Government and rebel forces in South Sudan threaten to plunge their young nation into civil war. Today, the two sides sat down to peace talks, and the US is working behind the scenes to support the talks.
NORAD started tracking Santa by accident, when a phone number was misprinted in a Colorado Springs newspaper. Now the Santa tracking has turned into a digital empire that will delight thousands, perhaps millions, of children around the world on Christmas Eve.
Associated Press photographer Jerome Delay chose to stay in the Central African Republic when many of his peers went to South Africa to cover the death of Nelson Mandela. He felt he needed to show the world what was going on in the chaotic African nation.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin seems to have once again pulled off a PR "master stroke" by having a routine amnesty law expanded to free two groups at the center of global human rights protests, just before the Sochi Olympics. The world's youngest nation, South Sudan, is suffering from renewed ethic violence. And the illegal practice of shark finning —stripping sharks of their fins — proves hard to end in Costa Rica. All that and more, in today's Global Scan.
Rwanda faces a huge challenge nearly 13 years after the genocide. Huge numbers of people were killed but huge numbers of people have also been implicated in the killings. The Rwandan government wants justice for the victims but it also wants to promote reconciliation. So it's created a program of community service. It's designed to help confessed killers ease back into society.
In Rwanda, a huge legal experiment is underway. It's called Gacaca. Since 1994 the government has struggled to administer justice to hundreds of thousands of genocide suspects. A UN court was set up in Tanzania to try high level suspects. The regular Rwandan courts began processing the rest. But they were soon overwhelmed. So the government adapted a traditional form of dispute resolution into a grassroots apparatus for trying genocide cases.