In 2024, when she filmed a quick video in her car on a work break, she thought nothing of it. But in days she had become a meme. What followed was excitement, opportunity and a crushing pressure ...

Jools Lebron was in her car, taking a break from her job in a supermarket, when she posted the TikTok video that would change her life. “You see how I do my makeup for work?” she told her followers that day in August 2024. “Very demure, very mindful … A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure.”

“At first, it was like any other video,” she says, on a video call from her home in Chicago. “A few likes, a couple of comments. But then I started noticing the numbers moving faster than usual – faster than anything I had seen before. I remember refreshing my phone and just staring at it like: ‘Wait … what is happening?’”

Two mothers fought British bureaucracy to obtain lifesaving cannabis medicines for their children. But most patients are having to go private – at huge cost

In the summer of 2012, Britain was in a festive mood. It was the year of the queen’s diamond jubilee and the London Olympics, and the country was celebrating. But for former hairdresser Hannah Deacon and her young family in Warwickshire, it was a summer of ambulances, hospital wards and doctors rushing in and out of emergency rooms.

Eight months earlier, Deacon had given birth to a healthy baby boy named Alfie. The early months of his life had been challenging for her and her partner, Drew, as they are for any first-time parents, but by the summer, Alfie was sleeping and feeding well, and it felt like the family was settling into the new rhythm. However, one night the couple woke up to find their baby’s little body gripped by a paralysing seizure.

John Lithgow plays the gay and often nude septuagenarian father of Colman’s character in this bombshell-laden story of intergenerational queerness. She explains why her own dad would have ‘sat and cried all the way through it’

In Jimpa, Olivia Colman plays a woman called Hannah who leaves Adelaide with her husband and 16-year-old child to visit her father in Amsterdam. This is Jimpa – the word sticks better once you know it’s a compound of Jim and grandpa. At the airport, the teenager, Frances, who’s trans, drops a bombshell: they want to move to the Netherlands and finish their schooling there. Hannah and her husband, Harry, respond thoughtfully, not freaking out.

But once they arrive in Amsterdam, Jimpa, played by John Lithgow, brings enough drama for everyone – something he’s been doing for 40 years, since he left his family for a fuller queer life than Australia at the end of the 20th century could offer. The film revels in revealing the sort of lifestyle he enjoyed instead.

King Arthur is said to have transformed into a chough when he died, its red feet and beak representing his bloody end

Decades after disappearing from the jagged cliffs around Tintagel Castle on the coast of north Cornwall, a bird with legendary connections to the area has returned.

The custodian of Tintagel, English Heritage, and local ornithologists have declared that choughs – charismatic corvids with red beaks and feet – are back.

Ahmed al-Doush’s health said to be in sharp decline since his arrest in 2024 in relation to social media posts

The wife of a British national who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia since 2024 for social media posts, has pleaded for his release as his wellbeing declines.

In November, the UN working group on arbitrary detention found Ahmed al-Doush was being detained arbitrarily under international law and recommended his immediate release, as well as the payment of compensation. The findings followed its eight-month inquiry

Japan and Taiwan have enviable care systems because they had the courage to plan – some solutions are radical, most are hiding in plain sight

It’s mid-afternoon in Fujisawa. Schoolchildren, rucksacks on their backs, bound into a room where a group of pensioners welcome them boisterously, before sitting them down to help with their homework. This group of older people is looked after by some of the pupils’ parents. Up the road, a cluster of university students live above some over-75s. They get half-price rent in return for checking in on them on their way to and from studies.

This multigenerational community I visited in a small town not far from the port of Yokohama is one of 5,000 in Japan.

Millions of documents chronicling generations of trauma saved from Gaza and East Jerusalem in 10-month Unrwa operation

East Jerusalem to Amman should have been an easy trip: a short drive down to the Dead Sea, across the border checkpoint and swiftly on to the Jordanian capital.

But in the early summer of 2024, the distance appeared an almost insurmountable obstacle to humanitarian workers from Unrwa (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), as they sought to safeguard huge quantities of archival documents vitally important to decades of recent Palestinian history.

Met cameravallen bij een door palmen omzoomd riviertje in een Keniaans wildpark legde natuurfotograaf Will Burrard-Lucas een veel completer beeld bloot van de lokale fauna.

Onderzoek in het Amsterdamse Bos moet uitwijzen hoe de bijzondere kanten van dit groene ‘eiland’ beter uit de verf kunnen komen, ruim negentig jaar nadat werd begonnen met de aanleg ervan.