Picture of the year

A great news photograph can be many things, but its core quality is that it tells you a story that lives in your memory. Many of the pictures in the following gallery are stunning images of this beautiful world, some show moments of intense emotion and others touch on the tragedy that is a very real part of our modern society.

Together they represent a fraction of the stories we worked on this year, but in our view they are the 100 most compelling images we’ve run on our service, as chosen by our picture editors.