All Blog Posts from World Watch

Eight years after a U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the country ranks as the worst place to be born, according to a United Nations report.

The United Nation's Children's Fund, better known as UNICEF, says Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world with 257 deaths per 1,000 live births, and 70 percent of Afghans have access to clean water.

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Whether it's your cherished iPhone, Nokia cell phone or Dell keyboard, it was likely made and assembled in Asia by workers who have few rights, and often toil under sweatshop-like conditions, activists say.

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By CBS News' Robert Hendin and Marsha Cooke

(SHANGHAI, China) One of more interesting moments in today's first ever Presidential town hall in China, came when President Obama was asked about Twitter and freedom of expression over the Internet. China is the world's biggest user of the Internet, with more people online here than any other country in the world. But since July, the Chinese government has blocked the popular social-networking sites Twitter and Facebook, to tamp down on criticism after the riots in the Xinjiang province.

The question came, guess what, over the Internet to the U.S. embassy here. Ambassador Jon Huntsman read the question posed via the Internet: "In a country with 350 million Internet users and 60 million bloggers, do you know of the firewall?... should we be able to use Twitter freely?"

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Ever since Raul Castro became Cuba’s President in February 2008, people—at home and abroad—have been waiting for changes that would improve living conditions on the island. But the changes have been slow coming and there are indications that when they do take place they might not be the ones hoped for.

For three days this week, the official Communist Party daily, Granma, has front-paged statements made in the 1970s and 80s by former President Fidel Castro. They are all variations on the same theme: too many people being employed to do too little, and low productivity as the bane of the economy. He also warned that at some point there would be more university graduates than openings in their fields and that students should view their degrees as an honor but not necessarily as a ticket to a professional career.

Castro’s statement printed last Tuesday focused on “inflated” payrolls. Inside the same newspaper was an article announcing that the Ministry of Agriculture would be cutting thousands of bureaucratic jobs. Twenty-six percent of their employees - 89,000 people - it said, were office workers resulting in an “excess of unproductive personnel.”

Cubans fear that similar layoffs will come in many other sectors of the economy and that Granma’s publication of Fidel Castro’s views—if dated—on the issue are rather like trying to put the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” on what are bound to be unpopular if necessary measures taken by his younger brother Raul.

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Turkey's president has sought to allay Western fears that his country — NATO's only majority-Muslim member — is shifting its affinity from Washington and Europe toward Iran.

Increasing closeness between Turkish leaders and Iran, and Turkey's quest for better ties in the broader Muslim world, have fueled concerns in the West that this key U.S. ally is moving gradually to the East.

But Turkey's president used a speech Monday at the opening of an Islamic nations' summit in Istanbul to try and ease worried Western minds.

President Abdullah Gul told the Organization for the Islamic Conference's Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC) that Turkey's foreign policy maneuvers in the West and in the East are "complementary to each other, not contradictory."

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Tired of working amid corruption, a 32 year old Russian police officer has made an unthinkable video appeal directly to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He says he now fears for his life, but thinks this whistle had to be blown.

"Vladimir Vladimirovich, I am appealing directly to you," says Major Alexei Dymovsky in his video, referring to Putin's by his traditional name. "You have been talking about corruption – you have been saying that not only should corruption constitute a crime, you said it should also be unseemly to engage in corrupt practices. But this is not the case in this country."

The words were more likely to come from a human rights activist or an opposition politician. But this rare outpouring of emotion came from within the Russian power structure, from Dymovsky, a cop in the city of Novorossiysk.

"I want you to know how we live – ordinary officers, ordinary policemen – those who solve and untangle (crimes) and detain (criminals), those who do the real work," Dymovsky said in his recorded speech, during which he looked visibly nervous and stumbled at times.

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Leaders from 48 Islamic states met Monday in Turkey to begin an economic summit which may see its stated purpose overshadowed by some controversial guests, and the decades-old quest for peace in the Middle East.

The one-day gathering drew Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is engaged in a standoff with the West over Tehran's nuclear program, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, on his first trip abroad since being controversially re-elected, and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Gul told attendees that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the basis of all conflicts in the Middle East, stressing the need to find a final solution to this issue and end the Israeli occupation of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

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Iran has experimented with a nuclear warhead design so advanced, it's still a secret in both the U.S. and Britain, according to a report in Friday's Guardian.

The British newspaper reports that intelligence suggesting the isolated Islamic regime tested components of a "two-point implosion" warhead has been handed over to Iran by the U.N. nuclear watchdog as part of a dossier of matters requiring explanation.

Parts of the International Atomic Energy Agency's dossier has been published in the past, but this is the first claim that Iran has sought such advanced weaponry — a claim nuclear experts called "breathtaking" when asked by the Guardian.

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Finbarr O'Reilly,a Reuters photographer based in Africa, created an audio slideshow for GlobalPost that captures some of challenges facing coalition troops in the worsening Afghan conflict.

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As millions of Muslims begin arriving in Mecca for this year's pilgrimage, Saudi officials face a unique challenge: how to prevent this sacred rite from becoming an inadvertent incubator and global transmitter of swine flu.

The conditions that will arise during the pilgrimage, or hajj, which officially begins in the last week of November, are the exact opposite of what health officials like to see.

An estimated 2.5 million people from up to 160 countries — including perhaps 15,000 from North America — will walk, pray and eat in close proximity to each other for several days. They will touch the same religious objects and sleep in crowded tent cities.

Some, inevitably, will arrive carrying the new virus strain, H1N1.

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