A Twitter spokesperson told Talking Points Memo that the president's tweet -- which read "This seat's taken" and was accompanied with the above shot of a certain big-eared and very visible Democrat in the presidential chair -- was re-tweeted over 50,000 times.

Despite all the cheekiness and some critical response to Eastwood's stunt in the media, the legendary director's reputation remains intact. Even the president himself told reporters this weekend that he was not offended by Eastwood's speech and praised his work.

Many of those killed in the town of Darayya were victims of execution-style killings, the activists said.

President Bashar al-Assad, who also met the Iranian delegation, said Syria would continue its current policy "whatever the cost" and accused Western nations of a regional conspiracy.

The activists say that many of the victims had gunshot wounds to the head and chest and were killed during house-to-house raids by government troops.

"The United States is not a party to the 1954 OAS Convention on Diplomatic Asylum and does not recognize the concept of diplomatic asylum as a matter of international law," the office of Spokesperson Victoria Nuland said in a Friday statement.

But the U.S. has a long record of protecting political targets inside U.S. embassy complexes, most recently with Chinese blind dissident Chen Guangcheng last December.

In 1989, the U.S. granted "temporary refuge" to Feng Lizhi, a leader of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, who fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and stayed there for 384 days before Chinese authorities allowed him to go to the United States, but officially only for "medical treatment."

Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana sought refuge in 1967 via the U.S. Embassy in India and was eventually granted U.S. citizenship.

“Ecuador requested some guarantees from Sweden that he wouldn’t be extradited to the U.S., and they rejected any commitment in this sense,” Patino said.

The decision from Ecuador comes a day after officials claimed that UK authorities threatened to raid the Ecuadorean embassy to nab the WikiLeaks leader if the country didn’t hand over the fugitive.

On Thursday, Patino expressed outrage over the unprecedented threat and said that the UK had no right to interfere in the right of an individual to request asylum and the right of Ecuador as a sovereign nation to grant that asylum. No country, he said, had the right “to blackmail or threaten in any way” the sovereignty of any other country.

Hours after the Syrian regime suffered its greatest setback in the yearlong civil war, the U.S. and U.K. defense chiefs feared that dictator Bashar Assad might use his stockpile of chemical weapons — the results of what may be the largest active chemical program on the planet.

There is little appetite in the U.S. military for taking on that challenge. Globalsecurity.org estimates Syria possesses “hundreds of liters” of Sarin, mustard gas and VX.

They’re manufactured all over Syria, so destroying the factories will require a major bombing campaign — and Assad has sophisticated air defenses, maybe including Russia’s powerful S-300 missiles.

Scrapping the machines brings to an end the embarrassing e-voting debacle which has cost the taxpayer more than €54m since it emerged the expensive equipment was faulty.

They could not be guaranteed to be safe from tampering. And they could not produce a printout so that votes/results could be double-checked.

The company will pay the State €70,267 for the 7,500 machines and associated equipment -- 0.13pc of the amount they have cost the State.

A BBC correspondent has seen evidence of human remains at the village of Qubair in Syria, scene of a massacre reported on Wednesday.

After a visit to Moscow, Treasury official David Cohen told BBC News there was evidence that financial sanctions against Syria were having an impact but Washington was worried that Russia's close economic ties with Syria were undermining the programme.

More than 100 people, many of them children, were killed in the attack overnight between 25 and 26 May, most knifed or shot at close range.

UN investigators have said most of the dead were summarily executed, and eyewitnesses had said pro-government militias had carried out most of the killings.

The international peace envoy Kofi Annan, sent by the United Nations and the Arab League, expressed frustration on Saturday that Mr Assad was not turning his words into actions.

The UN Human Rights Council has called for an investigation into the killing of more than 100 civilians at Houla, and condemned Syria for the massacre.

Earlier the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said the killings in Houla may amount to crimes against humanity.

Ms Pillay's office reported on Tuesday that UN investigators had found most of the 108 victims had been shot at close range or stabbed.

Contreras posits that, although “it makes sense” for Chile to participate in the negotiation by the TPP because it was one of the countries who formed the original “P4″ (with Brunei, New Zealand and Singapore) on which TPP is based, Chile is now reassessing whether it should remain in the negotiation.

The P4 had a scant four pages on intellectual property that primarily affirmed TRIPS, with additional listings of geographic indicators and obligations to enter WIPO performances treaties. When the US entered the agreement and pushed it to expand into what is now the TPP, it came with hundreds of incredibly specific intellectual property demands, many of them exceeding any standard in any bilateral or multilateral agreement between any parties.