Pageantry and trillion-dollar promises reveal how Washington’s loyalties may be tilting toward the Gulf

The White House welcome bestowed on the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was the most lavish of the Trump presidency, and a gaudily clear statement of its foreign policy priorities.

It was billed as a mere working visit, but it was more extravagant than any previous state visit. The president greeted the prince on the south lawn, the White House’s biggest stage. There were uniformed men on horses bearing flags and a flypast of fighter jets.

Struggling with gift ideas? The Guardian’s expert columnists are here to help, with everything from Yotam Ottolenghi’s favourite pans to the only nail polish brand Sali Hughes uses
• 305 best Christmas presents for 2025

Are you in the festive spirit yet? Or, just, well…a bit stressed? This time of year can feel overwhelming, but who better to calm the panic of Christmas gift shopping than the Guardian’s cohort of expert columnists?

Want to know which M&S cardi fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley has had her eye on that gives “very posh”? Or the chocolate bars chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi is obsessed with? Beauty expert Sali Hughes has got the gifts to make Gen Z’s squeal with excitement, while Gynelle Leon selects the perfect present for the person in your life who prefers gardening to a night out.

A pub that wants to be a old-school boozer and a cool restaurant both at the same time

While perched inside what felt like a repurposed bookshelf at the draughty back end of the Shaston Arms, sitting next to the dumb waiter and waiting for the ping to herald the arrival of my £16 plate of red mullet with squid ink rice, I had time to consider yet again the so-called “pub revival” in cool modern hospitality. Old boozers are reclaimed, reloved and restored, and the great tradition of going down the pub is celebrated. The Devonshire in nearby Piccadilly is, of course, the daddy, the Darth Vader of this trend, winning plaudits, TikTok adoration and celebrity fans aplenty. So it’s no wonder that myriad other hospitality operators have cast an eye over their local neglected fleapit and thought: “Let’s buy some Mr Sheen, give that old hovel a polish and start serving duck à l’orange and flourless chocolate tart. It’s all the rage! Gen Z loves it!”

Whether Gen Z really does love anything about the pub experience as it was in the 20th century is debatable, however, because inside these poshed-up spit-and-sawdust boozers, all the phlegm and fag ash has gone – as have the dartboards, pool tables, punch-ups, topless women on KP peanut pub cards and the ever-present bar-fly alcoholic drinking himself yellow while droning on about his marital problems. “It’s a pub just like pubs used to be,” proclaim many of these places, of which the Shaston near Carnaby Street is a great example. But those old pubs had jukeboxes blaring problematic ballads by Tom Jones, and a snug bar with a shag tartan carpet where the womenfolk could nestle with their glass of Dubonnet because we weren’t quite welcome in the saloon bar, and especially not if we asked for a pint.

Reform UK’s leader refuses to answer questions about his abusive behaviour, claiming there’s ‘no evidence’. We talk to victims and witnesses

Nigel Farage has denied – albeit through a spokesperson – that he ever said anything racist or antisemitic when he was a teenager.

The Guardian has spoken to 20 of his contemporaries while at Dulwich College in south London who say otherwise – more than half of them on the record.

A moment of peril demands a new approach – on everything from funding to the BBC charter

• Pat Younge is the chair of the British Broadcasting Challenge

We have not been here before. The BBC is used to coming under pressure from political parties, well-funded pressure groups and powerful newspaper publishers. But the threat of a lawsuit from the US president is unprecedented.

This latest furore is dangerous because it comes at a time when democracy faces an information crisis. The foundations of informed democratic debate are under attack across the globe from a combination of AI-generated deepfakes, hostile state propaganda and algorithms that amplify divisions through social media. We have already seen how Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet, is prepared to use his own social media platform, X, to interfere in the affairs of other countries and exert a chilling influence on democracies.

Pat Younge is the chair of the British Broadcasting Challenge, whose recommendations are contained in the report Renewing The BBC

When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts say

Krista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk – a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output – Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking.

Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read “Listen to that mooncricket sing”, she almost clicked on the “no” button before deciding to check the meaning of the word “mooncricket”, which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.

Files show then PM was walking dog, riding motorbike and hosting guests as pandemic planning stalled in ‘lost month’

Boris Johnson took four days off from official government business during a key period in the UK’s Covid preparation when the NHS was bracing to be “overwhelmed” by the virus.

Official disclosure for the period in February 2020 – described by the Covid inquiry as a “lost month” in the country’s crisis response – reveal Johnson enjoyed an extended break during the half-term holidays at Chevening, a governmental estate in Kent, where he spent time walking his dog and taking motorcycle rides.

Wealthy countries should triple funds for countries to tackle climate impacts, but deforestation and critical minerals blocked from final deal

The world edged a small step closer to the end of the fossil fuel era on Saturday, but not by nearly enough to stave off the ravages of climate breakdown.

Countries meeting in Brazil for two weeks could manage only a voluntary agreement to begin discussions on a roadmap to an eventual phase-out of fossil fuels, and they achieved this incremental progress only in the teeth of implacable opposition from oil-producing countries.

Research shows members would back Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting over PM

Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting would all win a head-to-head leadership contest against Keir Starmer, according to a poll of Labour members.

Research conducted by Survation for LabourList found that Burnham and Rayner would defeat the prime minister by considerable margins, while Streeting and Miliband would have a slight advantage but within the margin of error.

US president signals potential room for adjustments after Zelenskyy says proposals force Ukraine to choose between national dignity and losing the US

Donald Trump said on Saturday that his Moscow-drafted “peace plan” was “not my final offer”, after a furious backlash from Ukrainians who described it as reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler.

The US president told reporters during brief remarks at the White House: “We’d like to get to peace. It should’ve happened a long time ago … we’re trying to get it ended, one way or the other we have to get it ended.”