12-hour days, no weekends: the anxiety driving AI’s brutal work culture is a warning for all of us

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.”

Published: February 17, 2026, 1:00 pm

Jesse Jackson shifted Black politics from the margins of the Democratic party to its center

The civil rights icon, who died on Tuesday, used his progressivism as rebellion

By the early 1980s, the Democratic party was facing a crossroads. The 1980 landslide election of Ronald Reagan, who clinched the presidency with a whopping 489 electoral college votes against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, swiftly pulled the Democratic party to the right in the political and cultural wave of the “Reagan Revolution”.

For those Democratic constituents left behind, however, a challenge was mounting, mostly within US industrial cities whose economies were ransacked by Reagan’s “trickle-down” economics. Record tax cuts for the wealthy had come at the expense of a contracted social safety net, thus exacerbating inequality and collapsing much of the working class into the poor. Grassroots resistance campaigns spawned across the country in response to this dire urban crisis that had disproportionately devastated African Americans, and between 1982 and 1984 they had registered 2 million new Black voters – the largest gain in registered Black voters since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Published: February 17, 2026, 1:50 pm

‘A realistic take on marriage’: readers on their favourite lesser-known movie romances

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

Published: February 17, 2026, 3:23 pm

The gulf between critics and audience has never been wider – just look at Melania’s Rotten Tomatoes score

Critics have given the Flotus flick 11% on the aggregator site, but the ‘verified ticket buyers’ score is a near perfect 98%. A campaign by activists, or a sign of our politically disparate times?

If you’ve started to feel like you’re living in an entirely different reality from most of the world, there’s a good chance that it’s because you’ve been looking at the Rotten Tomatoes page for the Melania Trump documentary. There you will find two diametrically opposed numbers. First is the official Rotten Tomatoes score – the one aggregated across published reviews by professional critics – which sits at a minuscule 11%. But then there is the audience rating, which is based on scores from members of the general public. That score, incredibly, is 98%. (Admittedly, this is a score confined to “verified ticket buyers” – Rotten Tomatoes has another section it calls “All Audience” where the reaction is more … mixed.)

Of course, there has long been a chasm between public and critical opinion, which is why the film that won the most Oscars last year was a small character study about a disenfranchised stripper and the film that brought in the most money was about Minecraft. Even so, the disparity between the brutal reviews that Melania received (“The most depressing experience I have ever had in the cinema” – Mark Kermode) and the glowing public reviews (“Every red blooded American needs to see this movie to recognise the grace, sophistication and power of Flotius [sic]” – Jackie) is enough to give you whiplash.

Published: February 17, 2026, 12:37 pm

Elana Meyers Taylor’s victory in her fifth Olympics was about far more than gold

The American won her first Winter Games title at 41. She did so while advocating for Black athletes, mothers and the deaf and Down’s syndrome communities

Elana Meyers Taylor had already cemented her place in Olympic history long before Monday night. She had competed with and against men on the World Cup tour and at the world championships to help force women’s monobob into the Winter Olympic program. She had surpassed the speed skater Shani Davis as the most decorated Black athlete in Winter Games history. She had stacked more Olympic medals than any female bobsledder ever, reaching the podium at Vancouver, Sochi, Pyeongchang and Beijing.

But even at the age of 41, with a bad back and a concussion history, even with the added responsibility and time pressures of motherhood, even after five visits to an Olympic podium that would have been enough for a different athlete to call it a day, she had never let go of her dream of standing alone on the top step.

Published: February 17, 2026, 1:12 pm

More than 600 people were fired or punished for posting about Charlie Kirk’s death. They want justice

Acolytes of the far-right activist urged employers to fire his critics. Now those who were terminated are suing and claiming their right to free speech

Julie Strebe, a 55-year-old sheriff’s deputy in the small Bible belt town of Salem, Missouri, was on a date with her husband at a Buffalo Wild Wings when her husband slid his phone across the table. On Facebook, people were demanding Strebe’s immediate termination, calling her a “wacko” with “extreme mental health issues”.

It was the afternoon of 13 September 2025, just a few days after Charlie Kirk had been killed by a sniper’s bullet on a college campus. Shortly after his assassination, Strebe had posted on her personal Facebook page: “Empathy is not owed to oppressors.” In comments underneath, she did not mince words. She called Kirk a racist, a sexist, an antisemite and the kind of person who wants to see gay people, like her own son, stoned to death. “I don’t feel bad,” she says, months later, speaking from her home. “I refuse to feel bad for this man, and the hateful things he stood for.”

Published: February 17, 2026, 11:00 am

Obama, Trump and Biden lead tributes to Jesse Jackson: ‘one of America’s greatest patriots’

Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Al Sharpton, Donald Trump and more react to death of the civil rights leader at the age of 84

• Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader, dies aged 84

• Jesse Jackson – a life in pictures

• Share your tributes and memories of Jesse Jackson

Three Democratic former presidents led a wealth of tributes to Jesse Jackson, a “titan” of the civil rights movement and “one of America’s greatest patriots” who has died at the age of 84.

Joe Biden said history would remember Jackson as “a man of God and of the people”, calling him in a social media post : “Determined and tenacious. Unafraid of the work to redeem the soul of our Nation.”

Published: February 17, 2026, 8:33 pm

ICE reliance on Microsoft technology surged amid immigration crackdown, documents show

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.

Published: February 17, 2026, 6:06 pm

Goldman Sachs to drop race, gender and LGBTQ+ criteria from board evaluations

The move follows pressure from an activist shareholder group seeking end to DEI requirements

Goldman Sachs is removing race, gender and other diversity-related considerations when evaluating prospective candidates for its executive board after pressure from an activist shareholder group to remove the criteria.

The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a small Goldman shareholder, quietly submitted a request to the company last September asking the bank to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) board criteria.

Published: February 17, 2026, 5:59 pm

Hillary Clinton accuses Trump administration of Epstein files cover-up; top DHS spokesperson leaves amid shutdown – live

‘Get the files out’, says former secretary of state; Tricia McLaughlin’s departure comes amid shutdown of agency in charges of ICE surges

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts direct to your inbox

A Texas-sized showdown is brewing deep in the heart of the largest red state in the US. As early voting begins on Tuesday for the Lone Star state’s 3 March primaries, Republicans and Democrats alike face a high-stakes choice that could set the stage for one of the fiercest Senate races of the 2026 midterm cycle.

At the center of the fractious Republican contest is a clash between the party’s old guard and a Maga culture warrior, with four-term incumbent John Cornyn, a conservative fixture of Senate leadership locked in the fight of his political career against the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton.

Published: February 17, 2026, 8:23 pm

Brother of No Other Land co-director injured as Israeli settlers again attack family home

Hamdan Ballal says violence on West Bank as bad as ever, nearly a year after his Oscar-winning film shocked the world

The co-director of the Oscar-winning No Other Land has said his home and family have come under renewed attack, almost a year after the documentary on Israeli settler and army violence in the West Bank received an Academy Award.

Hamdan Ballal said a group of settlers who had conducted a long-running campaign of harassment against Palestinian villagers came on Sunday to his home in Susya, in the Masafer Yatta area on the southern edge of the West Bank.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:10 pm

Race for AI is making Hindenburg-style disaster ‘a real risk’, says leading expert

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.

Published: February 17, 2026, 6:01 pm

Shia LaBeouf arrested on battery charges in New Orleans during Mardi Gras

The actor was charged with two counts after allegedly punching two men and causing chaos at bars

The actor Shia LaBeouf was arrested early on Tuesday for alleged battery in New Orleans after apparently spending the long weekend partying across the city during Mardi Gras.

The New Orleans police department confirmed that at approximately 12.45am on Tuesday officers were called to Faubourg Marigny, located next to the French Quarter, the heart of the revelry, where LaBeouf was allegedly becoming increasingly aggressive at Royal Street Inn and Bar.

