Supposed voice of Assad says Oops

Remarks presented as coming from Syria's president said the country's security forces have made mistakes during the uprising against his regime, blaming poorly trained police officers at least in part for a crackdown that has killed more than 850 people over the past two months.

President Bashar Assad's comments, carried Wednesday in the private Al-Watan newspaper, came even as a human rights activist said Wednesday that Syrian troops have used heavy machine guns to attack a neighborhood in the central city of Homs.

Still, his remarks were a rare acknowledgment of shortcomings within Syria's powerful security agencies. Assad said thousands of police officers were receiving new training.

The brutal crackdown across Syria has sparked international condemnation, and the United States and European Union are planning new sanctions against the Syrian leadership. More than 850 people have been killed in the crackdown on protests that erupted in mid-March, according to Syria's top rights organization.

The Swiss government on Wednesday passed a measure restricting arms sales to Syria and freezing the assets and banning the travel to Switzerland of 13 senior Syrian officials. The arms embargo is largely theoretical because Switzerland hasn't exported weapons to Syria in over a decade, but any Swiss banks holding assets of the 13 officials will have to declare them immediately to the government.

But Assad got a boost from an old ally Wednesday, with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev saying Moscow will not support any United Nations resolutions that would open the way for interference in Syria's internal affairs.