When Britain’s former deputy PM took a job at Meta, nothing could have prepared him for the ‘cloying conformity’ of the tech world. So why does he still think social media is a force for good?

• Read an exclusive extract from Nick Clegg’s new book here

The rain is just starting to fall from a grey London sky as Sir Nick Clegg arrives, ducking through the traffic and carrying what looks like his laundry. Clean shirts for the photoshoot, he says, before apologetically wondering if he might possibly get a coffee. Within minutes he has further apologised for wanting to swap the leather club chair he is offered for a hard plastic one; and then, in horror, for any impression inadvertently given that my questions might send him to sleep.

Impeccable English manners should never be mistaken for diffidence – at 58, Clegg remains the only British political figure who could convincingly be played by the equally posh but self-effacing Colin Firth, whose old London home Clegg recently bought – but there are backbench nobodies more grandly self-important than the former deputy prime minister who became number two at the tech giant Meta. Which may be just as well, given rumours that his next supporting role may be to his lawyer wife Miriam González Durántez’s nascent political career in Spain. It turns out she “never really settled” in the land of the billionaire tech bro, one of many reasons the couple swapped poolside life in Palo Alto, California, for London almost three years before he left Meta, which owns and operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. “She’s fomenting insurrection in Spain now,” Clegg says of España Mejor, her non-profit aimed at bringing citizens into policymaking.

Woodlander Initiative provokes mixed reactions in Llanafan Fawr as critics say aim is to build racially exclusive communities

During the middle ages, monks would travel to the village of Llanafan Fawr in mid-Wales to visit the church and relics of St Afan, a son of the king of Gwynedd, martyred by foreign pirates centuries before.

Today, a different sort of pilgrim can be found there. Two hilly, wooded parcels of land in Llanafan Fawr have been bought by the Woodlander Initiative (TWI), a land-buying scheme led by Simon Birkett, a far-right figure with links to Patriotic Alternative, the UK’s largest fascist group. Critics say Wiltshire-based Birkett’s aim is to create a racially exclusive settlement; he has cited Orania, a whites-only town in South Africa, as an inspiration for the project.

In Kramatorsk, 12 miles from the frontline, daily life goes on amid the constant threat of attacks

In a branch of the Ukrainian coffee chain Lviv Croissants in the frontline city of Kramatorsk, there is a noticeboard where people leave coloured Post-it notes with simple hand-drawn messages. One just says “Kramatorsk”, with red hearts below and a yellow and blue semi-circular fan above, the colours of Ukraine.

Among those looking at the notes is Bohdan, a 26-year-old, who has been serving in the army for the past three years. The soldier, now in logistics, has chosen to spend his one day off in Kramatorsk with his dog Arnold to photograph for himself recent Russian bombing on a city where he was based for 18 months.

From Instagram poetry to Greek classics, the works of fiction that have caused uproar through history – and into the present

The banning of books, it would be easy to think, is a relic of less enlightened ages. The Catholic church, in a last spasm of rectitude, added Jean-Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia and Simone de Beauvoir to its Index of Forbidden Books during the 1940s and 50s, but then abandoned the list, which had lasted four centuries, in 1966.

Public book burnings by Nazis or McCarthyites, too, might be assumed to be nothing more than a baleful warning from the past. Yet the burning of books still appears an irresistible act to some – even in the country with the strongest statutory protection of free speech, the United States. In 2019, students at Georgia Southern University burned copies of visiting Cuban-American author Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers, some shouting “Trump 2020!”. In 2022, the Nashville pastor Greg Locke held a public bonfire for “demonic” books, including the Harry Potter and Twilight series.

From a desperate attempt to get aid to an expulsion order and the death of Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif – Karim recounts nine days in Gaza

Karim is a trained nurse in his early 20s from Gaza City. He has been displaced by the war 12 times and survived an Israeli strike in Rafah. He now lives in the ruins of his former home with his parents and four brothers. He kept a diary for the Guardian over the course of a week.

Battle between real and fake is an active front in sport and the Newcastle striker transfer saga is vast but strangely hollow

Depraved. Sickening. Toxic. Foul, but also pestilent. The end of days? That last thing wasn’t the end of days. This right here is the end of days.

But is it though? Is it really? Going on a summer holiday is always a bit strange when your life involves staring at sport. Taking a break just as football is preparing to enter its own sweaty, steamy eight-month meat pocket is extra tough. Re-engagement can be difficult. Oh look. There’s football hiding behind a bush in the car park again, frazzled and wired from staying up drinking crystal meth negronis and writing a presentation about merging marketing and sales, all the while gripped with a gathering sense of horror that it’s just not possible.

Campaigners say judgment shows powerful men cannot hide behind money and libel laws to silence accusers

Women’s groups have said a high court judgment dismissing a libel claim against the Guardian by actor Noel Clarke marks a victory not just for his victims, but for press freedom and public interest reporting as a whole.

They said too often “wealthy and abusive men” have been able to use the courts to try to silence victims, hiding “behind injunctions, NDAs, [and] threats of defamation suits”.

Activists from Homeland party, which split from Patriotic Alternative, set up groups to spread protests beyond Epping

Members of a far-right nationalist party are helping to organise protests outside hotels used to house asylum seekers across the UK, according to a series of Facebook posts and groups created in recent weeks.

Activists for the Homeland party, which was formed as a splinter organisation from Patriotic Alternative, Britain’s biggest far-right group, have set up a number of online groups in an attempt to spread the protests that recently engulfed a hotel in Epping.

Former Lib Dem leader and Meta strategist writes in new book that power in tech capital is interlaced with ‘self pity’

• Full interview: Nick Clegg on tech bros, Trump and leaving Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is full of hubris and hugely wealthy and macho men who think they are victims, the former politician and Facebook executive Nick Clegg has said.

The former leader of the Liberal Democrats makes the claim in a new book chronicling his three careers as an MEP in Brussels, an MP and deputy prime minister in Westminster and as a communications and public policy strategist in San Francisco.

Catastrophic hunger caused by aid blockade is most keenly felt by elderly people, the young and the destitute

In the overcrowded, rubble strewn streets of Gaza City, there was little surprise at the announcement that UN-backed experts believed the scenes of desperation could now be formally described as a famine.

“This is something we have been saying for months now, and we have witnessed this and we have been living this and suffering this. We feel very powerless and very sick and very tired,” said Amjad Shawa, the director of the Palestinian NGO Network, who has been in Gaza City throughout the 22-month war.