Published: February 17, 2026, 5:26 pm

Colbert accuses Trump administration of censorship after CBS pulls interview

Host says lawyers barred him from discussing decision to drop Texas Democrat segment amid FCC rules scrutiny

The talkshow host Stephen Colbert has accused the Trump administration of censoring critics after CBS pulled his interview with a Texas Democrat on Monday, apparently at the behest of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Colbert told viewers of the Late Show that network lawyers told him he was also prohibited from talking about their refusal to air his interview with James Talarico, a Texas state representative seeking his party’s nomination to challenge the Republican incumbent, John Cornyn, for a Senate seat in November.

Published: February 17, 2026, 3:08 pm

Winter Olympics 2026: women’s figure skating, crunch Canada v GB men’s curling and more – live

• Medal table | Live scores and schedule | Results | Briefing

• Follow us over on Bluesky | Get in touch: email Geoff

Heinis of France is in the air, it feels hein just looking at him, and he jumps 129, giving him 133.8 points; he moves above Karhumaa and into the lead.

I’ve also got the curling on and, if you’ll excuse my parochialism, I’m not watching pool leaders Switzerland monstering defending champions Sweden, rather USA v China, for reasons of relevance to GB. The Americans now lead 2-1 playing the fifth.

Published: February 17, 2026, 8:46 pm

Marco Rubio’s warm words to Viktor Orbán reinforce EU fears that US seeks disunity in Europe

Secretary of state spoke of ‘golden age’ of US-Hungary relations at time of tense transatlantic relations with traditional allies

Even before he in effect endorsed Hungary’s Viktor Orbán before of a crucial parliamentary election, Marco Rubio’s itinerary for Europe promised to be provocative. After meeting with US allies at the Munich Security Conference during a particularly tense moment in transatlantic relations, the US secretary of state departed for Slovakia and Hungary – the two EU states most dependent on Russian energy and sceptical of the bloc’s support for Ukraine.

In what bordered on an explicit political endorsement, Rubio told Orbán that relations between Hungary and the US had entered a “golden age” – and would stay like that for as long as Orban remains in power.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:49 pm

Robert Duvall obituary

Veteran American actor admired for his roles in Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies

“You smell that? Do you smell that? ... Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” says Robert Duvall as the mad, hawkish, surf-loving Lt Col Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979), Francis Ford Coppola’s two-and-a-half hour nightmarish ride through Vietnam.

Wearing a black stetson with a cavalry sword emblem and sunglasses, Kilgore is certainly a caricature of the American military, but Duvall, who has died aged 95, gave him a terrifying reality. Presenting a man who is only as insane as the war around him, his brief appearance was central to the film.

Published: February 17, 2026, 5:07 pm

Questions swirl over Ohio billionaire Les Wexner’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein

Retail mogul’s name was this week unredacted from trove of files – how did he and his model town fuel Epstein’s rise?

Les Wexner’s alleged note to Jeffrey Epstein marking his 50th birthday in 2003 included a hand-drawing of a woman’s breasts.

And yet today, the billionaire Wexner’s name and portrait sits front and center across Ohio’s most respected institution – the Ohio State University.

Published: February 17, 2026, 1:00 pm

Cardi B review – ambitious spectacle and sizzling choreography

Kia Forum, Los Angeles
Grammy-winning Bronx rapper electrifies LA with pugnacious lyrics and vivid set pieces on her first arena tour

As anticipation mounts in Los Angeles’s Kia Forum for the first of Cardi B’s two sold out shows at the arena, the rapper plays an extended visual depicting a murder of crows. The image nods to the cover of her latest studio release, 2025’s score-settling Am I the Drama?, in which the birds surround the rapper behind a storm-laced sky ready to burst. The reference is intentional: crows are whip-smart, cunning and capable of clinging to deeply held grudges for decades. Cardi’s arrival on stage tonight further underscores the ominous feeling; she appears with a long shadow behind her as a slice of album opener Dead plays: “I’m collecting body bags like they purses / I don’t even rap no more, I drive hearses.”

She emerges in a haute couture trench coat resembling battle armor and with a shock of white in her dark hair, like Cruella de Vil if she’d grown up in the Bronx. Cardi then launches into braggadocious Hello with pyrotechnics and smoke effects, the message clear: when someone crosses her, she doesn’t just want to embarrass them. She wants them in the ground.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:08 pm

Don’t toss it, fix it: nine easy DIY remedies for stuck zippers, wobbly chairs and more

Experts share repair tips to save money and extend the life of everyday essentials from clothes to furniture in minutes

• The eight best gifts in the US for the DIYer in your life

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

We’ve all thrown away something “perfectly good” that just suffered a minor flaw: a wobbly chair. Jeans with a knee hole. A toaster that won’t latch. All replaced by new versions that will break the same way. Most of these things could’ve been salvaged with 20 minutes and the nerve to try.

Fixing things yourself isn’t about pinching pennies. In the rising visible mending movement, it’s about refusing to treat everything as disposable. “The lightbulb moment for me was realizing I could make mending a creative act,” says Katrina Rodabaugh, textile artist and author of Mending Matters. “I was less worried about ruining my textiles and more interested to see how I could be resourceful, make a creative statement and keep my clothes out of the landfill.”

For patching jeans:
Sewing kit with needle, thread and safety pins

For headphone cable repair:
Soldering kit

Published: February 17, 2026, 8:15 pm

Colbert on Kristi Noem: ‘Everyone can’t wait to tell a reporter how awful you are’

The late-night host discussed political scandal, Obama’s alien claims and Maha teaming up with Mike Tyson

With Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel off air for the Presidents’ Day holiday, Stephen Colbert focused his monologue on a Kristi Noem scandal and Maha’s new suggested way to enjoy vegetables.

Published: February 17, 2026, 4:55 pm

‘Food porn’: are sexy meal pics ruining the restaurant industry?

Swanky eateries are attracting an influx of influencers - whereas those that produce less varied and photogenic fare are struggling

Name: Food porn.

Age: Entered common parlance around the 1980s – Rosalind Coward used the term in her 1984 book Female Desire (one of its earliest documented uses).

Published: February 17, 2026, 4:19 pm

Cardboard crazy! Scavenger genius Shigeru Ban on building cathedrals and quake shelters with paper

From high-end boutiques to housing in disaster zones with beer-crate foundations, the Japanese architect creates with things people throw away. What will his distillery in whisky’s holy land look like?

‘I don’t like waste,” says Shigeru Ban. It’s a simple statement – yet it encapsulates everything about the Japanese architect’s work. He takes materials others might overlook or discard – from cardboard tubes to beer crates, styrofoam to shipping containers – and subjects them to a kind of alchemy, refining rough edges and transforming fragility into sturdiness.

The outcome is a perpetually ingenious and curiously poetic scavenger architecture that finds beauty and purpose in the everyday. From high-end boutiques to housing for refugees, Ban’s buildings blur the lines between eastern and western design traditions, between the luxurious and the ordinary, and between what constitutes a temporary building and permanent one.

Published: February 17, 2026, 4:16 pm

Steve McQueen on working with Robert Duvall: ‘He was the rock. He brought gravity’

Duvall was cast as politician Tom Mulligan in McQueen’s 2018 thriller Widows: ‘He was nervous. I was gobsmacked,’ the director recalls. ‘That’s a sign of a great artist’

He must have been 88 or 89 when he did Widows. He came on the set – this icon – and we got talking, about London. He started telling me about Michael Caine and all these cockney phrases that Michael must have told him. We’re getting on all right – and then all of a sudden, he gets a bit annoyed. It got to a point where I didn’t really understand what was going on, as we’d been having a good time. It turned out he was nervous. He was as nervous as Cynthia Erivo was, whose first ever film role it was. And I was gobsmacked – he’s been doing this for I don’t know how long, back to the 1960s, and then I realised that, for him, it’s brand new every time.

That’s a sign of a great artist: he doesn’t rely on what he’s done before he’s going into it. He was a veteran, a legend, and yet he was nervous. And then, you know, we got into the groove and then it was fine. It’s just like what I imagine a football player goes through: you’re thinking about the match, getting wound up, and once you’re on the field, well, it’s, let’s get on with it. And that was Robert. Once the engines were warmed up, he was away.

