Unorthodox campaign is challenging the ruling party’s 12-year reign with a bold democratic experiment

On a cool autumn evening, a team of Serbian student volunteers went canvassing in the housing estates of Krnjača, a Belgrade suburb. They were equipped with lanyards emblazoned with the word “victory”, a stock list of questions and a mobile app that mapped visited homes and the level of support in each.

The volunteers were part of a mass student movement, Student List, that has rocked Serbia with two years of constant protests. On Sunday, the group will represent the most serious challenge Aleksandar Vučić has faced in his 12 increasingly authoritarian years in power, by putting forward their own candidates in parliamentary elections.

In 2014, 13% of the population of this Belgian city described themselves as flexitarian. This year, 83% did. Here is how everyone was convinced to eat their greens – and love them

Sixty bowls of slime-green soup sit waiting for the children to arrive. Pupils rush in from their morning lessons, grab the bowls by the handles and start slurping. No complaints, no refusals. (OK, maybe a few “bleurgh” faces.) Chicory soup dispatched, they get stuck into the main course: falafel, Mediterranean vegetable tagine and couscous. Some ask for seconds; most grab a piece of fruit for dessert and run out to play.

This is a typical Thursday lunchtime in BS De Stadspoort primary school in Ghent, Belgium. Similar meat-free menus are being eaten in other schools and nurseries across the city, plus community centres, care homes and assisted living facilities, not to mention many work canteens and restaurants. Thursday in Ghent is officially “Veggie Day”, with residents encouraged to eschew any meat or fish. So how did a city get its children – and everyone else – to eat their greens?

While facing grief, illness and a very public breakup, the comic reached for his diaries – and found a happy kid who spiralled into despair. Inspired by a Nobel laureate, he wrote a frank, funny book about that boy and what he grew into

It begins on Christmas Day, 1996: “It’s been a lovely day … I realised how much I love my family.” It ends three years later: “I’m lying on the floor in floods of tears and all I want to do is die.” Say what you like about adolescence but it is nothing if not an emotional tumult. “If I’d known as a teenager,” says the comedian Jon Richardson ruefully, “that I’d one day write a book about them, I couldn’t have bookended my teenage diaries with better quotes to show what a storm of shit those years can be.”

The book is The Teenage Diaries of a Stand-Up Comedian, and it has been two years in the making. Two years that, if not quite the hormonal rollercoaster the book itself records, have been quite the ride. The project is borne of a crossroads moment in the Lancashire man’s midlife, after he experienced bereavement, serious illness among family and friends, and the breakdown of his marriage to fellow comic Lucy Beaumont. The last was an inevitably very public ending, splayed across the tabloids, to a relationship which itself played out in public, courtesy of the couple’s acclaimed mockumentary about their domestic arrangements, Meet the Richardsons.

Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump are arsonists who play at being firefighters. Nigel Farage is finding that act harder to pull off in Andy Burnham’s Britain

An election where one side represents chaos will nearly always be won by the party that promises order instead. Public fatigue after years of turbulent Tory rule accounted for Labour’s 2024 landslide victory more than any policy in Keir Starmer’s manifesto. Across the Channel, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally (RN), is currently on course to win next year’s presidential poll with a pledge of “restored authority and security” for a country that has spent years cycling between enervating stasis and explosive crisis.

Le Pen has been boosted in recent days by scenes of city centres ablaze and shops being looted as student demonstrations mutated into riots. Street confrontation is a more standard feature of the political repertoire in France than in most settled democracies, but the destruction was disturbing by any measure.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Despite US-Israeli airstrikes and Tehran’s attacks on shipping, the waterway still has to provide a lifeline for those that live and work there

Capt Farouq turns the wheel as he watches the ferry terminal of Bandar Abbas grow smaller, its bright lights flickering in the distance.

In front of him, the navigation radar beeps periodically, its green and pink lights glowing in the darkness. The ferry, today at about half capacity with roughly 100 passengers, turns and heads into the darkness of the strait of Hormuz.

Capt Farouq pulls into the deeper waters

From incontinence to reconstructive bladder surgery, ketamine’s popularity with the young is a public health crisis in motion. But is Dooley the right person to get to grips with it?

Stacey Dooley’s latest documentary, Down the K Hole, lands as part of a new batch of three from the presenter. One explores the death in barracks of 19-year-old Jaysley Beck and asks how well the army protects its female soldiers from sexual assault and harassment; another investigates the phenomenon of women who are killed by falling and how often domestic abuse may have been involved.

Down the K Hole follows the stories of a handful of ketamine addicts in recovery, representatives of what we are told is a 20% increase in UK admissions involving use of the drug since 2023. Dooley spends four months embedded in Acorn Recovery Projects, a rehab centre in Stockport. It is not really made clear what “embedded” means. She appears to turn up in the mornings, rather than live there full-time. And there isn’t a great sense in the interviews with addicts and their families that she is any closer to them than she would be under normal circumstances. Nor, during her reflections after every interaction – usually leaning against a wall in the nearest corridor and sighing – does she come up with any greater insights than she usually does. Dooley’s speciality is empathy and, afterwards, either repackaging what she has just been told, or giving voice to the feelings – sadness, frustration, resignation – she can count on the audience sharing. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But as the programme – indeed, as her career as a documentary maker – continues, you do start to wish she could parlay her established bona fides into something just a bit more rigorous and move us all on from our shared understandings.

Decision was widely expected after lobbying by Shell but will dismay environmental campaigners

• What does the UK’s approval of the Jackdaw gasfield mean?

The UK government has approved the controversial Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea, a widely expected move that will nonetheless dismay environmental campaigners and a number of Labour MPs.

While Labour’s 2024 election manifesto committed to a ban on new drilling licences in the North Sea, the companies behind Jackdaw and the Rosebank oilfield project, which is being decided on separately, have sought environmental approval for existing licences.

Haines is in stable condition. Surgeons tried to save her right leg but both have now been amputated due to injuries

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The independent MP Helen Haines has lost both legs but remains in a stable condition, two days after an alleged targeted attack near her electorate office in north-east Victoria.

Haines, the federal MP for Indi, had been in a critical but stable condition after she was struck by a car in Wangaratta on Monday afternoon. Surgeons were trying to save her right leg on Tuesday, but both legs had to be amputated due to the seriousness of her injuries.

Court of appeal decision prevents woman from suing police and CPS for disclosing her address to violent ex-partner

The Labour MP Jess Phillips has said she hopes the UK’s highest court “sees sense” and overturns a ruling preventing a domestic abuse survivor from suing Sussex police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for disclosing her address to her violent ex-partner.

Phillips said that if the supreme court upheld the court of appeal’s decision when it hears the case on Wednesday and Thursday, it would prevent police from being held accountable for failures in cases of violence against women and girls.

Exclusive: Admission from James Orr to undercover reporter came three months before party was given £72m

A senior Reform UK official raised questions about whether major donations from billionaire backers Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo would be legal under the proposed new foreign donors cap three months before they gave £72m to the party.

James Orr, who was then Reform UK’s head of policy and a Cambridge professor, discussed potential difficulties around future donations from Harborne and Delo in undercover footage captured by the investigative reporting group Verbatim.