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Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, almost 100 volunteer decorators show up at the White House. They spend the next five days stringing garlands and hanging ornaments, making the White House sparkle for the holidays. NPR has a related tradition, and it's about to end.

The U.S. and Afghanistan have been at odds over a security agreement that allows U.S. troops to remain in the country past 2014. Hagel also met with leaders of Gulf nations to assure them the U.S. is not abandoning those ties in favor of a nuclear deal with Iran.

It was the spring of 1999 in Moscow, and two of the 20th century's great revolutionary leaders, South Africa's Nelson Mandela and Russia's Boris Yeltsin, were having their first face-to-face talks as presidents of their nations. Yeltsin was struggling, but with a few simple gestures, Mandela changed the narrative.

Once the weapon of law enforcement officials, the repellent is available to just about everyone.

Ozy co-founder Carlos Watson talks about a rising star in soccer who could turn things around for England in the 2014 World Cup, and a Bahraini woman who calls herself an "accidental activist."

U.S. civil rights leaders were among the first Americans to shine an international light on apartheid in South Africa. But calls for economic sanctions eventually led to wider actions, from college campuses to Wall Street. Richard Knight, project director of the African Activist Archive, remembers the role the U.S. indirectly played in South Africa's struggle.

When Nelson Mandela died this week at age 95, he left a legacy as one of the most important leaders in modern history. Mandela rose from humble beginnings to lead South Africa out of its apartheid past, and helped to keep the nation from tumbling into civil war. But before becoming South Africa's first black president, he endured decades behind bars.

South Africa's official period of mourning for former President Nelson Mandela will culminate in his funeral a week from Sunday. Mandela's death left South Africans with "a sense of profound and enduring loss," says the nation"s president, Jacob Zuma. His compatriots, as well as foreign visitors, are flocking in homage to the Mandela homes in Soweto and Johannesburg.

Freezing rain is creeping across Tennessee on its way to the mid-Atlantic as the stunning cold, snow and ice that gripped Texas and the west on Saturday makes its advance eastward.

In Roshi Fernando's upper-middle-class childhood home, conversations about sex were taboo. But at 13, already a survivor of sexual trauma, she needed answers. Fernando turned to Maya Angelou's autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and, in its pages, found comfort and strength.