If Trump’s re-election is getting you down, these innovations in medicine and technology should cheer you up

Ian Sample

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The photography student on embracing monochrome and capturing the unexpected

Tom Baker initially set out to photograph the wild rabbits that inhabit the University of Leeds campus, but their skittish nature was proving an issue. Seeking an alternative, he shifted his attention to a solitary crow perched on a car by the university’s Parkinson Building.

“Photography is implanted in my life,” says Baker, a final-year photography student at Leeds Arts University, just across the road. “My dad is the reason I became so passionate about it. He documents everything – we have a shed full of stupid cameras that don’t work. Whenever we had a moment, it wasn’t, ‘Let’s get together and take a family photo’ – the camera was already out.” This image of a stark black crow against ivory bricks is a departure from Baker’s usual monochrome portraiture. He started out shooting almost exclusively in colour, determined to prove wrong his father’s preference for black and white. But over time, Baker “fell in love with black and white photography. I began to recognise the beauty in contrast.”

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Alyse Ogletree has helped nourished hundreds of thousands of babies as a means of giving to charity

Alyse Ogletree would love it if she could donate immense amounts of money to all sorts of worthy causes, but as a mother raising three young children, that’s not something realistic. So the 36-year-old from Flower Mound, Texas , has found another way to fulfill her philanthropic instinct: giving away a record amount of breastmilk that officials estimate has been enough to nourish hundreds of thousands of premature babies.

“I have a big heart, [but] at the end of the day, I’m not made of money and I can’t give away money to good causes over and over because I have a family to support for,” Ogletree said in an interview recently published on Guinness World Records’ website. But “donating milk was a way I could give back”.

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The German dream of centrist, stable government has been dashed by geopolitical forces and the cult of balanced budgets

Wednesday 6 November was a seismic day in the politics of the west. On one side of the Atlantic, it was confirmed in the early hours of the morning that the hard-right nationalist Donald Trump had been elected president of the US; on the other side, the government running Europe’s largest economy – Germany’s traffic-light coalition of social democrats, market liberals and greens – collapsed . It could hardly have come at a worse time.

The breakdown of the feuding Berlin alliance will leave a political vacuum in Germany for months, just when the EU needs decisive leadership. Instead, the country faces months of introspective electioneering, followed by protracted coalition negotiations, with investment and public spending on hold.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

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On the continent, stylish, sustainable, community-minded social housing is a given, and nowhere more so than in Spain – from an elegant Barcelona women’s refuge to cool, solid stone houses in Mallorca

In Britain, as our government has promised, we’re going to have a “ council housing revolution ”, the building of as yet unknown numbers of homes at genuinely affordable rents, a return to policies of 50 and more years ago in order to address the well-known housing crisis. Which is welcome. It also raises the question of what these homes may be like, of their quality as well as their quantity, whether they are stacked-up accumulations of units or places that contribute to their communities and enrich the lives of their inhabitants.

Luckily there are, close at hand, outstanding examples of how this might be done, in cities and countries on the continent of Europe. In many of these places, public bodies and architects see their job as doing more than meeting numbers of homes completed. They also want to make beautiful places to live, sustainable to build and run, with homes planned to suit contemporary ways of living, and with shared and public spaces given as much importance as the private interiors. They seek to reduce environmental impacts by using natural materials, and to adapt existing buildings where possible rather than demolish them. They aim to reduce the costs of heating and air conditioning almost to zero – a simple-enough ambition, and extremely important to their tenants.

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The comedian on not opening his mail, clipping his toenails in the bath, and why lying is funny

Born in Bromley in Kent, Dee, 63, was a waiter when he first appeared at the Comedy Store in London in 1986. In 1991, he won the British comedy ward for best stage newcomer and was given his own show on Channel 4. His 2004 Live at the Apollo series was Bafta nominated, and he co-wrote and starred in the sitcoms Lead Balloon and Bad Move. He has chaired Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue since 2009, and co-hosts the podcast Oh My Dog! This week he begins a UK tour of his new standup show, Small World. He is married with four children and lives in London.

What is your earliest memory?
Aged about three, sitting on the pavement outside our house in Orpington with my friend Christopher, and making him laugh by eating biscuits really noisily. It’s still in the act.

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Improvisation is great, but recipes can be a guide to temperature, quantity and cooking times – and don’t underestimate the virtue of a sheet of foil

Whenever I make a marinade for fish or meat (usually invented and based on what I have in the cupboard ), it often burns when I cook the dish in the oven. How can I avoid this? Tatiana, Strasbourg, France

Speaking as someone who is in the recipe-writing business, it would be remiss of me not to suggest that you consider following one, even if only loosely. That aside, I’m all up for invention and using what you have.

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The right funding now can protect the frontlines of the climate crisis from the worst effects of extreme weather events

As we approach Cop29 in Baku, world leaders are due to set a new climate finance goal – a sum set aside to help poor countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the effects of the climate crisis. Their negotiations take place against a backdrop of increasingly severe weather events. This year alone, we have witnessed deadly heatwaves across north Africa, Mexico, India and Saudi Arabia ; a historic drought across southern Africa; catastrophic wildfires in the Brazilian Pantanal wetlands ; record-breaking hurricanes in the Caribbean and the US; and plenty more. The climate emergency knows no borders and spares no one.

These events serve as stark reminders of the pressing need for world leaders and all of us to protect vulnerable communities on the frontline of the climate crisis. For many developing countries, particularly in Africa, the cost of climate impacts is staggering. African nations are losing up to 5% of their GDP because of climate extremes, while some are diverting as much as 9% of their national budgets to overcome the fallout from them. The latest report by the World Meteorological Organization estimates that Africa south of the Sahara alone will need $30bn-$50bn annually over the next decade just to meet the costs of protecting communities facing unprecedented climate-related disasters. We will not be able to reduce poverty, eliminate hunger and build a prosperous and resilient global community without addressing the climate crisis.

Ban Ki-moon is a former secretary general of the United Nations and co-chair, Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens

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The acclaimed French author attended the trial - the longest in French legal history – every day. As his gripping courtroom chronicle is published, he talks about trauma, justice – and being drawn to the darkest of stories

For 10 months, between September 2021 and June 2022, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère went every day to the Palais de Justice in Paris. He was there to attend the trial of a group of men accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks carried out in that city in November 2015, in which Islamic State militants massacred 130 people and injured hundreds more. The trial, which became known in the media as “V13”– the attacks took place on Friday ( Vendredi ) 13th – was the longest in French legal history, and among the most high profile.

Carrère’s book V13, published in English translation this month, is the result of those months spent in court, listening to the testimonies of the survivors, the bereaved and those defendants connected to the attacks who remained alive. (The terrorists themselves – the men who shot and killed all those Parisians at the Bataclan theatre, the attackers outside the Stade de France and on the streets outside restaurants and cafes – were all killed, either in the suicide attacks of that night or in police shootouts.)

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