Published: February 17, 2026, 4:37 pm

Abandon shipment: how an Amazon van got marooned on the UK’s ‘most dangerous path’

Driver reportedly checked with base and was told to continue when GPS directed van on to Essex mudflats

People thought they were looking at an AI image: an Amazon delivery van half-submerged at the mouth of the Thames estuary where it meets the North Sea. “I thought someone had just knocked up a photograph,” says local guide Kevin Brown about first seeing it online.

It turned out the image was genuine, and it proliferated. There was something delightfully primordial about it – such a dominant sight of modern street life, just out there on the mud, vulnerable and surrounded by nothingness. Banter followed, images of an Amazon package floating in sea water: Amazon has made your delivery.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:01 pm

‘Loaded’ water is hyped as a secret to hydration. But adding electrolytes is merely time down the drain | Antiviral

The average person does not need to be adding electrolytes to their water

• Read more in the Antiviral series

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Attitudes towards hydration have become another fault line in the generational divide: while the giant “emotional support” water bottle is ubiquitous among gen Z, those of writer Ian McEwan’s vintage find the modern obsession with hydration “deranged”. McEwan and his ilk will be even more perplexed then that even those guzzling from their Stanley Cups throughout the day are being told they are still not sufficiently hydrating themselves.

Influencers are telling their followers they “don’t understand what hydration is” if they’re not adding electrolytes such as sodium and chloride (salt) as well as magnesium and potassium to their water to help their cells “hold on to and use” it. Often spruiking the sachets wellness companies are selling, they claim these fancy salt formulations are essential to avoid migraines and muscle cramps, anxiety and mood swings. Some TikTokers are adding these sachets alongside other ingredients such as coloured ice cubes, edible glitter and fruit into the aforementioned massive cup in a trend known as “loaded water”.

Published: February 17, 2026, 8:20 pm

Forget Maga. Welcome to Mega: Make Empire Great Again | Mehdi Hasan

Marco Rubio arrived at the Munich security conference with a disturbing message for European governments: empire is great

Fresh from toppling the president of Venezuela and taking control of the world’s largest oil reserves, the Trump administration’s top diplomat arrived at the Munich security conference on Saturday with a rather new and very disturbing message for European governments.

Empire is great. Empire is back. Empire is American.

Mehdi Hasan is the editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo

Published: February 17, 2026, 3:00 pm

Analog is back, and my millennial heart couldn’t be happier | Tayo Bero

When daily life feels like a black hole of apps and feeds, it’s no surprise we crave the intimacy of physical media

Usually, my handbag is a medley of digital devices and life essentials – my phone, iPad, chargers, keys, tampons. But lately, you’re likely to also find a half-done newspaper crossword, a ton of stationery, the book I’ve restarted three times, and whatever scraps and trinkets I’ve picked up throughout the day to put in my scrapbook.

Analog is back, and it feels like we need it more than ever. In a world where getting just about anything done means being sucked into a digital black hole of apps, sign-up forms, harrowing social media feeds and carnivorous advertisers, it’s no surprise that we keep reaching back for the comfort of the physical: Polaroids, vinyl records, real birthday cards. It all helps us slow down and appreciate a world where not everything is online.

Published: February 17, 2026, 1:00 pm

A historic force to be reckoned with, a giant to be mourned. Our panel pays tribute to the Rev Jesse Jackson

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

Published: February 17, 2026, 3:09 pm

ICE holds people in disgusting conditions. Now it’s turning warehouses into camps | Moira Donegan

The Trump administration has bought warehouses across the US that could hold thousands. But resistance is growing

There is a vast building, reportedly the size of seven football fields, in Surprise, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix; ICE bought it for $70m. Another building, along the southern border in San Antonio, Texas, was valued at $37m; it’s 640,000 sq ft. In January, ICE bought a warehouse in Upper Bern Township, Pennsylvania, not far outside of Philadelphia, for $87.4m. In Williamsport, Maryland, outside Hagerstown, the cost of a facility on a nearly 54-acre plot was $102m.

These are massive, industrial spaces, built for holding goods to be shipped elsewhere. Warehouses are drafty and difficult to heat, hard-floored and high-ceilinged, not meant for human habitation. But the Trump administration is aiming to convert them into vast detention camps for immigrants. Some of the buildings could house as many as 9,000 people at a time. The rapid slew of new warehouse purchases by deportation agencies brings to mind the words of the ICE director, Todd Lyons, who told a conference last year that he wanted the effort to operate “like Amazon Prime, for human beings”.

Published: February 17, 2026, 11:00 am

Katherine Ryan has had a facelift at 42. Why do I feel betrayed? | Polly Hudson

I’m a fan of the comedian and her decision initially made me feel like a haggard loser. But famous women are not obliged to act according to other people’s wishes

Katherine Ryan’s podcast is called Telling Everybody Everything, and she does. The comedian is honest to a fault: her comments are regularly reported out of context to create clickbait news stories that give people the wrong idea of what she meant and of her as a human, but she doesn’t stop. Her commitment to truth, especially in the celebrity world she inhabits, is as unusual as it is admirable. Topics others lie about – by omission or openly – she fronts up to as a default setting. Such as cosmetic surgery.

On her most recent podcast episode, she confirmed that the operation she told listeners she’d had in December – not revealing the details because it could potentially become a work project – was a full facelift. Ryan is 42. (Side note: does this mean it won’t be a TV show? If so, big mistake. Huge.)

Published: February 17, 2026, 4:41 pm

A man pushed me in the street, he wanted to teach me a lesson. Is that OK now? | Lucy Pasha-Robinson

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.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:00 am

Lindsey Vonn back in US for treatment but ‘not yet able to stand’ after Olympic crash

• American fractured tibia in downhill last week

• Vonn was initially treated in Italy for injuries

Lindsey Vonn is back home in the US to continue treatment after she broke her leg during the Winter Olympic downhill.

“Haven’t stood on my feet in over a week… been in a hospital bed immobile since my race. And although I’m not yet able to stand, being back on home soil feels amazing,” Vonn posted on X with an American flag emoji. “Huge thank you to everyone in Italy for taking good care of me.”

Published: February 17, 2026, 1:41 pm

Swiss broadcaster pulls Olympic commentary questioning presence of Israeli bobsledder

• RTS commentator critical of Adam Edelman

• Edelman dismisses ‘diatribe’ during bobsleigh run

The Swiss broadcaster Radio Television Suisse said it had pulled from its website the commentary of an Olympic bobsleigh run in which one reporter questioned at length the presence of an Israeli athlete at the Games because of his alleged support for Israel’s actions in the Gaza war.

The commentary on RTS was aired throughout one of the runs of the Israelis Adam Edelman and Chen Menachem in the two-man bobsleigh event on Monday.

Published: February 17, 2026, 4:35 pm

Russian woman carried Ukraine team placard at Winter Olympics opening ceremony

• Anastasia Kucherova has been living in Milan for 14 years

• ‘It’s important to show not all people think the same way’

The woman who carried the Ukrainian team placard at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony was a Russian living in Milan, who chose to perform a small act of resistance to show her support for Ukraine.

Anastasia Kucherova, an architect who has been living in Milan for 14 years, was unrecognisable in a hooded silver puffer coat, with her eyes also covered with dark glasses.

Published: February 17, 2026, 9:14 am

Italian biathlete returns to Olympic squad after blaming doping positive on Nutella

• Rebecca Passler may feature in women’s relay

• 24-year-old tested positive for letrozole in January

The Italian biathlete Rebecca Passler rejoined her team at the Winter Olympics on Monday after a successful appeal against a suspension handed out before the Milano Cortina Games for an alleged doping violation.

Passler began training in the bright sunshine at the Antholz-Anterselva Biathlon Arena on Monday afternoon, firing off shots in bunches of five on the range as her coaches watched intently.

Published: February 16, 2026, 2:14 pm

Benfica v Real Madrid, Monaco v PSG, and more: Champions League – live

⚽ Champions League updates from the first-leg matches
⚽ Live scores | Follow us over on Bluesky | And email Scott

The free kick is just to the right of the Juve box. Gabriel Sara whips it in viciously. All Davinson Sánchez has to do is tickle the ball with his eyebrow to send it across Michele Di Gregorio and into the top left. He couldn’t miss! Sara put that on a plate, a world-class delivery. And the hosts respond to Juve’s turnaround with one of their own. What a match this is!

