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 only got into it after the GB bob pilot Adele Nicole sent her a message on Instagram just after the Paris Olympics asking if she fancied giving it a go.

Wuthering Heights is inseparable from its landscape – but northern actors seldom get the lead role, instead are pigeonholed as stereotypical or supporting characters. This Bradford-born actor objects

Emerald Fennell’s casting choices for her new version of Wuthering Heights have already been much scrutinised. As well as the apparent “whitewashing” of Heathcliff by casting Jacob Elordi in the part, there’s the fact 35-year-old Margot Robbie is playing a woman 20 years her junior.

Plus, of course, they’re both Australian, not British – and certainly not from Yorkshire. Fennell has offered a defence of her casting choices as a “personal fantasy” – but amid all the scoff and chatter surrounding the film and its myriad deviations from the book, the erasure of regional authenticity risks going under-discussed.

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

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

My group, Swim Deep, plays to crowds of hundreds across the UK – but in China, we play to tens of thousands. And we’re not the only ones

When I joined the band Swim Deep 13 years ago, my dreams were much like those of any young musician: to play Glastonbury, to tour America and to hear our music on the radio – all of which we’ve managed to achieve. But what I hadn’t counted on was finding a fanbase in China. Despite us never having knowingly released our music there, Swim Deep recently returned triumphant from our fourth run of shows on Chinese soil in barely 10 years, and we’re not the only British indie band benefiting from this unexpected opportunity.

China has had an enthusiasm for British and Irish pop acts for years, long before its ¥500bn (£531m) music industry overtook France to become the world’s fifth largest in 2023. Jessie J became a phenomenon after winning the country’s premier singing competition in 2018, while Westlife have spent decades playing to thousands in Chinese arenas and stadiums. But less heralded is a growing interest in grassroots UK indie bands, for whom the unexpected demand – and promise of excellent pre-gig catering – presents a financial and spiritual lifeline as returns increasingly diminish on home soil.

From The West Wing to The Simpsons, House and now Industry, TV baddies have made a tongue-in-cheek Gilbert and Sullivan show tune their own

Warning: this article contains spoilers for Industry season four, episode six.

If you’re up to date with Industry (if you’re not, proceed with caution) then you’ll know that Kit Harington’s character Henry Muck has spent season four being even more of a nightmare than usual. He has been depressed, intoxicated, suicidal and horny in equal measure, all of which was topped off in the most recent episode with a sweaty bunk-up with a guy in a club.

A trailblazer in the civil rights movement and Democratic politics, Jackson championed the rights of Black, poor and working-class people with his ‘rainbow coalition’

• Jesse Jackson dies – latest updates

• Jesse Jackson – a life in pictures

The Rev Jesse Jackson, the civil rights campaigner who was prominent for more than 50 years and who ran strongly for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, has died. He was 84.

“Our father was a servant leader – not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement.

Party leader tells FT journalist she should ‘write some silly story’ after press conference revealing roles for his top team

Nigel Farage is speaking.

He starts by saying that 4.6m voters will get the right to to vote in the local elections because of his party.

I am writing a book on Nigel Farage for @headlinepg.

No holds will be barred.

Israel accused of denying doctors re-entry into territory after they gave first-hand testimony on conflict

Medics in the UK and US believe they have been denied re-entry to Gaza after speaking out on the conflict.

Following reports of rising refusal rates, medical workers and organisationswho have provided humanitarian aid in Gaza have described what they see as arbitrary denials.

Exclusive: Council in one of England’s poorest areas says it needs urgent help with ballooning children’s social care bill

Keir Starmer is facing a mass resignation of Labour councillors in one of England’s poorest areas over a “betrayal” of funding for children in care.

Labour councillors in Hartlepool, County Durham, said they were “between despair and open revolt” over an “unfair” cash settlement that would leave them unable to balance the books.