All Blog Posts from World Watch

(CBS News) UNITED NATIONS - The language of Monday's U.N. Security Council's Presidential statement condemning North Korea's launch of a ballistic missile last Friday was particularly strong, deploring the launch as a grave security concern in the region. But the most important element of the council's condemnatory statement is that China - North Korea's strongest alley - was on board.

It gives weight to the fact that Beijing also considers North Korea's nuclear ambitions a threat to security.

After lengthy debate, and resistance from China during negotiations on Friday and Saturday, the U.N. issued its Presidential statement (which is a U.N. document that has to be adopted unanimously) condemning the rocket launch, making the point that any launch using ballistic missile technology - even if it a satellite launch or a space vehicle - is a violation of Security Council Resolutions.

That was intended to dispel any pretext by North Korea that its launch was for peaceful purposes, permissible under treaty obligations.

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(CBS News) DAMASCUS - A six-man advance team of United Nations monitors arrived in Damascus on Sunday to prepare for a full observation mission in Syria as promptly as possible, as part of U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan's six-point plan for ending the violence which has ravaged the country for more than a year.

The observers departed for Syria shortly after the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to authorize the mission.

The observers' aim is to monitor and help maintain the still-shaky cease-fire between the government of President Bashar Al-Assad and armed opposition fighters.

The unarmed military team, headed by an Indian general, is expected to be on the ground in blue helmets as early as tomorrow. They will be augmented by additional personnel on Monday, and 25 to 30 more observers in the coming days, according to U.N. spokesman Khaled Massri.

Assuming the cease-fire holds, the 15-nation council will be asked to approve a full mission of about 250 observers, based on a report by the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon next week.

Syrian officials welcomed the arrival of the "technical" team, and said Damascus was committed to the U.N. plan, which calls for the government to ensure unimpeded freedom of movement for the observers and the ability to interview anyone they want to in private, in addition to unimpeded access for humanitarian workers.

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(CBS NEWS) ISLAMABAD - A bold jailbreak on Sunday by the Taliban in Pakistan's embattled northwestern province prompted fresh warnings over security conditions deteriorating rapidly in an area bordering Afghanistan.

The objectives behind the jailbreak in the city of Bannu, in the northern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, appeared to include freeing a notorious Islamic militant involved in an assassination attempt targeting Pakistan's former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf.

Altogether, approximately 400 inmates - including at least 30 men with previous record of association with the Taliban - escaped the prison early on Sunday, according to accounts given by Pakistani officials.

A senior Pakistani intelligence officer who spoke to CBS News from Peshawar, the provincial capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, confirmed reports of the escape of Adnan Rasheed, in custody in connection with the assassination attempt on Musharraf.

"He was a very notorious militant. His escape is a big breach in security arrangements" said the security official who asked not to be named.

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(CBS News) A day before Quartet on the Middle East mediators are expected to meet in Washington, D.C., the Palestine U.N. Observer, Ambassador Riyad Mansour, spoke with CBS News about prospects for peace. For 65 years, negotiations to bring peace to the Middle East have failed. This week, the Quartet principals -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov -- are scheduled to meet at Blair House in Washington, after having called for a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian talks and for a framework agreement by the end of 2012.

The previous Quartet summit took place last September at U.N. headquarters at the same time that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, submitted an application for full Palestinian membership - a plan which later failed at the Security Council.

"The talks are stalled," said Mansour, "We hope that the Quartet can succeed in getting the negotiations out of the impasse that we are going through."

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(CBS News) No place on Earth has seen the bad end of the war on drugs more so than Latin America, where drug gangs flourish and bystanders are murdered by the tens of thousands. A lot of the drug war-related suffering in Latin America is due to its proximity to the United States of America, which by all accounts is the world's biggest illicit drug consumer, all while being among the drug war's biggest proponents.

At the upcoming Summit of the Americas on April 14 and 15, it appears a new crop of Latin American leaders may press the Obama administration for an open and new kind of discussion on the war on drugs.

Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina reflected the new tone among many in Latin America on the drug war in a recent op-ed for the Guardian: "Knowing that drugs are bad for human beings is not a compelling reason for advocating their prohibition. Actually, the prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that the global drug markets can be eradicated. We would not believe such a statement if it were applied to alcoholism or tobacco addiction, but somehow we assume it's right in the case of drugs. Why?"

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(CBS News) In one way, the renewed military trial of the acknowledged mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and four others is a bit of Kabuki theater. Everyone knows the charges. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshib have admitted to, even reveled in, their roles as principal planners the attacks.

In another way, it is a bit of a high-wire act - the military commission system is one that hadn't been used since the 1940s to execute Nazi spies who came in from a German submarine off Montauk Point in New York. In the few cases from the post-9/11 battlefields, it has been clunky.

When I was with the FBI, I traveled to Guantanamo Bay and saw the military commission system at work. I was a witness at the trial of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver. After being held for seven years, Hamdan was convicted and sentenced to time served, plus six months. At the same time, back in the civilian federal court system, people who were being convicted of material support of terrorism charges far more benign than being on bin Laden's personal security detail were receiving longer sentences. In one case, two men convicted of sending blankets and backpacks to the Mujahedeen were being sentenced more than 10 years in federal prison.

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(CBS News) UNITED NATIONS -- At the same time that new assaults are being launched against cities in Syria by the government, U.N.-Arab League Special Envoy Kofi Annan tried to reassure the General Assembly that his peace plan was not functioning as a pretext for the Assad regime in Syria to buy time or to defeat the opposition. Many in the U.N. have come to see the Syrian conflict as an internationalized battle - a proxy war - between Russia and Iran on one side and the U.S. and the Gulf states on the other.

A still-divided U.N. Security Council adopted a non-enforceable Presidential Statement to bolster Annan just before he briefed the General Assembly.

With the deadline one week away for the cessation of all violence, at the U.N., diplomacy is decreasing and violence increasing ahead of the deadline. Despite the fact that Syria's Assad said that the government would begin to withdraw troops from population centers, the Syrian army shelled a suburb of Damascus and continued their assault on Homs.

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(CBS News) The $10 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Pakistani extremist Hafiz Mohammad Saeed is essentially the first step in publicly recognizing that the militant group he founded, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is bigger, richer, more sophisticated and in many ways more dangerous than al Qaeda.

LeT is a group that has operated largely in the shadows. Its front organization, Jamaat ud Dawa, is well-funded, well-known and popular in Pakistan for its charitable endeavors - running hospitals, offering relief from earthquakes and floods and managing a network of schools. But large amounts of the millions raised for its charity work are believed to be funneled to LeT for terrorist operations.

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(CBS NEWS) ISLAMABAD - Some of Pakistan's most notorious Islamic militants on Wednesday vowed to stop the resumption of a critical land supply route to U.S- led forces in Afghanistan.

At the same time, one of Pakistan's most prominent militants held a defiant news conference, a day after the U.S. slapped a $10 million bounty on him.

"I am here, I am visible. America should give that reward money to me," Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the 61-year-old founder of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, told reporters Wednesday.

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(CBS News) BEIJING - The Chinese government is a voyeur. At least that's what Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is trying to prove.

Tuesday marks the one year anniversary of the day police locked Ai up for 81 days. To commemorate his arrest, the renowned artist and designer of the 2008 Bird's Nest Olympic stadium installed four cameras in his home so that anyone on the web can monitor his movements, 24-hours a day.

The project symbolizes his time in detention, Ai tells CBS News. The artist remains heavily monitored after being charged for tax evasion linked to Fake Cultural Development, a company owned by his wife.

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