Hij was bijna gepromoveerd, viel, verloor zijn geheugen en moest alles opnieuw doen

Het jaar dat hij zou promoveren verloor Leon Houben (35) zijn geheugen bij een ongeluk. Vrienden en familie werden onbekenden, zijn basiskennis was weg. „Ik werd geconfronteerd met een hele lap code met mijn naam erboven, waarvan ik geen idee had hoe het werkte.”


Slecht slapen is een groot probleem voor parkinsonpatiënten. Een bril met blauwe ledlampen kan misschien verlichting brengen

De ziekte van Parkinson gaat niet alleen gepaard met motorische problemen, maar bijvoorbeeld ook met een verstoorde slaap. Om dat aan te pakken is meer nodig dan medicijnen.


‘Wintertijd’ klinkt ongezelliger, maar past het beste bij de biologische klok

Het Europarlement wil al sinds 2019 de wisseling van de klok afschaffen. Maar als je dat doet, kies je dan voor permanente zomer- of wintertijd? Canadese wetenschappers onderzochten de gezondheidseffecten.


Twee mannen opnieuw gearresteerd om vermeende hulp aan Iran bij incident rond luchtmachtbasis Fairford

De twee mannen werden eerder ook al gearresteerd op verdenking van aan terrorisme gerelateerde strafbare feiten. Ze werden daarna echter op borgtocht vrijgelaten.

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Volkskrant.nl biedt het laatste nieuws, opinie en achtergronden

Jongeren zijn boos en bang voor hun toekomst. Laten we vieren dat zij de straat op gaan

The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

A student protest movement has gripped Serbia for two years. This weekend it will try to take power

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.

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Residents of ‘1066 Country’ lose battle for Bayeux tapestry tickets

Exclusive: East Sussex MP Helena Dollimore says ‘shambolic’ museum phone line has made her constituents lose out to ‘queue jumpers’

Hastings residents have missed out on tickets for the Bayeux tapestry after being put on hold for hours by a “glitchy and shambolic” phone system, their MP has said.

People from “1066 Country” were promised a chance to buy before a sales line opened to the public on Wednesday. But Helena Dollimore, the MP for Hastings and Rye, said it has been almost impossible for her constituents to get through to the British Museum.

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Standup Jon Richardson on turning his dark teenage diaries into a tearjerking memoir: ‘I couldn’t sugarcoat those years’

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.

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Veggie Thursdays and vegan surprises! How Ghent became a plant-based paradise

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?

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Fifth foreign firm pulls out of controversial Israeli cable car project to East Jerusalem

Rights groups say the planned 1.4km route, which ends at compound run by far-right settler group Elad, will displace Palestinians and reshape the cultural landscape

A fifth foreign company has pulled out of a plan to build a cable car from West to East Jerusalem that threatens to involve the seizure of land and property rights from dozens of Palestinian families along its route, but local authorities insist the scheme is proceeding as planned.

The project appeared to have stalled for four years until late September, just weeks before Israel’s 27 October elections, when the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA) issued a notice of intent to award a contract without a public tender to ROPES, a cable car engineering consultancy based in South Tyrol, Italy.

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