I think I am in some sort of version of what people call a ‘trad marriage’ but it has its twists and turns. I met my husband when I was 25. I dropped out of university, got involved with drugs and drinking too much, and my self-esteem was at rock bottom.

One night I ended up at a party with people I didn’t know and someone slipped something in my drink and I lost all memory until the next morning when I woke up on the sofa in a strange man’s apartment. He had rescued me and taken me to his place. I didn’t leave his flat for three months, except to be taken out to dinner and sent off to a gym to get back in shape.

We got married a few months later and are still very happily married 15 years later. In terms of looks, he is a 10. In terms of intelligence, a 10, in terms of being a nice guy, an 11.

He has a job that pays well and we have a really nice lifestyle. I haven’t worked since I met him and I like that. He cooks, cleans and books our holidays. He even sends me off somewhere warm in January because I get depressed in the winter.

I get teased constantly by my friends for being a totally kept woman. I know, in some cases, the teasing is born out of envy but many women consider me a complete sellout to my gender. I love my friends but I avoid them now because I feel uncomfortable being who I am. Can you tell me how to get my friends to accept me for what I am?

Eleanor says: It might not be about adjudicating your lifestyle so much as not having much shared experience to talk about. No matter how dishy your husband is, the fact that you’re his wife is probably the least interesting thing about you to your friends. They’re interested in hanging out with you. Perhaps feeling more accepted in these friendships isn’t a matter of changing their attitudes to your marriage but changing how much your marriage is what they see of you.

There’s only so far that personality and traits can carry adult friendships. Once people aren’t having the same experiences or problems any more, “basically getting on” isn’t always enough to sustain the relationship. Lifestyles change us, and they change what we think about.

Wealth gaps make that happen. Career gaps can make that happen. Gaps in life anxiety can make that happen – when only one of you feels burdened by responsibility for deciding what’s coming next.

It sounds like the kept-ness of your marriage might mean many of those gaps appear at once. If you don’t struggle with career dynamics, bosses, money or life-decision fatigue, you’re bound to have less in common with people who do. And when I say “in common”, I don’t just mean the way fly fishers like to talk to other fly fishers. I mean there are whole ways of framing the world that you won’t share, like the way working can shift your relationship to nights and weekends, or the way developing a professional guise can change your understanding of yourself.

You asked how to get your friends to accept you for who you are. If I’m right, getting them to accept the “trad marriage” aspect of you might actually be lowest on the list. What about if instead of trying to get them to embrace the part of you they relate to least, you spent more time emphasising the parts they do understand? What was it about you that drew you to these friendships in the first place? What were you like before the marriage (and before the unhappy phase in which you met)? One of the nicest things about old friends is the way they remind you that you’ve always been you. How can you play up these parts of yourself, the parts that ground the friendship and made them want to know you?

Try, too, to manage your expectations. You’ve painted a picture of a comfortable, happy, work-free and financially provided-for life. By your account you’ve been pretty lucky, and the only thing more irritating than the lottery of fortune is when people pretend they haven’t won it. Taking their teasing on the chin might just be the price you pay for having fewer material problems than them. Sure, maybe you’d prefer they didn’t tease you. Maybe it makes you feel sensitive. But which would you rather: keep your life, and be teased, or change your life? If the answer is keep it, that might just be the deal you have to make.

The reader’s letter has been edited for length.

Ask Eleanor a question

Three people have been charged in connection with Liam Payne’s death in Argentina for supplying narcotics and the abandonment of a person followed by death.

Toxicology tests found that when he died, Payne had traces of alcohol, cocaine, and a prescription antidepressant in his body, prosecutors said in a statement on Thursday.

The former One Direction star fell to his death on 16 October from a third floor hotel balcony in the Palermo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires.

Guests at the time said they had heard banging and doors slamming throughout the afternoon, before a loud scream. Staff had called emergency services to report a guest who was “overwhelmed by drugs and alcohol” who was “destroying” a room. The 31-year-old’s body was found in the late afternoon in Casa Sur’s internal courtyard.

Police pronounced Payne dead at the scene, saying he had suffered a “very serious injury” to the base of the skull. The forensic medical corps later concluded that Payne’s death was caused by “multiple traumas” and “internal and external haemorrhage” resulting from the fall.

One of the three accused reportedly visited Payne regularly during his two-week stay in the city. They have been charged with the abandonment of a person followed by death – a sentence of which carries between five to 15 years in prison – and the facilitation of narcotics.

The second person, who is a hotel employee, “must answer for two proven supplies of cocaine”, prosecutors said. The third person has also been accused of supplying narcotics on 14 October.

Prosecutors said that officials had collected several dozen testimonies, and conducted nine raids on homes across Buenos Aires province, which resulted in the seizure of several personal devices. More than 800 hours of video footage have also been analysed.

