A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Feb. 24 that the government can continue to hold indefinitely two Yemeni Guantánamo Bay detainees, even though the men had been cleared for release by the Bush administration two years ago. Judge Gladys Kessler denied the petitions for habeas corpus filed by Fahmi Salem Al-Assani and Suleiman Awadh Bin Agil Al-Nahdi. The men had been notified of their release in 2008, but the decision was suspended when President Barack Obama took office. Full text of the opinions explaining Kessler's reasoning will be made public after passing a security clearance. Nearly half the 188 prisoners remaining at Guantánamo are from Yemen.

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.

Stanley Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel, flew to China Feb. 24 to urge Beijing to back sanctions against Iran over its suspected nuclear weapons project. Fischer, a former high official at the World Bank and IMF, was accompanied by Israel's minister for strategic affairs, Moshe Yaalon, and representatives of Israel's National Security Council. "They will discuss issues of common interest with the Chinese. This includes the Iranian issue, which is important for the Chinese as well as Israel," Yaalon's spokesman said.

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.

The man accused of killing New York independent journalist Brad Will was released from prison in Oaxaca, Mexico, on Feb. 18 after a federal appeals tribunal declared that there was no evidence against him. Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno, an activist with the Popular Assembly of the People's of Oaxaca (APPO) from an impoverished neighborhood of Oaxaca City, was freed after 16 months in the state's harsh Santa María Ixcotel Central Penitentiary. "It was easier to implicate somebody like me than the real killers," he told reporters.

Hooded gunmen stormed the pueblo of San Vicente Camalote in southern Mexico's Oaxaca state and killed 13 people Feb. 24. Among the dead were nine state police agents who were attacked at a checkpoint. The gunmen next burst into the ranch of Alfonso Maciel, killing him and his three sons, one of whom was a minor, state authorities said. The pueblo, in Acatlán de Pérez Figueroa municipality in a mountainous region near the Veracruz border, has been occupied by army troops and elite Federal Preventative Police. (AP, El Universal, Feb. 24)