an airstrike into Syria in the wee hours of Friday, US officials said.

The recent 'unbundling' of some services such as seat preferences or meals on board might be helping airlines to earn a lot of ancillary revenue, but the government is considering whether it could limit the number of 'preferred seats' on sale on each flight.

A Syrian air strike on a rebel bastion in the north on Thursday flattened a string of houses and killed 23 people including children, activists said, leaving residents wailing in grief and anger.

Seeking a regime change in Syria, President Barack Obama on Friday ruled out any unilateral American action against the Assad regime.

Israeli warplanes struck areas in and around the Syrian capital on Sunday, setting off a series of explosions as they targeted a shipment of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles believed to be on their way to Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, officials and activists said.

About 15 Syrians have died in Turkish hospitals of their wounds from an air strike after 100 were sent across the border for treatment following the attack, a Turkish official said on Thursday.

A Syrian activist group on Monday said that Israel's weekend airstrike on a sprawling military complex near the Syrian capital Damascus has killed at least 42 Syrian soldiers.