Some in Dover say their town is being exploited by content creators and politicians, but others claim there is a genuine problem

If you believe rightwing influencers and politicians, Dover and the wider Kent coast has been the site of an “invasion” for years now. And, for an online audience of millions, they and their camera crews have been the vanguard in the nation’s defence.

Indeed, if you believe all you see on the algorithms of amateur Channel watchers, the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, braved a hail of French gunfire as he took to the water in a fishing boat this week; an attempt by the French authorities, he suggested, to deter him in his mission of highlighting the small boats crisis.

Sick of doomscrolling? From venues with smartphone swear jars to cabins with absolutely no signal, here are the fun and freeing ways to ditch your device

There’s a ritual at the start of every event hosted by the Offline Project. Run by Pelé Zachariah, the activities vary – it could be a group walk, a collage‑making class or a supper club – but each one begins in the same way, *with an invitation to hand over your phone. Devices go in a lockbox. Once they’re all in, Zachariah closes the door and turns the key. “I don’t place them in for people, because it’s nice for them to physically put it in the box themselves, walk away, and think: for the next two or three hours, I’m fully present.”

He has been running these screen-free events in London since August 2025. First-timers can be apprehensive about being separated from their phone. “You can sense the vibe when they’re putting it away,” says Zachariah. “People have said to me, ‘I felt really weird’ or ‘I felt super uncomfortable for the first few minutes not having my phone on me.’ Then they’ll say, ‘I didn’t know how much I needed that.’”

Nigel Farage’s £5m gift, the Cottrell family’s links and donations, and Richard Tice’s business dealings form part of an increasingly clear nexus of relationships

It has been three months since the Guardian revealed that Nigel Farage had accepted a £5m gift from Christopher Harborne, a billionaire donor to Reform UK.

This was not the first story in our continuing investigation. But it has proved the most significant, and the consequences of the disclosure are still being played out.

Voters on the left are more fragmented than ever – but they will pull together behind a convincing cross-party message

• The author is director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass

The results of the election for a new mayor to succeed Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester show progressives standing at the threshold of a new era. But only if they work together.

The new mayor, Bev Craig, was elected using the supplementary vote, which uses voters’ second preference if no one wins more than half the vote in the first round. Despite the Burnham bounce, Labour received only 47% of the vote in the first round, well down on Burnham, who never achieved below 63% in his three campaigns. But when second preferences kicked in, it’s estimated that about seven in 10 progressives who had backed other parties piled in behind Craig.

Heat and drought have affected shipping, power plants and tourism across eastern Europe – as well as unearthing some surprises

Baking temperatures and drought across large swathes of central and eastern Europe have driven water levels on the Danube and Rhine rivers to record lows in some areas, hitting shipping, energy production and tourism hard.

Extreme conditions aggravated by the climate emergency left Europe’s waterways from the Netherlands to the Black Sea parched, triggering compounding crises.

The Pulitzer-winning author of Less and Villa Coco explores the art of writing humour – plus 10 of the best novels to make you laugh

In March 2020, when the mayor of San Francisco instructed all citizens to remain in their houses due to a pandemic, the first thing I did was order all the books of Agatha Christie. I was not alone; I think many of us immersed ourselves in reliable narratives to drown out the chaos. It did not matter if it ended in marriage or murder; the reliability was what mattered. Later when I realised I would need to hole up for some time, my reading shifted to a different kind of novel. And because, like Christie, our world has an endless supply of new terrors, it is the comic novel that still fills my reading hours.

Nobody knows what a comic novel is. And once you start discussing it, all the fun runs out. EB White compared it to dissecting a frog (you’re left with innards and a dead frog) but I would compare it to turning all the lights on at a party: everyone looks terrible and you’ve ruined the party. Most would agree, of course, that Wodehouse wrote comic novels, but I turn to books hardly anybody would classify that way – Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, for instance – that yet seem to me to be a hoot. I think they are books that decide something is funny, as Jerry Seinfeld once defined comedy. In Moby-Dick, it’s a coin nailed to a masthead. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, it’s the worst best poem you’ve ever read. And yet we feel we’re getting at something the most solemn narratives aim for: an understanding of the human condition, of grief, of love, of death. All the big stuff. The comic novels I love are books that could just as easily have been tragedies. It is simply that the author has decided it’s funny.

• Infantino ditched proposals after widespread backlash

• Uefa adds: ‘We cannot keep going on with secret schemes’

Uefa has warned Gianni Infantino that his style of leadership cannot continue in demanding a thorough and fundamental review of Fifa’s governance.

In a strongly worded statement that referred to “secret schemes”, “shabby backroom deals” and “faceless individuals”, the Uefa leadership made clear it wants change at the top of Fifa, despite the world governing body’s overnight U-turn in abandoning Infantino’s plan to sell off stakes in the World Cup and other competitions.

Pedro Sánchez hits out at ‘polarising and unlawful reaction’ over mass crossing into Spanish enclave in north Africa

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has called for an urgent meeting of EU interior ministers after what he called some member states’ “selfish, polarising and unlawful reaction” to this week’s mass border crossing into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in north Africa.

More than 50,000 people crossed into the territory from Morocco on Thursday and Friday, with at least 67 people dying in the attempt. Some drowned, while others were crushed as they tried to cross a breakwater barrier.

Jason Arday was regarded as an academic superstar, but then questions about his work prompted scrutiny of his backstory and counterclaims of racism

When the superstar academic Jason Arday took to the stage at the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference earlier this year, he delivered a talk called Wanted Dead or Alive: the Playbook.

The youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history told an audience of his peers that the playbook in question had helped bring down some of the biggest names in US academia. Conservative “activists” were trawling through the work of black academics, looking for anything to use against them: inconsistencies, citation errors, passages in their work that were similar to existing papers.

Exclusive: As wildfires rage, Frank Elderson says more work needed to assess risk from collapse of ecosystem services

A senior policymaker at the European Central Bank has said the climate emergency and the breakdown of nature poses a dramatically growing risk to the global economy.

Frank Elderson, a member of the ECB’s executive board, said the eurozone lender of last resort was stepping up its monitoring of the financial risks linked to the destruction of “ecosystem services”, which are nature-related processes or assets that support human activity.