Check out these festive funnies...

‘Ditology’ is a project from Italian artist Dito Von Tease who creates portraits of famous people on human fingers. It started when Von Tease was looking for a profile picture to use on Facebook and he chose a finger as a disguise because he didn’t want to reveal his identity. His art features portraits of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, Frida Kahlo and many others.

Artist Simon Beck spends up to ten hours a day trudging through snow in snowshoes to create these stunning works of art at Les Arcs in the French Alps. Each artwork is typically the size of three football fields and takes two days to complete. ‘I can no longer run properly due to problems with my feet, so plodding about on level snow was the least painful way of getting exercise,’ says Beck, although the main reason now is to create the massive artworks and photograph them.

Americans throw away 40 per cent of their food every year, even though an estimated 50 million Americans don’t have enough to eat. In the UK three million tonnes of food a year are dumped into landfill despite our economic woes and welfare cuts. Food waste needs to be addressed by governments and industry . . . but in the meantime local food recovery organisations are fighting back.

One of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world is Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun who left a convent to study literature at Oxford.  She has written many books about what religions have in common - and about their effect on world events.

'Death is a great motivator of life.' An amazing international essay winner from 13-year-old Elisey Biryukov in Belarus

I have never really thought about the future until… Until two months ago an announcement was made at our school about one girl. She was seriously ill. She had cancer. A very aggressive form of it. The doctors in our country did everything they could for her. Still she was dying. Her only hope was the treatment that she could get in Germany. She needed minimum of 50 thousand Euros to be able to go and soon. The price of the human life. It's a lot of money here.