Galatasaray 2-2 Juventus. Juan Cabal brings down Barış Alper Yılmaz, flying down the right, just to the side of the box. Cabal goes into the book, and nearly earns a second booking by pawing at the referee’s arm, Danny Makkelie telling him to get his hands off in angry fashion. And from the resulting free kick …

Published: February 17, 2026, 8:45 pm

LA mayor calls for Casey Wasserman to step down as Olympics chair over Epstein ties

• LA 2028 committee voted last week to keep Wasserman

• Emails with Ghislaine Maxwell were revealed in files

Pressure is building on Casey Wasserman, the head of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics organizing team, after the city’s mayor urged him to leave over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend.

LA mayor Karen Bass told CNN late on Monday that “my opinion is that he should step down” despite Wasserman getting support last week from the LA 2028 organizing board to stay.

Published: February 17, 2026, 3:11 pm

Tiger Woods weighs offer to captain 2027 US Ryder Cup team

• ‘I’m trying to figure out if I can actually do this’

• Woods says he could play in this year’s Masters

Tiger Woods has confirmed he has been asked to captain the US team at Ryder Cup next year. Woods, who has not played competitively since the 2024 Open Championship, has also semi-remarkably left the door open to teeing up in the Masters this year.

With the US still reeling from defeat by Europe at Bethpage in September, thoughts have turned towards attempts to reclaim the Ryder Cup in Ireland. Woods is the PGA of America’s first choice as captain. The 50-year-old will determine whether he believes he can commit sufficiently to the role.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:50 pm

‘I’m trying to expand what it means to be a skier’: Mallory Duncan on jazz, freedom and the mountains

The Californian once had ambitions of winning gold at the Winter Olympics. But now he is more interested in what skiing can do for the soul

Growing up in the Hayward Hills, just south of Oakland, California, Mallory Duncan lived a hybrid lifestyle throughout his childhood. Weekdays were spent at school, avoiding homework, disrupting class and getting in trouble. Weekends at Alpine Meadows, a ski resort on the north-west shores of Lake Tahoe, were for jumping off cliffs and skiing powder with friends. Every Sunday he would have dinner at his grandad’s house, watch football and listen to jazz.

“I’ve come to accept that I don’t always fit into the ski industry,” says Duncan, a professional skier, award-winning film-maker, entrepreneur and saxophonist. “I live in Portland and love the city life, music and the integration of art into my work. Being exposed to many different types of experiences helps me be more creative in everything I do.”

Published: February 17, 2026, 11:00 am

Emma Hayes strikes balance of experience and youth for USWNT’s SheBelieves Cup roster

• Rodman, Thompson and Girma feature in 26-player team

• US will face Argentina, Canada and Colombia in March

Emma Hayes has struck a balance of experience and rising young talent in her squad for the 2026 SheBelieves Cup. The friendly competition will pit the US women against Argentina, Canada and Colombia in early March.

This year marks the first time that teams can select 26 players for their SheBelieves squad, although each coach must determine 23 players who will be available for each game.

Published: February 17, 2026, 4:03 pm

‘They were like bombs’: Helenio Herrera’s little white pills kept Inter’s players buzzing

In an extract from his book, Richard Fitzpatrick reveals in the early 1960s the grand Italian club was equipped for doping like ‘a small hospital’

The quantity of drugs floating around the campus at Inter in the early 1960s meant the club was equipped like “a small hospital”, to borrow an expression used about the doping culture at Juventus in the 1990s. Inter’s coach Helenio Herrera – or “HH”, as he was known in the world of football – used the players on the youth team as “guinea pigs” for his drug experiments, according to Ferruccio Mazzola, who was on the books at Inter’s academy at the time (and a younger brother of Sandro Mazzola, one of the team’s star players).

“I can describe the effects of those white tablets,” he wrote in a confessional memoir. He said he couldn’t sleep after taking HH’s pills. The hallucinations left him like a fish thrown up on the bank of a river. “I was shaking all over. I looked like an epileptic. I was scared. Also, the effect lasted for days and was followed by a sudden, tremendous tiredness.”

Published: February 17, 2026, 8:00 am

Dolphins cut star receiver Tyreek Hill to free up $23m in salary cap space

• Five-time All-Pro suffered season-ending ACL injury

• Miami had signed Hill to $120m extension in 2022

• Pass rusher Bradley Chubb also cut in flurry of moves

The Miami Dolphins are releasing star wide receiver Tyreek Hill in a cost-cutting move, multiple outlets reported Monday.

Releasing Hill, an eight-time Pro Bowl wide receiver who turns 32 on 1 March, will save the Dolphins $22.8m against the 2026 salary cap, per ESPN.

Published: February 16, 2026, 6:02 pm

Arsenal announce rise in season-ticket prices for fifth consecutive season

• Arsenal Supporters’ Trust ‘disappointed’ by increase

• Club also confirm safe standing at Clock End next year

Arsenal have announced that season-ticket prices will rise for a fifth consecutive season, with the cost of a ticket for the most dedicated fans rising by an average of 3.9%.

The Premier League leaders, who face Wolves at Molineux on Wednesday, say they have made the decision as part of a continued push towards “financial stability” and confirmed that safe standing would be introduced to the Clock End next season, after consultation with supporters.

Published: February 17, 2026, 5:36 pm

New Mexico approves truth commission on alleged Jeffrey Epstein ranch abuse

Lawmakers say the panel will compel testimony to uncover what happened at Epstein’s Zorro ranch and who knew

New Mexico has approved a “truth commission” to investigate abuse on Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch outside Santa Fe, amid ongoing calls for transparency about the late sex-offender’s crimes.

The move by legislators on Monday follows the justice department’s release of millions of investigative documents into Epstein last month, which has renewed interest into the financier’s Zorro ranch.

Published: February 17, 2026, 3:37 pm

DNA from glove in Nancy Guthrie abduction investigation yields no leads

No database match for sample found two miles from home offers as search for TV host’s mother enters third week

DNA found on a glove about two miles from Nancy Guthrie’s house did not result in any leads on the case, officials confirmed on Tuesday.

Unknown male DNA was found on a glove that resembled one worn by Guthrie’s abductor in the surveillance video from the night of the 84-year-old’s disappearance, the FBI said on Sunday.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:33 pm

ICE cannot re-detain Kilmar Ábrego García, judge rules

Case became focal point for immigration after he was deported to El Salvador where he faces gang threats

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cannot re-detain Kilmar Ábrego García because a 90-day detention period has expired and the government has no viable plan for deporting him, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

The Salvadorian national’s case has become a focal point in the immigration debate after he was mistakenly deported to his home country last year. Since his return, he has been fighting a second deportation to a series of African countries proposed by Department of Homeland Security officials.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:35 pm

Palantir moves headquarters to Miami amid tech’s growing retreat to Florida

Data analytics firm moves from Denver after about six years and joins host of businesses relocating to south Florida

Palantir announced on Tuesday that it has moved its headquarters to Miami from Denver. The data analytics company, criticized for its role in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, joins a host of other businesses and billionaires that recently moved to Florida in search of a more business-friendly climate.

Palantir’s move across state lines comes after its chair, Peter Thiel, announced on 31 December that he opened a Miami office for his private investment firm. Thiel already has a mansion in Miami Beach. The company, previously headquartered in Palo Alto, announced the move on X but did not provide further details or respond to a request for comment. Palantir’s stay in Colorado lasted about six years; the company exited California in August 2020 – with its CEO, Alex Karp, citing disagreements with the state’s values.

Published: February 17, 2026, 8:20 pm

‘I feel like I’m in a financial prison’: Trump Wall Street plan puts ‘mom and pop’ investors at risk

Trump says everyday Americans deserve a chance to buy higher-risk ‘alternative’ investments. Critics say this could lead to big losses for small investors

On a summer day in 2018, Cathy Shubert, then 58, hopped in her Toyota Rav 4 and drove to the Jacksonville, Florida, office of Mario Payne, an investment adviser at the financial services firm Raymond James. She had a lot on her mind. She was not happy with her job at a local bank branch and wanted to see if Payne thought she had saved enough to retire.

