The Mustaqbal bloc condemned on Tuesday the government’s practices and the ongoing “struggle for power” among its members.

It said in a statement after its weekly meeting: “Meddling with the delicate distribution of power that has been designated by the constitution will not solve the dispute.”

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea noted on Tuesday that the current government deadlock is linked to some sides in cabinet that “have never been productive.”

He told Voice of Lebanon radio: “The deadlock is also linked to the crisis in Syria.”

Europe stepped up pressure on Syria on Tuesday as several nations recalled their ambassadors from Damascus and the EU considered new sanctions to cut the regime's access to cash.

France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands decided to bring back their envoys for consultations, joining Britain and Belgium to protest the regime's relentless opposition crackdown. The United States has closed its embassy.

Turkey will launch a "new initiative" with like-minded countries after the rejection of a U.N. resolution aimed at ending months-long bloodshed in neighboring Syria, its prime minister said on Tuesday.

"We will start a new initiative with those countries who stand by the Syrian people, not the regime," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in parliament, without elaborating.

Russia's foreign minister said after Damascus talks on Tuesday that President Bashar al-Assad was "fully committed" to ending the bloodshed in Syria even as regime tanks pounded the central city of Homs for a fourth straight day.

Sergei Lavrov said he had had a "very useful" meeting with Assad and that Moscow was eager to work towards a solution based on an Arab League plan that it had previously criticized.

A senior Treasury Department official will travel to Russia and the Middle East for talks about sanctions on Syria and Iran, the U.S. government said Monday, days after Moscow vetoed U.N. action against Damascus.

The Treasury Department's assistant secretary for terrorist financing Daniel Glaser will visit Doha, Muscat and Moscow from February 6-10.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat on Monday described the rare double veto used by Russia and China to block a resolution condemning Syria as a “slap in the face of the Syrian people,” urging the Lebanese state to “aid the Syrian refugees” instead of staging “airborne military parades in the northern border areas.”

In his weekly column in al-Anbaa newspaper, his party’s mouthpiece, Jumblat said the vetos “destroyed what’s left of the Arab League’s initiative which tried to find a political solution to the crisis in Syria.”

France and Germany will not accept the "blocking" of international action on Syria, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday, after Russia and China vetoed a U.N. resolution on the crisis.

After a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Sarkozy also said he would call Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on behalf of France and Germany later Monday to discuss the international community's response to the crisis.

Syria's Muslim Brotherhood on Monday accused Russia, China and Iran of being complicit in what it said was a "massacre" being carried out by the embattled regime in Damascus, which it likened to the Nazis.

"We consider Russia, China and Iran as direct accomplices to the horrible massacre being carried out against our people," the group's spokesman Zouheir Salem said in a statement issued from London.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Monday condemned as "hysterical" the West's angry reaction to a Russian veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the crackdown on protestors in Syria.

"Some comments from the West on the U.N. Security Council vote, I would say, are indecent and bordering on hysteria," Lavrov told reporters in Moscow. "Such hysterical comments are aimed at suppressing what is actually happening."