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The often-slow arc of good news may not make headlines. But 2012 brought its quiet share: from extreme poverty dropping by half since 1990 to a robot with the bulky profile of an NFL player that may have a role in bringing jobs back to the US.

Good news is hard to find. That's partly because, no matter what the topic, there's so much distracting bad news: ongoing violence in Syria, America's allegedly imminent fiscal demise, the National Hockey League lockout. From the front page to the sports page, so little looks good.

It isn't just the cacophony of naysaying and fear that crowds out good news. It's also the nature of progress itself: Good news happens slowly. The American storytelling ethos loves narratives of overnight success, but real change isn't usually so sudden. Earlier this year, the World Bank announced that the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day – what policy wonks call "extreme poverty" – had dropped by half since 1990. That study might have been the biggest bit of good news to go overlooked this year, but consider this: Global extreme poverty was actually halved in 2010 – it took two years even to see that progress had happened.

Other highlights, too, have been subject to the long arc of incremental change. Nearly 90 percent of people globally have access to clean water, according to the World Health Organization. In Mexico, homicide rates – driven to outrageous levels in the drug wars – are down for the first time in six years.

In The Hague, two international war criminals were found guilty in landmark rulings: the International Criminal Court convicted Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese rebel, of recruiting child soldiers. The conviction, after a two-year trial, was a first for the ICC, established a decade ago. The verdict "was the culmination of decades of hope that accountability for the most serious crimes would be achieved," says James Goldston, founding director of the Open Society Justice Initiative. "It took 10 years, but this conviction [is] an enormous accomplishment and a major step forward for international justice."

In a long-awaited verdict from a different court, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, former Liberian President Charles Taylor was convicted of war crimes. He is effectively the first former head of state to be convicted of war crimes. (The formal distinction goes to Karl Dönitz, who served as president of Germany for the 23 days between Hitler's suicide and the dissolution of the government after Germany's surrender in World War II.)

Technology drives much of the change seen in America, even just this year. Sales of nonpolluting electric cars are surpassing expectations. And self-driving cars are now legal in California. Google conducted the first test of its self-driving car with a passenger who was chauffeured to the dry cleaner and Taco Bell. [more on that at http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2013/0104/CES-2013-Toyota
-and-Audi-roll-out-new-self-driving-cars]) Beyond being wide-eyed, self-driven automobiles might make passengers safer – computers are likely eventually to be better drivers than humans, Patrick Tucker, the director of communications at the World Future Society, says – and transform cities. Summoning one's car from even a mile away "removes the need for designing cities on the basis of the availability of on-site parking," he says. Ordering up an automobile also makes car sharing easier, which can reduce carbon emissions, he adds.

The accidental death rate for children in the US plunged 30 percent in the past decade, led by auto safety improvements such as increased use of seat belts and booster seats and safer vehicle design, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Piracy and armed robbery at sea dropped to the lowest levels since 2009, when Somali piracy spiked, reports the International Chamber of Commerce International Maritime Bureau, which attributes the decline to improved policing by international navies and onboard security measures. And in the air, there were no major commercial airline crashes in the US in 2012, the 11th year in a row, says Todd Curtis, director of the AirSafe.com Foundation.

This year, "reshoring" entered the lexicon as a way of talking about manufacturing jobs returning to the US, usually from China. There isn't tracking of official numbers for this, but the Reshoring Initiative estimates that 12 percent of the manufacturing jobs the economy has seen return since 2010 were from abroad.

"We're winning more than we're losing," says Jerome Glenn, director of the Millennium Project, a global futures research center and think tank. The project releases an annual "State of the Future" index, and this year's says that "the world is getting richer, healthier, better educated, more peaceful, and better connected, [and] people are living longer."

Mr. Glenn cautions that things aren't all rosy, and thumbing through any newspaper would suggest there are still plenty of world problems to make progress on. He compares it to making ice: Cooling water isn't too difficult, but turning it into ice requires serious energy. "We're at that point of going from water into ice in a sense of difficulty" of shared global challenges. It's time, he says, "to roll up our sleeves." http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-Issues/2012/1230/Progress-watch-
2012-Smart-phones-jobs-returning-to-America-and-war-crimes-trials]
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1. Historic improvements in health

Not 15 years ago, an HIV diagnosis was medically considered a death sentence, and policymakers worried whether the world could contain the spread of AIDS. In that context, today's news is surprising: AIDS infections have dropped 50 percent or more in 25 countries, compared with a decade ago, reports the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

UNAIDS reports that the number of children newly infected with HIV is down by more than a quarter in the past two years. "This progress in reducing new infections among children is actually quite dramatic," says Peter Ghys, chief of Data for Action at UNAIDS. "We're seeing this in a large number of countries."

This year for the first time the majority of people eligible for HIV treatment in low- and middle-income countries receive antiretroviral therapy (ART). Dr. Benn singles out Rwanda as an example of stunning progress: More than 90 percent of eligible Rwandans were receiving ART by the end of October.

"This is fantastic ... historical. That is beyond our expectations from a couple of years ago," Benn says.

Kazakhstan is the site of another moment of global public health progress this year. In March, it was certified malaria-free by the World Health Organization, joining only four other malaria-endemic countries with that designation.

Nigeria heads the pack of 17 countries poised to eliminate malaria. Their antimalaria agenda includes a $50 million bed-net program, underwritten by The Global Fund, which hopes the country will offer two bed nets per household.

The Republic of the Congo, meanwhile, has made massive strides in combating maternal mortality. The number of women dying in childbirth dropped 60 percent between 2010 and 2011, from 740 deaths per 100,000 live births to 300 deaths.

2. A green secret: It was the year plug-in car sales accelerated

This year, only the second in which vehicles using electric motors for primary propulsion were widely available, the technology was hammered by pundits, politicians, and analysts. Yet despite inflated sales expectations, plug-in vehicles are doing quite well when compared with the last big technology to hit the auto industry – the gas-electric hybrid, analysts say.

Plug-in vehicles like the Chevrolet Volt, Toyota Prius PHV, and all-electric Nissan Leaf are on pace for combined sales of about 50,000 by year-end – far ahead of what hybrid sales were at the same stage of market development – and a 280 percent jump in sales over 2011.

In October, the Toyota Prius plug-in version and Chevy Volt turned in their best monthly sales. Volt sales set records three months in a row with about 3,000 units sold last month and more than 20,000 so far this year. The Volt today outsells many well-known conventional gasoline-powered models like the Mazda Miata, Audi A3, and Lexus GS, a Natural Resources Defense Council study found. It beats Chevrolet's Corvette, too, which nobody is declaring a loser.

Plug-in technology has also been hammered for allegedly exchanging one form of pollution (tailpipe) for another (power plant smokestack). But several major studies have shown that, when compared with most cars, electric-drive vehicles are a plus for the environment no matter where they charge up. From http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-Issues/2012/1230/2012-s-good-new
s-stories/Historic-improvements-in-health?nav=602513-csm_article-promoLink

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Since this is already terribly long, I'll just list the others in this article and you can read the details if you wish:

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3. Reshoring: 50,000 jobs, and counting, return to the US

4. US youth: record levels of education... optimism rising

5. Myanmar blooms in political opening

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