'I couldn't believe what was going on. I was just really concerned for the children. They were hiding under my skirt, holding on to my legs and screaming my name. I was trying to hide them in the cupboards. I was desperately trying to open the door to get them out but I couldn't because my arm was such a mess. It must  have been the adrenaline that kept me going.'  

On 8 July, 1996, the children, parents and teachers of St Luke's Church of England Infants School in Blakenhall, Wolverhampton were enjoying a teddy-bears' picnic. Then suddenly Horrett Campbell, a thirty-three-year-old local man with paranoid schizophrenia, burst on the scene wielding a machete and the day turned into a nightmare.

In 2003, Nelson Mandela invited Annie Lennox to perform at an AIDS Charity concert in South Africa. The day after the concert, Mandela gave a press conference: AIDS in Africa is genocide, he said, with 17 million dead and women and children becoming the frontline victims.   

Annie Lennox has always been a well-informed woman but she was shocked. ‘ I thought I need to sit up and listen. The world needs to sit up and listen. Generations are being wiped out, millions of babies are orphans, women just like me are dying and we're sitting around and reading about 'Celebrities Without Makeup,' she said. 'That moment, as I listened to Nelson Mandela, propelled me forward. I evolved from being a singer-songwriter-performer-mother-woman to being an activist.'

'It seemed as if the struggle I'd had with my weight my entire adult life was now officially over. I felt completely defeated. I thought, I give up. I give up. Fat wins.'  

But Oprah Winfrey didn't give up. She never does. Instead, she wrote, with characteristic openness and honesty, about her famous battles with her weight and the real reasons behind the gains and losses.

Faith is a practising Buddhist with a mission to bring fun and jollity to sick children in hospital

Last year This Way Up wrote about Dr Geehee, a Special Clown with a mission to bring fun and jollity to sick children in hospital. A therapeutic jester who slips in and out of wards and A & E waiting rooms spreading the infection of smiles. Dr Geehee is Faith Tingle, a London-based Buddhist. Here she recounts her journey of faith and where it has brought her. 

Two years ago Gary Pettengell was appointed seafront beat officer in the kiss-me-quick resort of Great Yarmouth. His working day consisted of reuniting lost kids with their parents, checking teenage high spirits and directing holidaymakers in the direction of ice cream, cash machines and toilets.

The resort’s long-established Greek Cypriot and Portuguese communities had recently been joined by a group of disorientated new arrivals – Lithuanians. Brought in on dodgy contracts, they were ignorant of British laws - including those regarding employment and health and safety. On top of which most were broke. ‘I remember going into a room to meet a group of fifty and at the sight of the uniform they shrank away and clammed up,’  he says. ‘I thought, no, that isn't how we do policing here.’
 

Three years ago the Israeli civil rights groups, B'Tselem, launched a new project. It gave video cameras to around 160 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Their remit was to record the human rights violations they experienced at the hands of Israeli settlers and soldiers. Now they no longer retaliate with a barrage of stones - they start filming. Vida Adamoli investigates

Project ‘Shooting Back’ is the brainchild of Oren Yakobovich, a B'Tselem activist and filmmaker, who served with the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank. He was appalled by what he saw. ‘I realised something was wrong with the narrative I knew,’ he says. ‘For Israelis there is a conspiracy of silence. Nobody wants to know what is happening there.’