In their statement, the prosecutors also ruled out suicide, saying: “The lack of defence or self-preservation reflex in the fall, together with other relevant data from his consumption, allow us to conclude that Liam Payne was not fully conscious or was experiencing a state of noticeable decrease or loss of consciousness at the time of the fall.”

“Physical intervention by a third party” was also eliminated as a possibility.

Payne, who was born in Wolverhampton, England, became part of One Direction after appearing on British reality show The X Factor as a teenager. The group, which was one of the biggest boybands of all time, sold more than 70m records worldwide, before going on an indefinite hiatus in 2016.

Payne had previously opened up about struggles with his mental health, saying that during the height of the band’s fame he began using alcohol and an epilepsy drug as a mood stabiliser to counter the “erratic highs and lows” he was experiencing.

Payne’s father, Geoff, travelled to Buenos Aires after his son’s death, meeting fans and visiting the British Cemetery where his son’s remains were being kept. Earlier this week, Payne’s body was repatriated to the UK.

When the chemist Chris Kozak finally got his hands on a sample of the mysterious blobs that recently washed up on the shores of Newfoundland’s beaches, Project Unknown Glob officially began.

At his disposal, Kozak and a team of graduate students had the “gorgeous” new science building and “world-class facilities” of Newfoundland’s Memorial University to run a battery of tests on the white, doughy blob.

“The first thing I did was poke it and smell it,” he said.

However simple, the initial observations gave Kozak a wealth of information to work with.

“By poking it, we could tell it was definitely rubbery, like overworked bread dough. We suspected it was an elastomer polymer. And the smell coming off was a bit like walking through the solvent aisle in your hardware store.”

For more than a month, residents of Canada’s easternmost province have tried to understand the source of hundreds of the pale, gooey masses which resemble the dough used to make toutons, a Newfoundland fried delicacy. Some of the blobs were as large as dinner plates.

The sample was provided by Hilary Corlett, an assistant professor with Memorial University’s earth sciences department, who travelled to Placentia Bay to gather samples. Her suspicion was that the blobs were man-made.

Kozak’s team’s initially hypothesized the blobs were a polyurethane foam used for insulating boats in the fishing industry. But when Kozak ran tests looking for carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen – all of which appear in polyurethane – no nitrogen was present. Nor did he find any sulphur, eliminating both polyurethane and any possible natural materials.

That initial finding diverged from what Canada’s environment ministry said last month, when it suggested in a news release that the material could be plant-based.

Next, Kozak conducted infrared spectroscopy and found chemical bonds consistent with polyvinyl acetate, often used as an adhesive in the shipping industry.

But a mass spectrometry test, conducted on 6 November, also found the substance also had characteristics of synthetic rubber.

“I did eight different tests, and they all point towards something synthetic,” said Kozak.

That new finding supported the team’s theory that the material was most likely a butyl rubber PVA composite, used in the oil and gas industry to clean out the pipes that feed oil into tankers.

The explanation put to the rest a mystery that had baffled both residents and experts.

“It’s funny that no one thought to reach out to a chemist until very late. Everyone had their own opinions and speculation, but no one was really taking a scientific and experimental point of view,” said Kozak.

But other characteristics of the blobs have worried Kozak. While it isn’t toxic and is safe to handle in its cured form, the substance is denser than water, meaning most of it has sunk to the depths of the Atlantic.

The Canadian coast guard has previously told residents the blobs were found on at least 28 miles of coastline.

“All we are seeing is the stuff that’s being washed ashore. I suspect a lot of this stuff is at the bottom of the sea and being churned up by the comings and goings of the tide,” said Kozak. “This definitely does not belong in the environment. It’s plastic pollution and what worries me is that because of its shape, it could be mistaken by marine wildlife for food.”

Kozak has reached out to the federal government with his findings, but not yet received a response.

A spokesperson from the ministry of environment previously told the Guardian it took pollution incidents and threats to the environment “very seriously” and if officers find evidence of a possible violation of federal environmental legislation, “they will take appropriate action”. Fines under the fisheries act can reach C$6m for corporations found to have released harmful substances into the water.

Kozak said said the nature and scale of the discharge suggest the material has industrial origins.

“I’m happy to be able to give residents peace of mind as to what it is. And now they know, they can find out where it comes from and who is responsible,” he said.

“Industry is important for development of this province, but at the same time, industry also can leave a very dire environmental footprint”

McKenna, who is 24 and lives in a rural, conservative state, recently got back on dating apps after a year of finding herself. She had two first dates planned for this weekend, but after Donald Trump won the election, she cancelled both.

“It’s heartbreaking to know that in this country you only matter if you’re a straight white man,” she said. “It’s just devastating that we’re at this point. So I will not let another man touch me until I have my rights back.”

