On Feb. 21, 67 corpses were brought to Baghdad morgue all shot with silencer guns, medical sources told Baghdad's Azzaman daily Feb. 26. The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said most of the victims were civil servants, former Baathists and army officers. Three more were killed with silencer guns Feb. 22, including Dr. Thamer Kamel, a university professor who was head of the human rights section at the Ministry of Higher Education. The gunmen drive in mainly four-wheel vehicles and quickly disappear from the crime scene.

At least 17 people were killed and 32 wounded early Feb. 26, when multiple suicide bombers attacked a hotel popular with foreigners and the surrounding area in the center of Kabul, Afghanistan's capital. The bombing is the first attack in the city since Jan. 18, when teams of suicide bombers and gunmen targeted government buildings, leaving 12 dead, including seven attackers. It is also the first attack in Kabul since the start of a major NATO-led offensive against Taliban fighters in Afghanistan's Helmand province. (AlJazeera, Feb. 26)

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syria's President Bashar Assad and Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah met in Damascus Feb. 25, Hezbollah's al-Manar TV reported. This was the first time a Nasrallah visit to Damascus has been reported. Al-Manar did not say whether Hamas political chief Khaled Meshal, who is based in Damascus, took part in the meeting.

Authorities in Spain have launched proceedings to suspend the notorious investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzón. The ostensible reason for the move is his investigation into the fate of 114,000 people who disappeared during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. The public prosecutor's office says Garzón had no authority to conduct the investigation because of a 1977 amnesty law. But Garzón says the disappearances must be considered crimes against humanity, and therefore not covered by any amnesty.

B'nai Brith Canada released its 2009 "Audit of Antisemitic Incidents" this week. The survey reported over 1,200 incidents last year, an 11% increase over 2008 and a five-fold increase over the last decade. In total, there were 884 reports of harassment, 348 cases of vandalism and 32 cases of violence—twice as many as 2008.

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Feb. 23 in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, on whether a federal law that prohibits providing material support to terrorism violates the First Amendment. The challenge was filed by the Humanitarian Law Project (HLP) on behalf on several groups that wanted to support Turkey's Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), both of which have been designated as terrorist organizations by the US government.

Pakistani authorities are reported to have arrested nearly half of the Afghan Taliban's top leadership in recent days, in what is being portrayed as a crucial blow to the insurgent movement. In total, seven of the insurgent group's 15-member leadership council, thought to be based in Quetta, have been apprehended in the past week, unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials told the Christian Science Monitor.

Two human rights groups released documents Feb. 22 confirming that planes associated with the US Central Intelligence Agency's "extraordinary rendition" program landed in Poland on six occasions in 2003. The Open Society Justice Initiative and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights released flight records obtained through a freedom of information act request to the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency. Those records confirm at least six plane landings linked to the CIA at the Szczytno-Szymany airport in northern Poland between February and September 2003. The flights' origins included Afghanistan and Morocco.