Ashleigh Nelson is in the mix for a bobsleigh medal at the Winter Olympics – but that doesn’t mean she enjoys it

Ashleigh Nelson was never meant to be in the Winter Olympics. If you’d asked her 18 months ago where she expected to be competing this week, she would have told you she would be at the Utilita Arena in Birmingham running the 60m at the UK Indoor Championships, not standing at the top of the world’s newest ice track riding a £75,000 bobsleigh.

“I was tricked into it,” Nelson says. “You laugh, but it’s true.” Nelson got into it only after the GB bob pilot Adele Nicoll sent her a message on Instagram just after the Paris Olympics asking if she fancied giving it a go.

Civil rights leader, politician, campaigner; the Rev Jackson was a phenomenal orator, and a brilliant organiser. Writers reflect on his impact around the world

• Jesse Jackson – a life in pictures

• Jesse Jackson tributes – latest updates

San Francisco’s AI startups are pushing workers to grind endlessly, hinting at pressures soon hitting other sectors

Not long after the terms “996” and “grindcore” entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening at startups in San Francisco, ground zero for the artificial intelligence economy. There was the one about the founder who hadn’t taken a weekend off in more than six months. The woman who joked that she’d given up her social life to work at a prestigious AI company. Or the employees who had started taking their shoes off in the office because, well, if you were going to be there for at least 12 hours a day, six days a week, wouldn’t you rather be wearing slippers?

“If you go to a cafe on a Sunday, everyone is working,” says Sanju Lokuhitige, the co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed-stage AI startup, who moved to San Francisco in November to be closer to the action. Lokuhitige says he works seven days a week, 12 hours a day, minus a few carefully selected social events each week where he can network with other people at startups. “Sometimes I’m coding the whole day,” he says. “I do not have work-life balance.”

After Guardian writers shared their picks for big screen love stories people may not have seen, readers have responded with some alternative options

It’s a long time since I saw it, and it’s one of those films I’ve been unable to rewatch after a first viewing in case it disappoints. The way they keep upping the ante as the movie progresses struck me as completely perfect at the time. CreatureAdam

More than two years after Israel’s devastating war in Gaza began, the West Bank has become an increasingly volatile front in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. While international recognition of a Palestinian state has gathered momentum, the situation on the ground is moving in the opposite direction. Israel’s government has advanced new annexation legislation, settlement growth is accelerating, and daily life for Palestinians is becoming more restricted and precarious.

In a new series, reporter Matthew Cassel travels through the West Bank to document what daily life looks like under deepening occupation. Starting in Hebron and moving north to Ramallah, villages outside the city, and finally Nablus, he meets people across generations to ask: what does the idea of a ‘Palestinian state’ mean today?

Many women reading this will have experienced something similar: a warning that sharing public space isn’t a man’s job, it’s a woman’s

What motivates a stranger to push a woman in public? That’s a question I’ve been stuck on this week after a man shoved me out of his way on an empty pedestrian street. I didn’t even see him coming – well, I wouldn’t have, as he came up from behind me.

I had walked in his path, he barked at me. “What path?” I thought, baffled, as I took in the huge expanse of empty pavement around us. I was so stupefied by the encounter that I found myself frozen to the spot, watching him walk away in his blue anorak and technical rucksack. He could have been any man from anywhere on his way to work.

Lucy Pasha-Robinson is a Guardian assistant Opinion editor

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Follow latest updates as public figures praise civil rights leader who was a protege of Martin Luther King Jr and twice ran for Democratic presidential nomination

• Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader, dies aged 84

• Jesse Jackson – a life in pictures

• US political leaders pay tribute to Jesse Jackson

You can watch Jesse Jackson’s famous 1988 speech at the Democratic convention urging Americans to “keep hope alive” below. It quickly became an American political classic and was echoed in the “hope and change” slogan of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential campaign.

The civil rights campaigner, Al Sharpton, has paid tribute to his “mentor” Jesse Jackson, whom he worked closely with over the civil rights era. In a tribute posted to X, Sharpton wrote:

My mentor, Rev. Jesse Jackson, has passed. I just prayed with his family by phone. He was a consequential and transformative leader who changed this nation and the world.

He shaped public policy and changed laws. He kept the dream alive and taught young children from broken homes, like me, that we don’t have broken spirits.

Leader says move should end claims of one-man band and shows party is ‘creating a machine for government’

Nigel Farage has unveiled the first part of Reform UK’s frontbench team, saying it shows that the party is no longer reliant entirely on him – while also warning that he will not tolerate any dissent from his colleagues.

Two of the four appointees are recent defectors from the Conservatives: Robert Jenrick, who takes on the Treasury brief, and Suella Braverman, whom Farage has put in charge of education, skills and equalities.

Prof Michael Wooldridge says scenario such as deadly self-driving car update or AI hack could destroy global interest

The race to get artificial intelligence to market has raised the risk of a Hindenburg-style disaster that shatters global confidence in the technology, a leading researcher has warned.

Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, said the danger arose from the immense commercial pressures that technology firms were under to release new AI tools, with companies desperate to win customers before the products’ capabilities and potential flaws are fully understood.

Exclusive: ICE more than tripled the amount of data stored in Microsoft’s cloud at the same time that its arsenal of surveillance technology ballooned

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deepened its reliance on Microsoft’s cloud technology last year as the agency ramped up arrest and deportation operations, leaked documents reveal.

ICE more than tripled the amount of data it stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform in the six months leading up to January 2026, a period in which the agency’s budget swelled and its workforce rapidly expanded, according to the files.