McKenna, who did not want her last name published for privacy reasons, first heard about 4B a few months ago, via a TikTok video referring to the South Korean social movement. The basic idea: women swear off heterosexual marriage, dating, sex and childbirth in protest against institutionalized misogyny and abuse. (It is called 4B in reference to these four specific no-nos.) The mostly online movement began around 2018 protests against revenge porn and grew into South Korea’s #MeToo-esque feminist wave.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, 4B is once again on McKenna’s mind – and she’s not the only one.

Trump’s embrace of manosphere figures such as Joe Rogan, the Nelk Boys and Adin Ross means he has strong support among their evangelists – mainly, young men. But for young women, the former president’s long history of misogyny means a vote for Trump is a vote against feminism, especially with reproductive rights as a key issue in 2024. Ahead of the US election, pundits predicted a history-making gender gap, and early exit polls support that prediction: women aged 18-29 went overwhelmingly left, while Trump picked up ground with their male counterparts compared with 2020.

With the race called, TikToks viewed hundreds of thousands of times offered one way for women to go for the jugular: 4B, specifically cutting off contact with men.

“Girls it’s time to boycott all men! You lost your rights, and they lost the right to hit raw! 4b movement starts now!” one creator wrote on TiKTok in a video viewed 3.4m times.

In another video, a woman exercises on a stair climber machine. “Building my dream body that no man will touch for the next 4 years,” reads the caption. The top comment on her post: “In the club, we all celibate.”

On Wednesday, Google searches for “4B” spiked by 450%, with the most interest coming from Washington DC, Colorado, Vermont and Minnesota.

In South Korea, 4B began as an offshoot of national protests against the spycam epidemic, in which perpetrators filmed targets – most of whom were women – during sex or while urinating in public bathrooms without their knowledge or consent.

“These videos were sold and exchanged by men on Discord, and women didn’t know how many men had taken part, and if any of the men in their lives had,” said Min Joo Lee, an assistant professor of Asian studies at Occidental College. “There was a general sense of, ‘Who can I trust? And before I regain my trust in men, I need to refrain from contact with them.’”

The demonstrations evolved into actions against the patriarchy writ large; some activists cut their hair or refused to wear makeup as a rejection of beauty standards and the male gaze.

South Korea claims the lowest fertility rate in the world, for a number of reasons which include a high cost of living, prioritization of work over home life, and a decrease in marriage. Some companies and government agencies have offered incentives for parents: one conglomerate gives employees who have three or more children a free car, and another constructing group has spent $5m on $75,000 cash bonuses to workers who have babies.

In Busan, the country’s second-largest city, a government-backed pilot program hosted blind dating events, offering singles $600 for each match they make. Those who married or bought houses with their partners earned greater compensation, pocketing up to $85,000.

As with #MeToo in the US, men have called 4B an overreach, and discriminatory. South Korea’s conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, ran on a platform of abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which protects against gender-based violence and discrimination, saying feminists were to blame for the country’s economic woes.

Haein Shim, a South Korean activist and current undergraduate researcher at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, said in an email that women who participated in 4B protests faced cyberbullying, harassment, stalking and threats of violence. “Many of us wore masks, sunglasses, and hats to cover our faces, and it was common practice to dress differently before and after a protest to minimize being stalked.”

There were more nuanced critiques, too. “Some debated if it was a sustainable way to participate in feminism, because it was a total disconnect with men, and some people believe there have to be productive conversations among people with different world views in order for society to move forward,” Lee said. Feminists expressed concern over whether 4B “disregarded heterosexual women’s desires, in order to punish men who may or may not have participated in misogyny”.

Shim, the activist, says that 4B goes beyond just boycotting men, and encourages women to find solidarity with each other. “It’s a new lifestyle focused on building safe communities, both online and in-person, and valuing our existence in this crazy world,” she said. “What we want is not to be labeled simply as some man’s wife or girlfriend, but to have the independence to be free from the societal expectations that often limit women’s potential to be fully acknowledged as human beings.”

Second wave feminist groups of the 1960s and 70s such as Cell 16, which advocated celibacy and separation from men, and political lesbians, who opted out of heterosexuality, were historically deemed as extreme – or simply trendy. 4B, a more contemporary movement that mostly lives online, may seem more accessible to gen Z women. On TikTok, 4B posts play as communal and therapeutic, a way to take back control during a time when basic rights are at stake.

South Korea’s fertility struggle caught the attention of the vehement Trump ally Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO has at least 11 living children (one son died in infancy in 2002). He describes pronatalism, the enthusiastic promotion of reproduction, as a way to save humanity from “population collapse”. When Taylor Swift came out in support of Kamala Harris this summer, he seemingly offered, creepily and unprompted, to get her pregnant. He’s propped up South Korea’s declining fertility rate as a case study for Americans who do not get busy making babies.

Consider Musk an archetypical 4B foe. He’s far from the only one. Far-right figures such as Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who has praised Hitler and once described his “ideal wife” as 16 years old, celebrated on X after Trump’s win, tweeting, “I’d just like to take the opportunity to thank men for saving this country from stupid bitches who wanted to destroy the world to keep abortion,” and, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” That sort of violent rhetoric, which is spreading among Trump’s far-right supporters, will not exactly convince the majority of young American women they should be dating at the moment.

