With the fiscal cliff and its double whammy of expiring tax breaks and spending cuts, this has to go down as one of the strangest year-ends on record.

FORBES: Year-End Tax Planning Despite The Cliff

Yaounde, Cameroon (CNN) -- Michele Mbala Mvogo, a 17-year-old high school student, left home to go to school one morning, and she never came back.

CNN: City panicked by wave of suspected ritual killings

Regular polls by one newspaper show that reporting of crime this year has been at an all-time low: victims go to the police only one time in five.

ECONOMIST: Mexico

Most of them in a context of an expanded vision of basic education for all that should go from one year of pre-primary across to the lower secondary school cycle.

UNESCO: EDUCATION

There's a lot he doesn't remember, but one conversation does stick out: his wife talking to her 5-year-old daughter about how good people go to heaven.

CNN: Surviving a flesh-eating disease

After a one-year stay in the Caribbean, Sarah Stotzner wants to go to university and, if possible, return to Hoyerswerda.

CNN: Born in the east, young Germans still forced to head west