The US Secretary of State has warned of the risk of genocide in South Sudan if the civil war is not stopped. John Kerry made the comments during meetings in Ethiopia, where talks are under way between South Sudan's government and rebels. Kerry’s visit is part of international diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis.

The week leading up to the anniversary saw an onslaught of headlines about Rwanda, declaring it a peaceful and forgiving nation, a modernized and tech-savvy pioneer, and an Africa-gone-right success story. 

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, and there has been a global movement to remember and educate people about what happened.  Some survivors are sharing their painful memories in the United States, hoping students will listen and learn from what happened.

On a Saturday morning in late January, Russ Feingold descended a tight path in the hilly forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park to look for gorillas. The former Democratic senator from Wisconsin wore a long-sleeved safari shirt over a blue polo, a coiled bracelet to repel mosquitos, a surgical mask to protect the gorillas from human germs and two pairs of socks, with his zip-off cargo pants tucked into the outer pair to keep out ants.

France launched its second major African intervention in a year on Friday as its troops rushed to the Central African Republic's capital, Bangui, to stem violence that already claimed over 100 lives this week. France, which capital Bamako earlier this year, began assembling a new 1,200-strong force for CAR just hours after winning U.N. backing to go ahead on Thursday.

If it hadn’t been drowned out by the ongoing wars in Mali and Syria, you would have heard all about the brutal civil war that broke out in the Central African Republic (CAR) in December of 2012. I guess there's only so much war you can read about at any given time, but the one currently tearing through the bush of the Central African Republic is a significant one. One UN official is even claiming a high threat of genocide in the coming months as Christian and Muslim militias face off in a war of escalating sectarian violence.

Perhaps the only thing that the average American knows about Rwanda is of the genocide that claimed over a million lives in 1994. When locating Rwanda, a small nation about the size of the state of Maryland, on a map of Africa, most would first notice their looming neighbor to the left, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.