For now, McKenna isn’t sure exactly what 4B will look like to her in the election’s aftermath. She wants to do more research on the community. She’s not swearing off sex for ever, or taking a vow of celibacy. “Now when I go out with my girlfriends meeting people, instead of mingling to find a date, I’m going to mingle to get change,” she said. “When men come on to me, I’m just gonna push back.”

It is a tragic moment, frozen in time: a family of four shelters beneath a staircase as ash and pumice rains down on Pompeii. But scientists studying DNA of the victims say this famous scene is not what it seems: the “mother” of the group is actually a man.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, the Roman town of Pompeii was destroyed, and its remaining inhabitants were buried beneath a thick blanket of ash and pumice. These victims were later immortalised by archaeologists who used plaster to fill the voids left by their bodies.

Now researchers say DNA evidence debunks long-held assumptions about the identity and relationships of those captured by some of the most famous casts.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, scientists in Italy, Germany and the US report how they extracted ancient nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from samples of bone fragments mixed with plaster taken from 14 casts that were undergoing restoration, five of which were studied in detail.

Among them were three of the four individuals found at the foot of the staircase within a richly decorated building named the House of the Golden Bracelet. The moniker refers to the jewellery worn on the arm of one of the two adults who was found with a child on their hip – circumstances that led to the idea this victim was the mother of the two children within the group, with the other adult identified as the father.

However, the new analysis reveals the bracelet-wearing individual was male, and that he had black hair and dark skin. In addition, the team found no evidence he was related to the two infants – both of whom were boys. Indeed, the data suggests the ancestors of these three victims had origins in different eastern Mediterranean or north African populations. The researchers suggest there are genetic clues hinting the other adult may also have been male.

The study also offers fresh insights into the relationship of two victims, preserved in an embrace, found in a building known as the House of the Cryptoporticus. While some archaeologists have suggested these casts could represent a mother and daughter, two sisters, or a pair of lovers, the new analysis rules out the first two interpretations, revealing one of the victims was a male and that the pair were not related through the female line.

“These discoveries challenge longstanding interpretations, such as associating jewellery with femininity or interpreting physical closeness as an indicator of biological relationships,” the researchers write. They believe it is possible restorers in the past manipulated the poses and relative positioning of casts to aid storytelling.

However, the analysis did not overturn every narrative: the team’s analyses confirmed a victim found alone in a room within a large building known as the Villa of Mysteries was male, as was previously thought, and revealed he may have been a local to Pompeii.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, a professor at the University of Cambridge not involved in the work, said the Pompeii DNA study had enormous potential. “Inescapably, this sort of new evidence turns some older interpretations, especially those based on rather romantic assumptions, on their head,” he said.

But he said the most interesting question was where the people came from. “One would predict, in a society heavily based on slavery, a significant diversity,” he said. “It is very interesting for instance that they have identified an individual with dark skin and black hair, which strongly points to an enslaved person from Africa.”

Phil Perkins, a professor of archaeology at the Open University, said the study suggested the victims found under the stairs could have been, or were descended from, migrants to Italy.

“The research shows that scientific analysis can provide new insight into the lives of the victims of Pompeii, and provides further evidence of human mobility around the Mediterranean in the Roman period,” he said. “The people of Pompeii were not Romans from the city of Rome, but people of the Mediterranean.”

Plastic pollution is changing the processes of the entire Earth system, exacerbating climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the use of freshwater and land, according to scientific analysis.

Plastic must not be treated as a waste problem alone, the authors said, but as a product that poses harm to ecosystems and human health.

The authors gave their warning in the days before final talks begin in South Korea to agree a legally binding global treaty to cut plastic pollution. Progress towards a treaty on plastic pollution has been hindered by a row over the need to include cuts to the $712bn plastic production industry in the treaty. At the last talks in April, developed countries were accused of bowing to pressure from fossil fuel and industry lobbyists to steer clear of any reductions in production. The discussions in South Korea, which start on 25 November, mark a rare opportunity for countries to come to an agreement to tackle the global crisis of plastic pollution.

In 2022 at least 506m tonnes of plastics were produced worldwide, but only 9% gets recycled globally. The rest is burned, landfilled or dumped where it can leach into the environment. Microplastics are now everywhere, from the top of Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on earth.

The new study of plastic pollution examined the mounting evidence of the effects of plastics on the environment, health and human wellbeing. The authors are urging delegates at the UN talks to stop viewing plastic pollution as merely a waste problem, and instead to tackle material flows through the whole life pathway of plastic, from raw material extraction, production and use, to its environmental release and its fate, and the Earth system effects.

“It’s necessary to consider the full life cycle of plastics, starting from the extraction of fossil fuel and the primary plastic polymer production” said the article’s lead author, Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, at Stockholm Resilience Centre.

