大象传媒

At the age of 26, Livey Van Wyk became the youngest person ever to be elected mayor in Namibia. But just a few years before, she had been attacked and ostracised by some of the townspeople of Witvlei, because of her HIV-positive status. Livey was given the diagnosis soon after discovering she was pregnant. Despite having serious lows, she maintained hope after the birth of her HIV-negative son, and is giving strength to other people living with HIV.

In 1984 Sarajevo, in what was then Yugoslavia, held the winter Olympics. A centrepiece of the games was a state-of-the-art luge, bobsledding and skeleton track on the towering Mount Trebevic. Within a decade, the country was in the grips of a bloody conflict. During the Bosnian War, the Olympic luge track was used as a trench. It was pierced with bullet holes and explosions. Afterwards, the track was in ruins, overgrown, and covered in graffiti. But one man in Sarajevo, Senad Omanovic, is determined to fix the track and restore it to the glory of the 1984 winter Olympics.

In March 2010, a young Australian, Luke Moore, set up a bank account, and an administrative error meant that whenever he asked for a loan, it was automatically granted. Over the next two years or so, he withdrew more than two million Australian dollars. His conviction for obtaining financial advantage by deception and dealing proceeds of a crime has been overturned and he is now training to be a lawyer.

Photo credit: UNICEF / Torgovnik Verbatim Photo Agency.