The Nuba Mountains region in southern Sudan is a land the world has largely forgotten, except for the Catholic Church, which for more than three decades has stood with the people as they endured hunger, bombing and neglect.

Talks between President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar in Khartoum in neighboring Sudan entered the home stretch with negotiators fine-tuning the final chapter on power-sharing arrangements and governance.

In a statement July 22, the Association of Member Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa, known by the acronym AMECEA, said the steps taken by the leaders of both countries "show that Africans have the wisdom to solve their own problems amicably."

In Johannesburg, Obama gave what some commentators consider his most important speech since he vacated the Oval Office.

The Congolese artist has left us a form of art that transcends political and aesthetic categories.

After watching for years as newly independent South Sudan has succumbed to civil war fought largely along ethnic lines, displacing one-third of the population, church leaders in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan are working hard to ensure that their small enclave of liberated territory will not go the way of its neighbors to the south.