Assassination

KABUL, Afghanistan - A brazen daytime assassination on Sunday offered a grim reminder of stymied progress in a key part of NATO's effort to wind down the Afghan war: peace talks with the Taliban. Arsala Rahmani, a senior member of the Afghan government body set up to conduct negotiations with the militant group, was shot and killed while traveling by car through the Afghan capital, police said. Coming less than nine months after the assassination of the head of the High Peace Council, the killing cast yet more gloom over Western-backed efforts to bring the insurgents to the bargaining table.

The Passage of Power The Years of Lyndon Johnson Robert Caro Alfred A. Knopf: 736 pp., $35 "The Passage of Power," the fourth volume in Robert Caro's epic biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, encompasses the period of LBJ's deepest humiliation and his greatest accomplishment. It is a searing account of ambition derailed by personal demons in Johnson's unsuccessful bid for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. It is a painful depiction of "greatness comically humbled" when Johnson gave up his unbridled authority as Senate majority leader to becomeJohn F. Kennedy's disdained vice president.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Turban bombs had become too obvious. So the two men who apparently set out Saturday to assassinate Kandahar's governor looked to their footwear instead. The assailants used the unusual tactic of concealing weapons and explosives in their boots to make their way past police checkpoints and into the governor's heavily guarded compound in the city of Kandahar, leading to a gun battle that left them and two Afghan police officers dead, a provincial spokesman said.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.was assassinated 44 years ago today. The somber anniversary will be marked across the country, including with a wreath-laying ceremony at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., which is on the site where King was fatally shot. And the new Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington, D.C., will also mark the anniversary -- its very first, since it just opened to the public last summer -- with a candlelight vigil later this evening.

Inside Wayne Lensing's auto museum, down a remote road from a body shop, visitors can see Elvis Presley's 1972 Lincoln, the Mayberry squad car from "The Andy Griffith Show" and three Batmobiles. A few steps from a Cadillac that has been covered in 120,000 coins, the curious also can view a decidedly different artifact: Lee Harvey Oswald's tombstone. That's right. The 130-pound gray granite slab that marked the final resting place of one of U.S. history's more notorious figures is about 90 miles northwest of Chicago, on the outskirts of Roscoe, Ill., best known perhaps as the hometown of race car driver Danica Patrick.

Two judicial officials were assassinated Sunday in Syria's Idlib province, and the strife-riven nation faced what could be a critical week, almost a year after the bloody rebellion erupted against the government of President Bashar Assad. Authorities said "an armed terrorist group" in Idlib city opened fire on a car carrying a judge, Mohammed Ziyadeh, and a prosecutor, Nidal Ghazal. Also killed was the driver, said the official Syrian Arab News Agency. An opposition activist reached in Idlib contradicted the official version and said Syrian security forces killed the pair because they were cooperating with antigovernment rebels active in the northwestern region, close to the border with Turkey.

In Afghanistan, to be a judge is to be a target. Officials on Sunday reported the assassination of a provincial jurist from a restive eastern province. His 8-year-old daughter was killed along with him, they said. For the last several years, the Taliban and affiliated insurgent groups have carried out a concerted campaign of assassinations, taking aim at influential local figures — tribal elders, community leaders, municipal and provincial officials — because of perceived loyalty to the central Afghan government.

A Syrian general was assassinated Saturday outside his home in Damascus, the capital, the official state news service said, as violence continued to rage in the central city of Homs and elsewhere in the country. Three gunmen waited for Brig. Gen. Issa Kholi and shot him as he left his residence, the Syrian Arab News Agency reported. The slain general, a senior military physician who headed a Damascus hospital, was believed to have been one of the highest-ranking military officers killed in the almost year-long conflict.

MLK: The Assassination Tapes infobox 2/12/12 'MLK: The Assassination Tapes' Where: The Smithsonian Channel When: 6 and 9 p.m. Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

There are only two things even remotely amiss with "MLK: The Assassination Tapes," a highly unsettling trip back in time that premieres Sunday on the Smithsonian Channel, 43 years and a day after the beginning of the sanitation workers strike that brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, Tenn., and his death. And they are small things at that. First, there is the slightly misleading title, which seems to imply a single cache of hitherto unsuspected, clandestinely recorded or revealing documents.