Three separate times, doctors came to those parents and advised them to switch the machine off. For months the family were not allowed to touch her. They stood beside the bed and watched.

And one day her mother saw her foot move.

Also: somebody tied steel pipe to the railways of the Netherlands in thirty places, and nobody has claimed it. Japan passes a hundred thousand people aged over a hundred, and the other half of that number. A 220-pound ram called Rambo, wedged in a drainpipe, freed with chimney rods and a hearth sheet. Nashville breaks a record set in 1927. A bond rate at its highest since before the crash. Two hundred thousand pickup trucks called back because the cameras were switched off. Nine pieces of a battleship found in a dead man's storage unit. Ten thousand envelopes from the state of Delaware. A firefighter who crie ...