The research team showed that plastics pollution was changing the processes of the entire Earth system, and affected all pressing global environmental problems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the use of freshwater and land.

“Plastics are seen as those inert products that protect our favourite products, or that make our lives easier that can be “easily cleaned-up” once they become waste,” Villarrubia-Gómez said. “But this is far from reality. Plastics are made out of the combination of thousands of chemicals. Many of them, such as endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals, pose toxicity and harm to ecosystems and human health. We should see plastics as the combination of these chemicals with which we interact on a daily basis.”

Plastic treaty talks have attracted a huge number of fossil fuel and industry lobbyists. At the last talks in Ottawa, Canada, 196 lobbyists registered, up from the 143 who registered at the previous discussions in Nairobi.

Most single-use plastics (98%) are made from fossil fuels, and the top seven plastic-producing companies are fossil fuel companies, according to data from 2021.

The chair of the UN treaty talks has said the whole life cycle of plastic must be included in the mandate. “What is clear is we cannot manage the amount of plastic we are producing,” said Luis Vayas Valdivieso, also the Ecuadorian ambassador to the UK. “Only 10% of it gets recycled, something needs to be done, and that is why these negotiations are so important. We need to have the whole-life-cycle approach.”

Prof Bethanie Carney Almroth, of the University of Gothenburg, a co-author of the report, said: “We now find plastics in the most remote regions of the planet and in the most intimate, within human bodies. And we know that plastics are complex materials, released to the environment throughout the plastics life cycle, resulting in harm in many systems.

“The solutions we strive to develop must be considered with this complexity in mind, addressing the full spectra of safety and sustainability to protect people and the planet.”

The wealth of the 10 richest people in the world – a list dominated by US tech billionaires – increased by a record amount after Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, according to a widely cited index.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated that the world’s 10 wealthiest people gained nearly $64bn (about £49.5bn) on Wednesday, the largest daily increase since the index began in 2012.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, registered the largest increase with a $26.5bn addition to his fortune, which now stands at $290bn. The prominent backer of Trump’s campaign, benefited from a surge in the share price of Tesla, the electric carmaker where he is chief executive and in which he owns a 13% stake.

The gains came as tech business leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook parent Meta, and Apple’s Tim Cook publicly congratulated Trump on his election win.

Much of the gains for the top 10 was because of a surge in US stocks on Wednesday as investors anticipated a low-tax and regulation-light policy platform.

Other beneficiaries were Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s second richest person, who added $7bn to his near-$230bn fortune, and Larry Ellison, the chair of the software company Oracle, historically a Republican supporter, who increased his wealth by nearly $10bn to $193bn.

Other members of the top 10 whose wealth grew included Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates, the former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, and Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

However, Trump has also expressed his frustration with Google on the campaign trail, after threatening in September to direct the justice department to pursue criminal charges against the search company if he won the election. He claimed that Google was displaying negative news articles about him but not about his opponent, Kamala Harris – a claim Google denied.

The only member of the wealth elite to lose money on Wednesday was the French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault, whose fortune decreased by nearly $3bn.

Zuckerberg’s wealth dipped slightly by $81m although he is still worth $202bn. The entrepreneur has drawn Trump’s ire, after the president-elect in August threatened to jail him for life for allegedly plotting against him in the 2020 election.

Neil Wilson, chief analyst at the broker Finalto, said US stocks rose on Wednesday owing to a “pure Maga trade”, referring to Trump’s slogan “make America great again” and investors buying shares on the back of a clear Trump win.

“It was the prospect of lower taxes, deregulation across a wider variety of sectors, such as banks and energy and tech, plus a big, reflexive relief rally on the fact that the outcome of the election was clean and uncontested,” he said. “The red-wave result was what every American capitalist would have favoured and was not a certainty by any means coming into the election, so the reaction was decisive.”

Wealth increases from 5 November to 6 November 2024
1. Elon Musk $290bn (+10.1%)
2. Jeff Bezos $228.3bn (+3.2%)
3. Mark Zuckerberg $202.5bn (0%)
4. Larry Ellison $193.5bn (+5.4%)
5. Bernard Arnault $173.2bn (-1.6%)
6. Bill Gates $159.5bn (+1.2%)
7. Larry Page $158.3bn (+3.6%)
8. Sergey Brin $149.1bn (+3.6%)
9. Warren Buffett $147.8bn (+5.4%)
10. Steve Ballmer $145.9bn (+2%)
Source: Bloomberg

Politicians, conservationists and business people from around the world met last week to discuss how to save nature at the Cop16 biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia.

For those working on the ground, however, it is the most dangerous country in the world to fight for the environment. A third of the 196 environmental defenders killed last year were Colombian. Here, four conservationists give us a glimpse into their working lives and the dangers they face.

