by Ben McConville and Jill Lawless

Associated Press Writers

DUNBLANE, Scotland (AP) — If there's anywhere that understands the pain of Newtown, it's Dunblane, the town whose grief became a catalyst for changes to Britain's gun laws.

ANTI-GUN CAMPAIGN--A woman passes a poster reading: 'Weapons Monopoly for Criminals? No' in Zurich, Switzerland. In September 2001, a man named Friedrich Leibacher went on a rampage in the regional parliament in the wealthy northern Swiss city of Zug, killing 14 people and himself, apparently over a grudge against a local official. (AP Photo/Keystone/Walter Bieri, File)

In March 1996, a 43-year-old man named Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school in this central Scotland town of 8,000 people and shot to death 16 kindergarten-age children and their teacher with four legally held handguns. In the weeks that followed, people in the town formed the Snowdrop campaign — named for the first flower of spring — to press for a ban on handguns. Within weeks, it had collected 750,000 signatures. By the next year, the ban had become law.

by Laura Burke

GOVERNMENT COUP—In this Feb. 28, 1966 file photo, students of the Ghanian trades union congress heap communist and Pro-Kwame Nkrumah magazines and newspapers onto a bonfire outside Congress House in Accra, Ghana in the wake of the overthrow of Nkrumah’s government during the week of Feb. 20, 1966. (AP Photo)

ACCRA, Ghana (AP)—The year was 1966 and a 7-year-old boy named John Dramani Mahama was standing by the door of his boarding school, wondering why his father wasn’t there to fetch him. The Easter holiday was approaching, classes were done, and everyone else had left.

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South Africa's former President Nelson Mandela is "doing very, very well" while undergoing unspecified medical tests at a military hospital, the nation's defense minister said Monday. The office of the presidency said the anti-apartheid icon was being kept in the hospital for a third day for more tests.

COUNTRY WORRIES--A newspaper vendor sells Sunday newspapers reporting on former South African President, Nelson Mandela, in Johannesburg Sunday Dec. 9, 2012. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)

NYUMBANI, Kenya (AP) — There are no middle-aged people in Nyumbani. They all died years ago, before this village of hope in Kenya began. Only the young and old live here.

Nyumbani was born of the AIDS crisis. The 938 children here all saw their parents die. The 97 grandparents — eight grandfathers among them — saw their middle-aged children die. But put together, the bookend generations take care of one another.

In this photo taken Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2012, young schoolboys walk home at the end of the school day in the yard of the Hot Courses Primary School, in the village of Nyumbani which caters to children who lost their parents to HIV, and grandparents who lost their children to HIV, with the bookend generations taking care of one another, in Kenya. Saturday, Dec. 1, is World AIDS Day, and UNAIDS says that as of 2011 an estimated 23.5 million people living with HIV resided in sub-Saharan Africa, representing 69 percent of the global HIV burden, with eastern and southern Africa the hardest-hit regions. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)