Thousands of dejected and distressed Syrians left the rebel enclave of Aleppo on Monday as the UN Security Council unanimously voted to deploy observers there. The council also announced the plan for a new peace talks in Geneva in February. Families in Aleppo had spent hours waiting in below-freezing temperatures, sheltering from the rain in bombed-out apartment blocks and …

  Nairobi / AFP When Rose Kariuki first felt a lump on her left breast, the spectre of cancer — a disease she had only heard of on television — was the last thing on her mind. “To me, cancer was nowhere near us. It was shocking, I feared death, I feared so many things,” the 46-year-old Kenyan school teacher said. …

  Gulu / AFP Lily Atong’s anxious eyes fix on the sky where a helicopter gunship circles over her thatched hut, so low she must shout to be heard. “When I see gunships like this it brings back the fear of being in the bush,” Atong says. Abducted as a young girl and forced to become a wife to Lord’s Resistance …