British pop star Dua Lipa has been granted Albanian citizenship by President Bajram Begaj for raising the country’s global profile through her music. It’s not as random as it might seem – her parents are originally from Albania, and she’s a patron of a charity she helped set up in her native Kosovo.

A technicolour Californian home dubbed the ‘Butterfly House’ is up for auction for a cool $1.5 million. The iconic property – created by a man for his wife as she started to lose her eyesight – would be particularly suited to maximalists and Mariah Carey fans…

And it can be tempting to go all out for the festive season, but a British artist has taken the opposite approach by creating the world’s smallest nativity scene in the eye of a needle. Now that’s a truly minimalist Christmas…