Dick Cheney said he urged then-president George Bush in June 2007 to bomb a suspected nuclear reactor site in Syria, the former vice president wrote in his memoirs, the New York Times reported Thursday.

"I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor," Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue according to the newspaper, which received an advance copy of the book.

Security forces shot dead a woman and beat up Syria's best-known political cartoonist on Thursday, a day after violence in which 11 civilians and eight soldiers were killed, activists said.

The woman was shot dead during a military operation in a village near the eastern oil hub of Deir al-Zour, 460 kilometers northeast of Damascus, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The EU on Wednesday named Iran's elite al-Quds force, five Syrian generals and the military intelligence network in Damascus on a new list of those sanctioned for their role in repression the U.N. says has killed 2,200 people.

The much-feared wing of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was listed for having provided "technical assistance, equipment and support to the Syrian security services to repress civilian protest movements," the European Union's Official Journal showed.

A woman died under torture in western Syria and more than 150 people were arrested over the past 24 hours in a Damascus suburb, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Wednesday.

The Britain-based group said that a 28-year-old woman who was arrested a week ago died under torture in the city of Khan Shehoun on Wednesday.

European nations and the United States pressed Wednesday for U.N. sanctions against Syria's President Bashar Assad and his entourage for their deadly crackdown on opposition protests.

A draft resolution circulated to the 15 nation Security Council on Tuesday by Britain, France, Germany and Portugal also calls for a total arms embargo against the country.

Syrian dissidents meeting in Istanbul on Tuesday established a "national council" to coordinate a campaign to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

In a final declaration, activists said the council rejected foreign intervention or the rule of any one ethnic group and emphasized the national character of the "revolution."

The U.S. ambassador to Syria on Tuesday visited a town in the south of the country where 15 people were killed last week, an embassy spokesman said.

"Ambassador Robert Ford went this morning to Jassem, 65 kilometers south of Damascus as part of his routine diplomatic duties," the spokesman, who declined to be named, told Agence France Presse.

The U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday ordered a probe into violations committed by the Syrian regime during its crackdown on popular protests.

By 33 votes to four, with nine abstentions, the council passed a resolution to "urgently dispatch an independent international commission of inquiry... to investigate alleged violations of international human rights law ... in the Syrian Arab Republic."

The Lebanese towns and villages in the Bekaa and the North abutting the Syrian border have decided to escalate demonstrations in support of the Syrian people during the last days of Ramadan, the pan-Arab daily Asharq al- reported on Tuesday.

Islamic sources told the newspaper that the clergymen, Imam’s of the mosques and Islamic associations “agreed on triggering daily night protests after al-Taraweeh prayers in all the regions of Tripoli, and in a number of towns in Akkar.”

Syrian authorities ordered a U.N. team to leave the city of Homs on Monday after protests erupted there, a U.N. spokesman said.

Three people were shot dead when security forces opened fire on a rally in Homs on Monday, according to activists.