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.

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.

The Tory leader has glimpsed the future and it involves Labour putting every last UK citizen on benefits

If you’re worried about next week’s budget, then now is your time to chill out. Because Kemi Badenoch has all the answers. The chancellor, John Healey, has been living rent free in the leader of the opposition’s head for the past few weeks. Lucky man. More than that, she has been perched on his shoulder while he sits at his desk in the Treasury and tries to make the sums add up.

And – SPOILER ALERT – Kemi has now read the whole speech that hasn’t yet been written and is in a position to give her budget reply more than a week ahead of time. Opposition by telepathy. Or wish fulfilment. If things don’t work out for her in her current job she could apply to be the next Mystic Meg.

Is your television listening to every conversation? Filling your home with highly invasive ads? Some viewers have had enough of tech violating their privacy

When Dan had had enough of his television, he threw a rock straight through the screen. The offence? His smart TV was downloading its third update in three days. “It drove me crazy with what seemed like daily software updates that never fixed anything and ‘features’ that never seemed to work,” says the 71-year-old from Illinois. “And of course, constantly trying to push me to subscribe to paid-for services when all I wanted to do was watch over-the-air TV, play a DVD or stream something from my computer.”

Some may accuse Dan of being a luddite, but his master’s degree in computer science and decades of experience in telecommunications would suggest otherwise. “The tech is not intimidating,” he explains, “just increasingly enshittified.”

Jackdaw gasfield announcement signals UK’s commitment to North Sea industry but undermines green credentials

• What does the approval of the Jackdaw gasfield mean?

The Jackdaw gasfield will be given the go-ahead on Wednesday, signalling Andy Burnham’s commitment to the North Sea fossil fuel industry and threatening to trigger a row with climate campaigners and Labour MPs.

Miatta Fahnbulleh and John Healey, the energy secretary and chancellor respectively, will make the announcement from Aberdeen on Wednesday morning after more than a year of deliberations over whether doing so would violate the UK’s climate commitments.

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.

Advance warnings of missile attacks were seemingly suspended last week by the White House, but Ukraine’s president says: ‘Now it works’

The US has resumed sharing intelligence with Kyiv about Russian missile strikes, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday after a meeting with the US envoy Steve Witkoff in Norway.

He said Ukraine was again receiving advance warnings of ballistic missile attacks, which were seemingly suspended last week by the White House. “Now it works. It’s great,” he said, adding that the US move would save lives.

During a summer fire that destroyed homes in Stourbridge, low pressure meant filling a water carrier took 40 minutes

Concerns have been raised about how drought affects the UK’s ability to cope with wildfires after MPs were told firefighters struggled for water supplies during this year’s record summer.

The government has been urged to set out water companies’ statutory responsibilities during major fire incidents to improve the country’s preparedness for the years ahead.