“He said what I was retiring with would carry me and everything would be wonderful,” she remembered. “I went home and told my husband, ‘Oh my God, I want you to go meet him.’”

Published: February 17, 2026, 11:00 am

Mexican president challenges UK asylum given to woman accused of corruption

Karime Macías, ex-wife of a state governor, is wanted for allegedly pilfering nearly £5m of public money and now lives in London

The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has said her government will send a formal letter of complaint to officials in the United Kingdom after the wife of a former governor wanted for allegedly pilfering £4.8 million of public money was granted asylum in Britain.

Karime Macías, ex-wife of jailed former Veracruz governor Javier Duarte, is wanted for extradition to Mexico for allegedly siphoning millions from the state welfare office, but has reportedly spent the last few years in London.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:59 pm

Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton among those to condemn Berlinale’s ‘silence’ on Gaza

At least 80 film-makers and stars sign open letter after German festival jury president Wim Wenders says they should keep out of politics

More than 80 current and former participants of the Berlinale, including Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton and Adam McKay have signed an open letter condemning the festival’s “silence” on Gaza.

It comes after the film festival was swept up in what it called a “media storm” over the alleged sidelining of political discourse at the event.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:30 pm

Four Chagossians return to islands in attempt to stop British transfer to Mauritius

Group says they intend to establish permanent settlement but Mauritius attorney general calls their move a ‘publicity stunt’

Four Chagos Islanders have landed on one of the archipelago’s atolls to establish what they say will be a permanent settlement, in an attempt to complicate a British plan to transfer the territory to Mauritius.

The Mauritius attorney general said the move was a publicity stunt designed to create conflict over a 2025 agreement with Britain on handing over sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is opposed by some Chagossians who accuse Mauritius of decades of neglect. Mauritius has denied the accusations.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:19 pm

Early voting begins for high-stakes Texas primary elections

Democrats, who haven’t won statewide race since 1994, aim to gain ground with rising stars as Republicans clash between incumbent and embattled Maga ally

A Texas-sized showdown is brewing deep in the heart of the largest red state in the US. As early voting begins on Tuesday for the Lone Star state’s 3 March primaries, Republicans and Democrats alike face a high-stakes choice that could set the stage for one of the fiercest Senate races of the 2026 midterm cycle.

At the center of the fractious Republican contest is a clash between the party’s old guard and a Maga culture warrior, with four-term incumbent John Cornyn, a conservative fixture of Senate leadership locked in the fight of his political career against the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton.

Published: February 17, 2026, 1:11 pm

‘Daunting but doable’: Europe urged to prepare for 3C of global heating

Advisory board member says Europe already paying price for lack of preparation but adapting is ‘not rocket science’

Keeping Europe safe from extreme weather “is not rocket science”, a top researcher has said, as the EU’s climate advisory board urges countries to prepare for a catastrophic 3C of global heating.

Maarten van Aalst, a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC), said the continent was already “paying a price” for its lack of preparation but that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit”.

Published: February 16, 2026, 11:01 pm

‘It’s betrayal’: Shetland’s scallop fishers brace for arrival of UK’s largest salmon farm

Huge project by Norwegian-owned Scottish Sea Farms gets go-ahead amid concerns over the environmental cost of fish farming and threat to traditional way of life

At Collafirth, north Shetland, Sydney Johnson is unloading two-dozen bags of scallops by throwing them over his head like medicine balls to the pier above. Johnson, who has just finished a 10-hour shift on his boat, the Golden Shore, is concerned that plans for a new salmon farm will put fishers like him and his two sons out of business.

“They say it’s just one farm,” says Johnson. “But it’s one farm more. There’s only so much water and we’re at saturation point.”

Published: February 17, 2026, 12:00 pm

Cyprus appeals to residents to cut water use by two minutes a day amid drought

Island’s reservoirs hit record lows even before tourist season starts as Cypriots are warned ‘every drop counts’

• Europe live – latest updates

Authorities in Cyprus have urged residents to reduce their water intake by 10% – the equivalent of two minutes’ use of running water each day – as Europe’s most south-easterly nation grapples with a once-in-a century drought.

The appeal, announced alongside a €31m (£27m) package of emergency measures, comes as reservoirs hit record lows with little prospect of replenishment before the tourist season starts.

Published: February 16, 2026, 2:49 pm

Rhode Island ice rink shooting may have been tied to ‘family dispute’, officials say

Shooting at hockey game in Pawtucket that left three dead and three injured may have also been a ‘targeted event’

The shooting at a Rhode Island high school hockey game that left three dead and three injured may have been a “targeted event” stemming from a “family dispute”, officials have said, with local media reporting that one of the victims was the suspect’s son.

The Pawtucket police chief, Tina Goncalves, confirmed the suspect was also among the three people who died.

Published: February 17, 2026, 6:34 pm

Manhattan commuters urged to work from home for weeks amid rail upgrade

Extensive works on key bridge in New Jersey – part of $16bn Gateway project – will disrupt rail services into New York

New Jersey’s transit authority has urged commuters into Manhattan to work from home for up to a month if possible because of a huge railroad upgrade that is expected to upend travel to New York City from Tuesday morning.

The national rail operator, Amtrak, will move some train traffic on to a new bridge, according to the New York Times, in a travel-snarling project that is expected to last until 15 March and will result in extensive delays and fewer trains under the Hudson River.

Published: February 17, 2026, 6:02 pm

Surging prediction markets face legal backlash in US: ‘Lines have been blurred’

At least 20 federal suits filed against companies like Kalshi and Polymarket as lawmakers call it ‘loophole’ for gambling

State lawmakers and gaming regulators across the US are escalating their fight against prediction markets, arguing that the fast-growing platforms are “basically gambling but with another name”.

At least 20 federal lawsuits have been filed nationwide, disputing whether companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket should be treated as federally regulated financial exchanges, as they maintain, or as gambling operations that should be regulated like state-licensed sportsbooks.

Published: February 17, 2026, 12:00 pm

Hyatt chair Thomas Pritzker steps down over Epstein links

Billionaire says he exercised ‘terrible judgment’ in maintaining contact with sex offender and Ghislaine Maxwell

The billionaire Thomas Pritzker has stepped down as executive chair of the hotel chain Hyatt, after revelations over his ties with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Pritzker said he had exercised “terrible judgment” in maintaining contact with the sex offender and Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 for her role in recruiting and grooming underage girls.

Published: February 17, 2026, 11:02 am

Warner Bros gives Paramount seven days to make ‘best and final’ offer

Waiver from Netflix allows film company to engage with rival bidder if it could lead to a ‘reasonably superior offer’

• Business live – latest updates

Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) has reopened talks with Paramount Skydance, giving the company seven days to table its best and final offer and top an existing agreement with Netflix.

WBD has so far stuck to its binding agreement with Netflix and rejected a series of sweetened offers from Paramount, resulting in the company pursuing a hostile $108.4bn (£76.8bn) takeover directly with shareholders

Published: February 17, 2026, 3:42 pm

'In Israel's eyes, we are terrorists' | In search of Palestine: episode 1 – video

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?

Published: February 17, 2026, 9:46 am

‘Deliberate targeting of vital body parts’: X-rays taken after Iran protests expose extent of catastrophic injuries

Exclusive: Expert analysis of images from one hospital suggests severe trauma to the face, chest and genitals was caused by metal birdshot and high-calibre bullets

Across the planes of Anahita’s* face, white dots shine like a constellation. Some gleam from inside the sockets of her eyes, others are scattered over the young woman’s chin, forehead, cheekbones. A few float over the dark expanse of her brain.

Each dot represents a metal sphere, about 2-5mm in size, fired from the barrel of a shotgun and revealed by the X-ray camera for a CT scan. Shot from a distance, the projectiles, known as “birdshot”, spray widely, losing some of their momentum. At close range, they can crack bone, blast through the soft tissue of the face, and easily pierce the eyeball’s delicate globe. Anahita, who is in her early 20s, has lost at least one eye, possibly both.

