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meeting in Damascus, killing four top regime officials, including Assad's brother-in-law and the defense minister.
• There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Saturday's attack in Daraa, but Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida-inspired extremist group that is fighting alongside the rebels, has said it was responsible for similar bombings in the past.
• The targeted area is considered a high-security zone that houses a branch of the country's Military Intelligence as well as an officer's club where dozens of regime forces are based. Around 30 tanks that regime forces use to shell Daraa and surrounding areas are also stationed in a nearby stadium, activists said.
• In other violence, Syrian TV said a locally made rocket slammed into a four-story residential building in the district of al-Qassaa in the capital of Damascus, wounding two young women. The TV blamed "terrorists" for the attack in the predominantly Christian residential area -- the term used by the Syrian government to describe rebels.
• Despite gaining control over large swaths of territory, particularly in the country's north, Syria's rebels are far outgunned by the military, which has increasingly relied on airstrikes against rebel strongholds.
• The Syrian opposition, which is deeply divided and plagued by rivalries, says it needs weapons to break the military stalemate and defeat Assad. The rebels' Western backers have been reluctant to send weapons to the opposition fighters, for fear they will fall into the wrong hands.
• George Sabra, the newly elected leader of the main opposition bloc, the Syrian National Council, urged the international community on Saturday to support rebels without any conditions.
• "Unfortunately, we get nothing from them, except some statements, some encouragement" while Assad's allies "give the regime everything," Sabra told The Associated Press on the sidelines of a weeklong SNC conference in the Qatari capital of Doha.
• Sabra was heading an SNC delegation Saturday in talks with rival opposition groups on forging a new, broader and more inclusive opposition leadership group -- an idea promoted by Western and Arab backers of those trying to oust Assad.
• Syria has dismissed the meeting in Doha, and Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi called it a political folly. In an interview on state-run Syrian TV aired late Friday, al-Zoubi said those who "meet in hotels" abroad are "deluding themselves" if they think they can overthrow the government.
• Activists say more than 36,000 people have died in Syria during the nearly 20-month-old conflict, which has increasingly taken on sectarian overtones. The oppo

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