But there were signs of a break in the bipartisan approach to the war, with Michael Howard, the Tory foreign affairs spokesman, castigating Nato's "act of gross incompetence" and warning that there was "grave disquiet" over the conduct of the war.Members of the UN Security Council met in emergency session in New York late last night to debate the embassy bombing. The meeting was called by Peking, which hoped to extract a formal statement from the council condemning the attack. On Friday night, the council expressed its "shock and concern" but declined to endorse a tougher statement drafted by China that would have condemned a "serious violation of international law".China's President, Jiang Zemin, told his Russian counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, by telephone yesterday that continued Nato bombing of Yugoslavia made it "impossible for the UN Security Council to discuss any plan to solve the problem" in Kosovo. This amounts to a de facto veto of the G8 agreement last week for a UN-backed peace-keeping force.Peking also announced it was severing all dialogue with Washington on weapons proliferation, human rights and international security. Further retaliatory measures are expected for what Mr Jiang called Nato's "gunboat policy".President Clinton offered a new public apology to China yesterday but coupled his regrets with a warning not to confuse "a tragic mistake" with Serbia's "systematic and deliberate act of ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo.In his televised apology, Mr Clinton said: "I want to say to the Chinese people and the leaders of China, `I regret this, and I apologise'."Ms Albright promised a "comprehensive review of the targeting databases - Nato will provide China with a full explanation of how this could have occurred".For the third day, thousands of Chinese protesters marched through Peking's embassy district yesterday in a government-orchestrated dem-onstration of public fury "Clinton, son of a bitch Blair, grandson of a bitch" one banner read.

But, after two days of mayhem, the Chinese government seemed determined to keep better control. A massive presence of helmeted riot police was in place, and a strict police cordon blocked the entrance to the area for ordinary Chinese who did not belong to the groups of factory workers, monks, pensioners and school-children marshalled for protest.Stones and paint bombs were still thrown at the American and British embassies, but for the first time the police ensured that many demonstrators discarded their home-made ammunition before hurling abuse at the Western powers' embassies.Further details emerged yesterday of how the mistake occurred. The US Defense Secretary, William Cohen, confirmed reports that the map consulted by Pentagon targeters dated from 1992. It had been revised in 1997 and again in 1998, but the revisions did not include the move of the Chinese embassy to its new building.The "institutional error", he said, was compounded when the building of the supply and procurement agency, which was the intended target, was incorrectly identified on the military targeting maps. Mr Cohen said procedures would be tightened to avoid similar errors in future.Expressing regret for the bombing and the casualties caused - but stopping short of a formal apology - Mr Cohen said embassies were on a list of "no-strike targets" and if the embassy had been mapped correctly, the erroneous position for the supply depot would have shown up automatically.

"It defies all logic," he said, "that we would deliberately target the Chinese embassy.". TONY BLAIR attacked the BBC and CNN yesterday, accusing them of "refugee fatigue" and of focusing on Nato's mistakes while ignoring the plight of ethnic Albanians left in Kosovo. In his annual speech to the Newspaper Society, he said broadcasters had allowed themselves to be manipulated by Serbia's control of where they could take pictures. "Refugee fatigue may have set in with some TV stations, but it will not set in with me until the refugees are home." The Prime Minister quoted an unnamed television reporter in Macedonia who had acknowledged that "refugee fatigue" was setting in among his news editors."In other words, once you've reported one mass rape, the next one's not so newsworthy Seen one mass grave, you've seen the lot. This is a dangerous path, and it is one that benefits the Serbs," Mr Blair said.He said the media had to resist the idea that unless something was captured on film, it was not news.

"If reporters are only allowed to see what the Serbs want and if their reports are censored, it is very hard .. to be genuinely authoritative. If a bomb goes astray and hits a residential area, or the Chinese embassy is mistakenly attacked, then I'm not going to pretend that is not news. It is."But are these tens of thousands of lives inside Kosovo worth less because there happens to be no film of them? Are they non-people not worth a studio discussion simply because CNN and the BBC and the rest cannot get in on the ground?"He said accidents such as the bombing of the Chinese embassy ought not to be allowed to obscure what was happening in Kosovo, where Serb forces were engaged in a "deliberate, systematic and evil" campaign of "ethnic cleansing".The Prime Minister was accused of "shooting the messenger" by George Galloway, one of a group of left-wing Labour MPs who led a delegation to the Chinese embassy in London in protest at the bombing. "It is absurd to focus on the messenger when the message is so profound," he said.The BBC said no news organisation had any reporters in Kosovo: "Every night we have people coming across the border and telling their stories," said a BBC News spokesman "They speak of `ethnic cleansing' and genocide ...