‘I am just a small woman trying to save monkeys’: Ángela Maldonado

When I was 28 years old, I went to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s (Farc) controlled area in Vista Hermosa to look for an endemic Colombian species of woolly monkey. A lot of people said I was completely nuts, but I needed to deal with the Farc to get into the area where the monkeys are.

I went to talk to the Farc commander. His nickname was Smurf, because he was very short. He was also very dangerous – people told me five days before I met him he had killed someone. From the very beginning he was nice to me, and I always think even the worst people have a good side.

He told me where to find the monkeys and contacted other Farc commanders so I could enter their towns. I was always on my own. I don’t represent a threat to anyone – I’m 160cm tall and weigh 52kg. To these people I am just a small woman trying to save monkeys. That was in 2001 – I have spent more than 20 years working in the Amazon, fighting the trafficking of wildlife, focusing on monkeys. I have managed to establish hunting bans for woolly monkeys in southern Amazonas, at the border between Colombia, Peru and Brazil.

I hope the international community supports a peace agreement with all the illegal armed groups we have. Once the rights of local people are respected, we can move forward for making peace with nature.
Ángela Maldonado is the founder of Fundación Entropika

‘I had to bring a bodyguard and wear a bulletproof jacket’: Fernando Trujillo

When I was five, I went to the Orinoco River with my grandfather and saw river dolphins for the first time. It is amazing to be in a tropical forest with toucans and at the same time see dolphins in the water. For people in the Amazon, they are like the jaguars of the water – they believe the dolphins have cities underwater and live like humans.

Pollution is one of the greatest threats to river dolphins in the Amazon. Goldminers use mercury to extract the precious metal from river silt, dumping it in rivers and lakes. I found out my own levels of mercury were far above safe thresholds, probably because I had eaten fish in the Amazon for so many years. It can cause damage to your central nervous system – I am lucky I have not been affected.

In 2016, my life was threatened because I provided analysis of mercury in an Amazonian fish that led to the Colombian government banning it being sold. When I went into the Amazon I had to bring a bodyguard and wear a bulletproof jacket. It was a very sad moment in my life. I was very worried for my daughters and stopped bringing them to the Amazon for some years. In the Amazon there are more than 500,000 people working in organised crime – they are handling gold, cocaine, timber and animal trafficking. The main protection from armed groups comes from being onside with local communities, and that is how we work.

I have surveyed more than 84,000km (52,000 miles) of waterways in seven countries looking for river dolphins. Almost one year ago, we got 11 countries from across Asia and South America to sign a landmark treaty to protect river dolphins. At Cop16 we were promoting a resolution for dolphins to be protected in 29 key sites in Asia and South America.
Fernando Trujillo is the founder of Fundación Omacha

‘There are people who have no scruples in ending a life’: Sandra Bessudo

Malpelo is an island 500km off Colombia’s Pacific coast. The first time I went there in 1987 I fell totally in love with it. The life underneath the surface of its sea is incredible: the island is surrounded by a spectacle of hammerhead sharks, snappers, barracudas, rays and moray eels. When I was there I saw large tuna boats with their decks full of dead sharks, dropping their anchors on the coral – it was devastating to see.

After that, the only thing I wanted to do was to go back and do everything in my power to get the government to protect it. I started petitioning the president, and thanks to my work, Malpelo has been protected since 1995. There is a “no take” area of 47,000 sq km around it.

I have faced difficult moments, with threats made against me and my team because of my work. When I started to fight against illegal fishing, I was up against several large boats, not only Colombian but also from other countries. There weren’t any protocols about how to proceed, so I literally got on board the boats, explained to them what they were doing wrong and made them swear before God that they would not enter again. I was a young woman at the time, and somewhat naive, but I always approached them in a respectful and friendly manner. We did receive threats, and the Colombian navy eventually told me to be more careful and not to be so trusting.

Today, unfortunately there are people who have no scruples in ending the life of another person. I hope no other environmental activist loses their life for defending life.
Sandra Bessudo is the founder of Fundación Malpelo

‘Don’t take sides and never discuss politics’: Rosamira Guillen

I have made it my mission to save cotton-top tamarin monkeys, which weigh just one pound and are about the size of a squirrel. They have a shock of white hair that sticks out like Einstein, and little warrior faces – they’re very territorial. When I first saw one I thought, holy cow, this is a special little monkey.

I was director of Barranquilla zoo when I started working on the conservation of these monkeys, but when I started seeing them in the wild, I realised that is what fills my soul – being in the forest. Five decades of civil unrest in our country displaced farmers, who chop down the forest where these monkeys live to make space for traditional cattle ranching and agriculture. We are creating protected areas and discouraging hunting within the forest. It is slow progress: you can cut down a hectare of forest in a day but it takes at least 20 years to create.

The areas where we work were “red zones” in the past, meaning they were run by illegally armed groups, until the signing of the peace agreement in 2016. It’s that kind of landscape where illegally armed groups can hide. We heard a lot of stories from the people living there about how terrible it was: in the middle of the night they would cut the power off and come to your house and take random people, and you would never hear from them again. Sometimes, their bodies would be found. It was fear and silence in these communities.