Published: February 17, 2026, 6:00 am

A binge and a prayer: Italian monks told to avoid Netflix and social media

Prior of hermitage says digital technologies are designed to be addictive and present ‘challenge for monastic life’

The prior of a hermitage in Tuscany has urged monks living in the secluded retreat to avoid the use of social media and streaming services, arguing that their rooms are sacred places for prayer and “not for Netflix or other platforms”.

Father Matteo Ferrari, the prior general of the Camaldolese congregation and of the Camaldoli monastery and hermitage in Arezzo, Tuscany, said such digital technologies were “specifically designed to create addiction” and “should absolutely be avoided”.

Published: February 17, 2026, 4:01 pm

‘It’s a protest movement behind windows’: tribute to the Iranians risking their lives to film dissent

Inspired by the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising that gripped Iran in 2022, two film students created a documentary, Memories of a Window, about onlookers who anonymously record footage as proof of state violence

Footage that went viral from Iran in late 2022 showed a woman being shot by security forces while capturing a bloody crackdown on anti-government protests on her phone. The victim’s last words were: “Film it!”

Mehraneh Salimian graduated from art school the same day, and that final wish guided her and her partner, Amin Pakparvar, to make their documentary short premiering at the Berlin film festival on Tuesday. Memories of a Window is dedicated to the slain woman, Shirin Alizadeh, and the role of amateur videos in recording and emboldening dissent in Iran.

Published: February 17, 2026, 2:52 pm

Frederick Wiseman brought a uniquely empowering scale to his immersive documents of ordinary life

His maximal studies of US institutions such as welfare bureaucracy and an intensive care unit were packed with human detail and free from explicit commentary

• Frederick Wiseman, prolific documentary film-maker, dies aged 96

The documentary form is often thought to be governed by a manageable feature-length high concept: the story of a person, an institution, an historical episode. The subject itself and the film’s attitude towards it, its editorial slant, are habitually plain enough and the procedure is metonymic: the camera focuses on a part, and the whole is illuminated by implication. Often they have a sexed-up, quirky story to tell, which might mean a selective and sneakily tendentious approach to editing the material. But that is not quite the case with the films of Frederick Wiseman. His colossal, immersive movies about ordinary people and ordinary lives enclosed in some kind of institution, and characterised by the absence of voiceovers, intertitles or the off-camera directorial presence of the interviewing voice, are not amenable to the elevator pitch; they are the entire elevator shaft itself, and the whole building that houses it.

Whereas epic-length films might be generally held to be appropriate for big and distinctively historical subjects, such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah or Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, Wiseman applies the maximal approach to static cross-section studies of sometimes less obviously momentous topics such as Paris’s Crazy Horse nightclub or the French restaurant Le Bois Sans Feuilles. However his greatest works are top-to-bottom body-politic pictures of public institutions, huge, intricate constructions of unglamour; his movies themselves were virtual institutions, movie-edifices mirroring their subjects in architectural form and indeed almost always funded by one particular public institution: PBS, the Public Broadcasting System.

Published: February 17, 2026, 11:48 am

‘The rallying cry of the rich and horrible’: the song that TV villains love to sing

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.

Published: February 17, 2026, 5:00 am

Dear Beautiful Beloved review – a powerful message from the Ukrainian frontline

Film-maker Juri Rechinsky documents moments of kindness and compassion among the death and grief that surrounds evacuation and forensics teams

“My son, my sunshine, my beloved child.” A mother is overwhelmed by grief as she strokes the face of her son, a soldier lying in a coffin, killed on the frontline. Another week, another Ukrainian film about the terrible toll of the war. This documentary from film-maker Juri Rechinsky follows two evacuation missions in Ukraine: teams of volunteers transporting the elderly and frail from their homes to safety away from the front; and the operation to return the remains of fallen soldiers to their families. It’s a painful film, haunted by death, but also tender and moving, with a powerful message that compassion, love and resilience can be acts of defiance.

It opens with the evacuation of the elderly from their homes to a processing centre in a former hospital (where one volunteer addresses them “comrade grannies”). From here they will be relocated to more permanent housing. As she prepares to leave her flat, one woman frets: “My hair is a mess.” An English volunteer called Elizabeth is all gentleness, smiles and patience as she clasps the woman’s hands in her own. Rechinsky also films women and children getting on to trains leaving Ukraine, tugging along wheelie cases, babies bundled into their warmest onesies.

Published: February 17, 2026, 9:00 am

Redux Redux review – multiverse hopping child-abduction thriller keeps things simple

The McManus brothers offer a stylish new spin on the time loop genre in this tale of a woman trying to stop the abduction and murder of her daughter

Perhaps it’s the general obsession with optimising every aspect of life that’s driven the glut of time-loop thrillers in recent years, with the likes of Predestination, Looper and Edge of Tomorrow et al. The McManus brothers’ Redux Redux is a decently handled example from the low-budget end. It traps a bereaved mother and a bratty tearaway in a Sisyphean revenge cycle, playing like an intimate version of Terminator where the credibility of 12-step grief recovery, rather than the future of humanity, is what’s at stake.

Actually, Redux Redux is technically a multiverse film. Hailing from the only universe where multiverse travel has become possible, Irene (played by the directors’ sister Michaela McManus) uses what looks like a banged-up gas boiler to skip between different timelines. But there is one constant: she always ends up murdering Neville (Jeremy Holm), the short-order cook and child-killer who abducted her daughter. She hopes to find the one multiverse where her daughter is still alive. Instead, on her umpteenth payback, she interrupts Neville with 15-year-old Mia (Stella Marcus) cable-tied in his backroom.

Published: February 17, 2026, 1:00 pm

‘It’s a nice surprise to be treated like kings!’ Why are mid-level British indie bands massive in China?

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.

Published: February 17, 2026, 8:38 am

‘I love you twenty-sixty times’: how lyrics written by a three-year-old became tear-inducing viral hits

When Stephen Spencer began setting his daughter’s surreal stories to music, he had 36 followers. Now his banging pop miniatures have been streamed nearly 30m times – and are making parents cry

I’m listening to the latest Stephen Spencer song when suddenly I burst into tears. Was it the falsetto vocals? The swirling harmonies? No, it was the lyrics: “What did Apple-the-Stoola say? He said ‘I love you’ twenty-sixty times.”

Spencer, you see, has a unique lyrical collaborator: his three-year-old daughter. Over the last four months, he has been posting short songs online based on her stream-of-consciousness stories. There’s a smooth soul number about “a regular rabbit, who has regular ponytails just like me”. A song called Funchy the Snow-woman that could fit easily on to a 1975 album, but for its lyrical message about using a litter tray in the forest. And a festive tune about a Christmas cat called Harda Tarda, who hopes that Taja (“a funny way to say Santa”) will bring her “a doggy, a puppy and a ninja-bread man”.

Published: February 16, 2026, 8:00 am

A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot review – a unique memoir by a figure of astonishing power

Pelicot’s riveting account of her ordeal refuses to conform to any agenda but her own

It is a mark of the power and honesty of Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir, A Hymn to Life – a seemingly impossible writing project in which the author must reconcile herself with horrors of which she has no recollection – that in the first 40 pages, the person I felt most angry towards was Pelicot herself. Her ex-husband, Dominique, who will almost certainly be in jail for the rest of his life for drugging and raping his wife and recruiting 50 men over the internet to do likewise, takes his place among the monsters of our age. In his absence, the reader may experience a version of what happened in Gisèle Pelicot’s own family – namely, the misdirection of anger towards her.

I have read enough books by female survivors of male sexual violence to say with confidence that Hymn to Life is unique. Pelicot – she decided to keep her married name in the interests of giving those of her grandchildren who share it a way to be proud rather than ashamed – was 67 when her husband of almost 50 years was arrested in 2020 for upskirting women in a supermarket in Carpentras, a small town in the south-east of France near the couple’s retirement home in the village of Mazan. When the police investigation uncovered a cache of videos and photos in which an unconscious Pelicot was shown being sexually assaulted by scores of men, she entered a nightmare.

