U.S. Secretary of State_The United States Secretary of State is the head of the United States Department of State, concerned with foreign affairs. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and the highest-ranking cabinet secretary both in line of succession and order of precedence. The current Secretary of State is Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 67th person, and third woman to hold the post.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton blasted Russia and China as "despicable" for opposing United Nations Security Council action on Syria, and more than 60 nations began planning a civilian peacekeeping mission to deploy after the Damascus regime halts a brutal crackdown on the opposition.

President Barack Obama said he will keep pressuring Syrian President Bashar Assad to stop the "slaughter" of civilians, saying it was imperative that the world unite in condemning the onslaught.

"It is time to stop the killing of Syrian citizens by their own government," Obama said after a conference by a group of nations known as the Friends of Syria concluded in Tunisia.

Assad's forces pounded rebel-held areas in central Syria on Friday, killing at least 22 people, activists said. At least 50 people were killed nationwide, they said.

The move by the Friends of Syria is aimed at jolting Assad and his allies into accepting demands for a democratic transition, even as they are still unwilling to commit to military intervention to end the nearly year-old bloodshed.

Although the conference in Tunisia offered nothing other than the threat of increasing isolation and sanctions to compel compliance from Assad, Clinton predicted a military coup in Syria of the kind that ended the old regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.

"We saw this happen in other settings last year, I think it is going to happen in Syria," she told reporters.

Assad allies Russia and China, which have blocked previous UN action on Syria and are eager to head off any repeat of the kind of foreign intervention that happened in Libya, gave no sign they would agree to peacekeepers. Their actions prompted a particularly strong reaction from Clinton.

"It's quite distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto while people are being murdered," she said.

There was no immediate reaction from the governments of Russia or China. In New York on Friday, UN deputy spokesman Eduardo del Buey said the secretary-general's office had no immediate response to a call for a peacekeeping mission.