Cop16 was important because it created opportunities for raising funds for organisations such as ours, which are small and grassroots, and very much need the support to continue their conservation efforts.

We have already protected more than 5,000 hectares (12,400 acres) of land for the monkeys. Safety remains a concern for us. We try to stay in the margins, politically speaking. We don’t take sides, to avoid being labelled as sympathising with one side or another. We never discuss politics in our conversations, to avoid accidentally treading on someone else’s foot. Just do your work and have fun, that’s what I tell my team.
Rosamira Guillen is co-founder of Fundación Proyecto Tití

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There is nothing but bad news for Europe in Donald Trump’s US election victory. The only question is just how bad it will get. Europeans stand to suffer strategically, economically and politically from his “America first” policies, as well as from his unpredictability and transactional approach to global affairs. The undermining of Nato, the emboldening of illiberal nationalists everywhere, a transatlantic trade war, and a battle over European regulation of US social media platforms, AI and cryptocurrencies are just some of the major risks of a second Trump presidency.

Moreover, Europe is at risk of being squeezed in a deepening US-China trade conflict, with the prospect of coming under severe pressure from Washington to curtail economic ties with Beijing, while facing a potential flood of cheap Chinese goods diverted by prohibitive tariffs from the US market.

The prospect of severely strained transatlantic relations catches Europe at a moment of great fragility. European economies are lagging behind the US and China in innovation, investment and productivity. Germany and France are weakened by political crises. Rightwing populists, playing on fears of globalisation and migration, are on the rise across Europe, too. And Russian troops are slowly grinding forward against Ukrainian defenders, while the west is not delivering enough support for Kyiv to prevail.

It is far from clear whether EU countries will be able to unite in defence of common interests if a Republican administration presses ahead with threatened tariffs on all European goods – or if Trump tries to throw Ukraine under a bus and cut a deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin to end the war on terms humiliating for Kyiv. History is not encouraging.

The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, one of the EU’s few strong centre-right leaders, declared at the weekend that “the era of geopolitical outsourcing is over”. Europe, he said, needed to finally grow up and believe in its own strength. He is not alone in wishing that Trump’s victory would jolt Europeans into doing more collectively for their defence, and building a stronger European pillar of Nato. France has long been pushing for such “strategic autonomy”, but many EU countries remain wary of anything that could weaken the transatlantic bond.

EU countries conduct trade policy together, so the European Commission has had a back-room team preparing for a possible Trump return for weeks, readying ways to hit back fast and hard if necessary in any tariff dispute. But it is far from clear whether Ursula von der Leyen will be able to marshal the 27 EU states behind a common line. There could be a repeat of the unseemly scramble to Washington we saw during Trump’s last term to curry favour with the White House and try to secure better terms for individual European countries, perhaps in exchange for buying more US weapons.

Von der Leyen reminded Trump in a congratulatory message that “millions of jobs and billions in trade and investment on each side of the Atlantic depend on the dynamism and stability of our economic relationship”. But the incoming US president is obsessed with the imbalance in goods trade with Europe, and especially with German cars.

Strategically, Trump’s win is bound to revive uncertainty over the future of Nato, which he threatened to quit during his first term in the White House. While Congress has since enacted a law making it harder for the US to withdraw from the alliance, nothing can prevent the president from undercutting its credibility by making clear he would not come to European countries’ defence against Russian aggression. Trump said as much earlier this year, asserting that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” with Nato allies that did not pay enough in defence spending.

Trump’s supporters say his tough approach in his first term shocked European allies into finally increasing defence spending – and that he is right to question why American taxpayers should go on subsidising the security of wealthy European countries that free-ride on US protection. Fiona Hill, his former White House Russia adviser, told me Trump simply did not understand the value of alliances or allies. His approach to security is purely transactional.

The impact of a second Trump presidency on Europe’s internal politics may be just as damaging as on trade and international relations. One veteran former EU official said Trump would not only embolden national populist leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić to form a sort of “illiberal internationale”, but his influence could also pull mainstream European conservatives further to the right on migration and gender issues, weakening Europe’s liberal values.

Among Trump’s billionaire backers were libertarian US tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who are counting on him to allow a free-for-all on social media, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. Musk has been defiant in the face of EU and UK efforts to regulate hate speech and disinformation on his X social media platform.

The tech barons’ quest for unfettered power to build their empires beyond the reach of governments and central banks is bound to set up a confrontation during a second Trump term with European legislation regulating the internet, AI and electronic currencies. This is another transatlantic crisis in the making.

Given such a bleak outlook, the EU and the UK ought to be proactively preparing for the worst, and moving closer together to defend their many common interests and values. Sadly, there’s little sign of that in the timid foreplay between the two so far.