Published: February 17, 2026, 12:01 am

Our Better Natures by Sophie Ward review – reimagining Andrea Dworkin

Three women, two real and one fictional, seek social justice in an ambitious novel that explores power in 1970s America

What kind of justice can we have in a world driven by power? The actor turned writer Sophie Ward likes to fuel her novels with philosophical conundrums and set herself complex writerly challenges. Her ingenious, Booker-longlisted Love and Other Thought Experiments was structured around philosophical thought experiments, from Pascal’s Wager to Descartes’ Demon, with a chapter narrated by an ant living inside a character’s brain. The Schoolhouse explored the ethics of self-directed schooling and of policing in a complicated cross-period procedural. Now she turns her attention to questions of justice, freedom and power in the 1970s United States, with a tripartite structure bringing together three women – two real and one imagined.

It’s 1971: the Manson Family have just been found guilty and hundreds of thousands are marching against the Vietnam war. In the Netherlands, 25-year-old Andrea Dworkin escapes her abusive husband and attends a debate between Chomsky and Foucault on justice and power. Back in the US, the poet Muriel Rukeyser throws herself into protesting once again, though her lover, the literary agent Monica McCall, tells her rightly that her health won’t stand it. The third character is loosely based on the family history of Ward’s own Korean-American wife. Phyllis Patterson welcomes her son home to rural Illinois from the army base in South Korea, and attempts to build a relationship with her new Korean daughter-in-law and grandchildren. All three women are testing their own capacity for justice in an unjust world.

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:00 am

More heartache than Hamnet?: Maggie O’Farrell’s best books – ranked!

As her Women’s prize-winning novel heads to the Oscars, we rate the author’s best work – from tales of new motherhood to a life-affirming memoir of mortality

The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she’s actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the protagonist of O’Farrell’s second novel, who is swept off her feet by dashing architect Marcus and in short order moves in with him. Lily takes his assurances that her predecessor Sinead is “no longer with us” to mark a more permanent absence; in fact, Sinead has simply been thrown over, and it is in the details of the collapse of her relationship with Marcus that the novel most engages. Hints of the gothic ghost story deepen one of the main takeaways, which is that Marcus consists almost entirely of red flags.

Published: February 16, 2026, 12:00 pm

Frogs for Watchdogs by Seán Farrell review – about a boy

A charming child’s-eye view of rural Ireland

There’s a particular energy to novels written from the point of view of small children. Humour, of course, in the things the child misinterprets; pathos in the things they feel they must keep hidden; jeopardy in the dangers we can see, and they cannot. As any relative or babysitter can attest, even the sweetest child can become mind-numbingly dull when they’re all the company one has, so there’s a skill to charm without boring. The other skill is to find ways of enabling the reader to read over the child’s shoulder, as it were, to piece together for themselves the adult dramas to which a child’s natural egotism, or simple innocence, blinds them.

In 1988, the longsuffering mother in Seán Farrell’s first novel, Frogs for Watchdogs, is stranded. This Englishwoman has had a boy and a girl with a handsome rogue of an Irish actor, but he has walked out on them. Asked to leave a commune unsuited to children, skint, too proud, perhaps, to return to the protection of well-heeled parents in England, she rents a farmhouse on the cheap in the deep countryside of County Meath, where she can grow vegetables, raise hens and a few sheep, and attempt to scrabble a living as a healer. (From the multiple dilutions her boy witnesses her perform, her fairly batty practice would seem to be some form of homeopathy with new age elements thrown in.) While her doubtless appalled parents insist on sending the oldest child, a forthright girl called B, to an English boarding school, B’s younger brother spends months running happily feral. Once he is eight, he will be old enough to follow her and be tamed and anglicised.

Frogs for Watchdogs by Seán Farrell is published by John Murray (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Published: February 16, 2026, 9:00 am

‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront

Multiple game creators describe ineffective moderation on the platform, resulting in unchecked hatred in forums and targeted campaigns of negative ‘anti-woke’ reviews

For years, the gaming storefront Steam has let abuse and bigotry pass through its moderation, according to players and developers who use it. The platform is now host to reams of content that violate its own guidelines.

According to developers who spoke with the Guardian, abuse – particularly directed towards transgender creators – is a fact of life on the platform. “Everyone is at one another’s throats all the time in reviews, discussions, forums, anywhere you can possibly find it on Steam,” says content creator and Steam curator Bri “BlondePizza” Moore. “It ensures no one is safe on the platform; developers and consumers alike.”

Published: February 16, 2026, 10:00 am

Robert Duvall was a vigorous and subtle actor who always performed with passion and conviction

From his steely self-effacing consigliere in The Godfather to his surf-crazed Wagner enthusiast in Apocalypse Now, just to see him on screen made me smile

• Robert Duvall, Apocalypse Now and Godfather star, dies aged 95

Robert Duvall was a foghorn-voiced bull of pure American virility, and he put energy and heart into the movies for more than 60 years. Just to see him on screen was enough to make me smile. That handsome face and head gave him the look of a Roman emperor from Waxahachie, Texas or a three-star general playing the country music circuit. Duvall was famously bald (the rare roles needing hairpieces always looked artificial on him) and so he looked the same age almost all his acting life: forever in his vigorous fortysomething prime – though often playing figures complicated with tenderness and woundedness.

Duvall had a long, rich career, starting out with notable roles in To Kill a Mockingbird, M*A*S*H, The Conversation and Network, but it was destiny to be chiefly known for two sensational and very different roles given to him by Francis Ford Coppola at either end of the 1970s. One was Tom Hagen, the quiet, self-effacing consigliere to the Corleone crime family in The Godfather (1972), with a complex relationship both with the Don himself, played by Marlon Brando, and his youngest son and heir, the coldly imperious Michael, played by Al Pacino. And the second was his extraordinary turn as the surf-crazed Wagner enthusiast Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979), who with his “Air Mobile” division of helicopters leads a gigantic attack on a Vietnamese village in broad daylight, with speakers blaring The Ride of the Valkyries – in theory to airlift Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen, and his boatful of men into the river’s strategic entry point. But all too clearly, it’s because he just wants an excuse for a whooping and hollering cavalry attack.

Published: February 16, 2026, 6:25 pm

Wuthering slights: why are film-makers afraid of casting Yorkshire actors as Cathy Earnshaw?

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.

Published: February 17, 2026, 9:03 am

Pints, prayers and horse racing on the beach: Martin Parr in rural Ireland – in pictures

The iconic photographer believed his two years shooting horse fairs, pubs and dance halls in the 1980s had been overlooked. A new exhibition aims to put that right

Published: February 17, 2026, 7:00 am

‘It was spooky’: folk singer Olivia Chaney on how a song reflecting her own Brontë-ish love triangle wound up in Wuthering Heights

Offsetting Charli xcx, Chaney’s take on 19th-century ballad Dark Eyed Sailor accompanies Margot Robbie on the moors – but it’s just a tiny part of her culture-crossing, history-vaulting musical catalogue

An hour into Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, Margot Robbie is in a gauzy wedding dress, gliding forlornly across the moors towards the man her character feels she has to marry. A lone female English voice appears to accompany her, high and pure against the buzzing drone of a harmonium, singing about a woman roaming alone, and a man who, for “seven years, left the land”, before his eventual return.

Long before Emerald Fennell found Olivia Chaney’s version of 19th-century ballad the Dark Eyed Sailor online, Chaney was preparing to sing it for a 2013 live session on Mark Radcliffe’s BBC Radio 2 folk show, in the midst of her own Brontë-esque love triangle. “I was at the beginning of my relationship with the man who is now my husband and the father of my two children – he nearly married someone else, and I nearly had kids with someone else.”

Published: February 16, 2026, 3:33 pm

The Norwich pigeon wars: how birds are dividing a UK city

To the local people feeding the growing flock every day, they are ‘perfect’ creatures with beautiful plumage. To others, they are creating a Hitchcockian nightmare – defecating, stealing and spreading disease. But who is right?

At nine o’clock on Saturday morning, Norwich market is only just stirring: shutters are still down and the aisles are quiet. In the nearby Memorial Gardens, however, a large crowd has already gathered: the market’s pigeons are waiting to be fed.

