大象传媒

One July evening three years ago, the latest Batman film was showing at a cinema in Aurora, Colorado. 18 year old Bonnie Kate Pourciau was in the audience with a friend. About fifteen minutes in, a man wearing body armour and a gas mask opened fire, killing 12 people, and wounding seventy - including Bonnie Kate. The gunman was sentenced last month to life without the possibility of parole. Bonnie Kate spent months in hospital, and is still in pain. But there has been a happy ending - the incident rekindled a romance with a boyfriend she'd dumped some months before, film maker Max Zoghbi. I've been speaking to both of them from Nashville. Bonnie Kate told me how she came to be in the cinema that night, more than a thousand miles from home.

In the last few months, tens of thousands of migrants and refugees have attempted to cross the Mediterranean sea to Italy, one of the main gateways to Europe. It's a dangerous trip and many are stranded at sea. But there is someone they can call - Nawal Soufi, a human rights activist from Sicily - who's become a main point of contact, and whose phone is always on. She helps direct coastguards their way. Our reporter Daniel Adamson has been to meet Nawal in Catania.

A slightly different perspective on the conflict that's been tearing up eastern Ukraine over the past year comes from two young science enthusiasts, who have a cult following online for the slightly madcap experiments that they carry out on TVs and microwaves and household junk. They're called Pavel Pavlov and Aleksandr Kryukov, or Pasha and Sasha, and they come from Luhansk, on the border with Russia, which has broken free from Ukraine and been declared a so-called People's Republic. Over the past few months, they've become an unexpected source of information for their millions of viewers about what's been happening in Luhansk.

If you live in East Africa, you may well be familiar with Kingo - a cartoon character who's featured in newspapers for more than three decades. He's a witty, balding, older man with a bushy beard who comments on everything from the state of his football team - to the state of the nation. He's the creation of Tanzania's leading cartoonist, James Gayo. Our reporter Andrea Kidd went to meet James at his studio in Dar es Salaam.

(Picture: Max Zoghbi and Bonnie Kate Pourciau. Credit: Zoghbi)