If Donald Trump’s previous administration taught us anything, it’s that women’s bodies do not matter. The autonomy of those bodies, the frequent injustices and abuses inflicted on them, are of little consequence to a far-right misogynist administration that is – unbelievably to some – back in power after an all too brief period of reprieve, if not change. Women’s bodies are also of little consequence to the people who voted for Donald Trump.

Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, I saw Regina Spektor playing at the Royal Festival Hall. She sat down at a piano and sang her song Ballad of a Politician. “A man inside a room is shaking hands with other men,” it opens: “This is how it happens / Our carefully laid plans.” The almost physical weight of sadness in Spektor’s performance, and that of the women in the audience, is something I have never forgotten.

Women across the world are today experiencing the visceral, secondhand body horror of another Trump administration, and that is nothing compared with the all-too-real feeling of peril that many American women will be having as I write. We hold fear, tension and trauma in our bodies, and though that is the kind of idea that strongmen such as Trump and their acolytes would snigger at, it’s well documented that, to quote the psychiatrist and author Bessel van der Kolk, the body keeps the score. It is a complete tragedy that yet more American women are facing the prospect of their reproductive rights being curtailed even further.

This body horror will be felt by the many others on Trump’s hitlist of undesirables: immigrants, gay and transgender people, disabled people, protesters. Anyone capable of empathy. Yet in the context of the assault on reproductive rights, and being a woman myself, it is women I am writing about today.

I am thinking particularly of three women. Candi Miller died at home in bed with her three-year-old daughter next to her after being too afraid to seek medical care because of Georgia’s abortion ban. She had a son as well as a daughter. Amber Nicole Thurman, also in Georgia, died after taking abortion pills at home and being made to wait 20 hours in agony for the dilation and curettage procedure that would have saved her life. She had a six-year-old son. And Josseli Barnica, who died when she was 17 weeks pregnant after doctors in Texas delayed treating her miscarriage for 40 hours. She had a young daughter. There are many more women, children and their families who have suffered profoundly as a result of the Republican-led rollback of women’s reproductive rights.

The outcome of this election is not surprising. After last time, I didn’t believe America’s hatred of women could be overestimated; why should it elect one? The hatred all too evidently runs deep. Increasingly, its currents run separately to the mainstream: on podcasts, in the “manosphere” and on our online news feeds.

Kamala Harris announcing that she was running for president coincided with my social media algorithms bombarding me with Christian “tradwife” content about the importance of serving and obeying one’s husband, and not working outside the home. This alternative reality isn’t a side of America that many Europeans had seen. You might be dimly aware that historically the country was founded by religious fundamentalists deemed too extreme for European sensibilities, but there’s something about seeing quite how unhinged and retrograde the content is that really brings the ideological disconnect home. Naturally, many people living in the US are just as horrified by the rise of these sorts of ideas, not to mention how they intersect with online misogyny and white supremacy, but their prevalence is less of a surprise because they have been exposed to them to some degree their entire lives.

At the same time, “childless cat lady” discourse was dominating the political debate, as if things weren’t already feeling medieval enough. Having researched and written a book, The Year of the Cat, that is partly about childless cat ladies – and where the sexist myths about them come from – I found it as predictable as the “burn the witch” rhetoric deployed against Hillary Clinton. It’s easy to laugh at the ridiculous notion that women who have not given birth are bitter, rageful harpies without a stake in the country they live in, and even easier to spin it into a clever “Cat Ladies for Kamala” campaign, but this fear of childless women is an old, old form of misogyny. That it was being deployed, especially in the context of global panic about the birthrate, did not bode well.

And, of course, there were yet more rape and sexual assault allegations to add to the pile – which barely seemed to make a dent in the election debate, despite the alleged involvement of the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Many of us have been left wondering what exactly Trump would have to do to a woman that would be deemed sufficiently beyond the pale to prevent his return to power. If women didn’t matter in 2016, we seem to matter even less in 2024.

There is good news for American women to cling to, with Missouri and Arizona voting to expand abortion rights, and Colorado, New York, Maryland, Montana and Nevada all passing measures to protect them. Yet misogyny can be catching: in Europe, governments must take steps to protect our own laws (Labour must urgently decriminalise abortion here in the UK after the legislation fell by the wayside earlier this year).

I know I am not alone in saying that I had never experienced such profound physical revulsion as I did during the Trump years, whenever that man tweeted or went on television. When Trump was last in office, I had not ever been pregnant or given birth. I was, though, a survivor of assault, and found the “grab them by the pussy” rhetoric and the treatment of Christine Blasey Ford particularly sickening. You don’t need to have been assaulted, or raped, to feel that revulsion, just as you didn’t need to have had an IUD fitted to empathise with all the women who were suddenly rushing to get theirs. You don’t need to have had an abortion, to have been pregnant or given birth to understand the trauma of being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

The body keeps the score, and that feeling of horror is back.