Jenny Coupland arrives on the scene a little later than her usual hour, with a backpack brimming with seed. As she begins doling it out, the birds descend from their perches and cover the ground, pecking furiously. The sun catches their bobbing heads, sending iridescent shimmers across their brown and grey feathers.

Published: February 17, 2026, 5:00 am

The pet I’ll never forget: Otto, the wild, people-loving golden retriever who had 20 volunteer dog walkers

His charm and excitement helped us see the world as he did – full of kindness and joy

When we bought Otto, a golden retriever, a year after the death of our previous dog Bertie, we were sceptical that he could live up to our high expectations. What quickly became apparent, during the routine humiliation of our puppy training classes, was that Otto was a law unto himself.

“He’s not normal” quickly became a stock family phrase, as Otto demonstrated a series of wild, mischievous and outlandish behaviours. During classes, I remember being told euphemistically that he was “wilful” and shamefully resorted to hiding cocktail sausages in my pockets during the final exam to encourage a modicum of civility in him. It just about worked.

Published: February 16, 2026, 11:00 am

The 11 best men’s winter boots, according to stylists, Antarctic workers and a dog musher

Tested in cold climates and wet conditions, these are the boots professionals swear by during the winter

• Nine best winter boots for woman to buy for life

• The best winter gloves are two pairs, actually (and one is hiding at Home Depot)

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With six weeks left of winter, there is still ample time for another snowstorm to derail our weekend brunch plans or outdoor running routine. Unless you have the right footwear.

A good pair of boots lets you venture out while the rest of your neighbors are hibernating indoors, rewatching Friends for the hundredth time. And the best pairs make stomping through slush and snow look stylish.

Published: February 16, 2026, 8:15 pm

Is it true that ... central heating is bad for your skin?

Dry air indoors can cause an inflammatory reaction, yet so can cold, windy outdoor conditions – but turning down the heating and using a moisturising cream can help

‘This is kind of true,” says consultant dermatologist Dr Emma Craythorne. Human skin has evolved to retain water, thanks to a protective barrier on its surface. But that barrier isn’t totally watertight. Water is constantly moving across it, depending on the humidity of the surrounding air.

Skin tends to be most comfortable at a relative humidity of about 40%. When the air around us is drier than that, water is more likely to leave the skin. That matters because the process of water escaping across the skin barrier is mildly inflammatory.

Published: February 16, 2026, 8:00 am

Houseplant hacks: are light meters handy or hopeless?

They are hardly essential, but can act as useful teachers

The problem
Lots of houseplants fail because they aren’t getting enough light. But what does “bright, indirect light” really mean in practice? Light meters and apps promise to turn guesswork into numbers, but are they useful, or just kit for professionals and plant nerds?

The hack
Light meters measure the amount of light hitting a spot. Some are dedicated devices; others are phone apps that use the camera sensor. Instead of guessing whether a corner is bright enough, you measure it and then find the right plant for that spot with more confidence.

Published: February 17, 2026, 10:00 am

The one change that worked: When good things happen, I write them down – and it’s made me more optimistic

Growing up in a turbulent household taught me to expect the worst. Then one day I found £20 in the street and shifted my thinking

Growing up, I was envious of one type of person. It was never the kids who were smarter, sportier or more popular. My awe was reserved for a rarer breed of people: optimists. I was hypersensitive to the ease with which they sailed through exams, social gatherings or teenage milestones with a sunny conviction that things would more or less work out. To me, they were the chosen people. “It’ll be fine,” one such friend would reassure me. “Or you could embarrass yourself,” my mind would purr like a villain. “Be rejected. Fail.”

I was a chronic worrier. A negative Nancy. I couldn’t fathom that people’s brains weren’t hardwired to compulsively fear things might go wrong. I grew up as the eldest daughter in a turbulent household where my father’s moods would plummet quickly and I walked on a knife-edge. Every morning, the second my eyes opened, I would force myself to accept it was going to be a bad day – an act of self-preservation so the rug could never get pulled from under my feet hoping for better. My thinking was that if you always expected the worst, things had a tendency to turn out better than you imagined.

Published: February 16, 2026, 11:00 am

My rookie era: I attempted only the easiest Australian Women’s Weekly birthday cakes. Then came the duck cake

When I shared my attempt online, my duck cake was described as ‘Big Bird on crack’

• Read more summer essentials

I assume no parent aspires to give their offspring an unmemorable and vanilla childhood. I wanted to be a fun mum, creating love-soaked memories and quirky family traditions for my children right from the get-go. I wanted to be Bluey’s parents before Bluey even existed.

The Australian Women’s Weekly birthday cakes were destined to be a pillar of my perfectly imperfect parenting rituals. One child quickly became three, and that iconic recipe book was in constant rotation. In the early years, I would simply choose a cake that matched my very basic baking skills. I also only owned a round tin, so my kids’ early cakes were circle-shaped, or circle-adjacent: the swimming pool (a round cake filled with jelly), the cat (a round cake with ears) and the race track (two round cakes with the centres removed).

Published: February 16, 2026, 2:00 pm

‘The kids don’t get days off. Nor should you’: my secret life as a paedophile hunter on the dark web

US undercover investigator Greg Squire can spend 18 hours a day befriending child sex abusers, to try to identify them and get justice for victims. He reveals the toll the work has taken on him

Greg Squire can never forget the video that opened his eyes to what child sexual abuse could mean. It was a Sunday and he was at his home in New Hampshire, sitting out on his deck, his two young children running around, playing. This was 2008, about a year into Squire’s career as an agent for Homeland Security – he’d been a postman before this – and he reached for his laptop, checked his inbox and saw that the results of an email search warrant for a suspect had come in.

He clicked on a video. A girl was sitting in an adult bed, a child’s picture book beside her. Squire watched as a man came into the frame and began reading it to her. For a moment, it could have been a normal scene – maybe it would be – until the man proceeded to remove the girl’s clothing. Then he raped her. Squire watched her “endure” it – “it looked like her soul left,” he says.

Published: February 17, 2026, 10:00 am

Floating cities of logs: can the ‘lungs of Africa’ survive its exploitation?

The Congo River basin is one of the planet’s most biodiverse ecosystems. But it is also home to a growing population and relentless trade in timber and charcoal

“You can’t be scared of the storms,” says Jean de Dieu Mokuma as the sun sets on the Congo River behind him. “With the current, once your voyage has begun, there is no turning back.” Mokuma, along with his wife Marie-Therese and their two young children, is piloting a cargo of timber downstream lashed on to a precarious raft and tied to a canoe.

Families wake up at dawn on rafts of logs and merchandise that are being transported down the Congo River by boat to Kinshasa, the DRC capital

Published: February 16, 2026, 12:00 pm

US students and professors: tell us if the Epstein files have affected your university

Some universities and colleges have taken action involving faculty or affiliates named in the documents. We want to hear about what’s happening where you study or work

As fallout from the large release of documents connected to Jeffrey Epstein continues, a handful of US universities have taken action against faculty or affiliates named in the files.

At some campuses, professors have been placed under review, research centres closed, conferences cancelled or public explanations issued. Students and staff have responded in different ways, including petitions, open letters and campus forums.

Published: February 17, 2026, 6:34 pm

Gen Z in the US: how are you feeling about your finances?

If you are age 18-29 and live in the US, we’d like to hear from you about the state of your finances and your biggest money concerns

The US economy has been in a tailspin, from rising prices, changing trade policies and the impact of artificial intelligence on the labor market. Polls show many Americans believe their financial security is getting worse and it’s harder to afford major life goals.

Young Americans are no exception. If you are aged 18-29 and live in the US, we’d like to hear from you about the state of your finances and your biggest money concerns.

Published: February 17, 2026, 3:22 pm

Share your tributes and memories of Robert Duvall

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of actor Robert Duvall – whether you met him, or appreciated his work

Robert Duvall, the veteran actor with many roles across film and TV including Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, M*A*S*H and To Kill a Mockingbird, has died aged 95.

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of Robert Duvall – whether you met him, or appreciated his work.

Published: February 17, 2026, 9:47 am

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Published: February 17, 2026, 1:09 pm

Tent painting, sand wrestling and year of the horse: photos of the day – Tuesday

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Published: February 17, 2026, 5:31 pm