Beneath gilded portraits and suits of armour in Windsor Castle, 160 guests wined and dined at a lavish banquet to fete US President Donald Trump's unprecedented second state visit to the UK on Wednesday evening. Along with the impeccable table settings, three-course meal and custom cocktail, who was there and, just as importantly, who was seated next to who is carefully planned, since the event is as much about diplomacy as it is about fine dining. This year's guest list was conspicuously missing screen stars or celebrity faces, with not even royal perennials like Sir David Beckham or Sir Elton John attending. Instead, the list was mostly royals, tech and finance executives, and politicos from both sides of the Atlantic. From Trump's seat of honour at the centre of the table, next to his host King Charles III, those up and down the table ranged from lesser-known but influential White House players to professional golfers.

The number of planning approvals for new homes in England is unacceptable, the new housing secretary has said, after official data showed permission for building homes fell to a record low during Labour's first year in office. Fewer than 29,000 projects were granted permission by councils in the year ending June 2025 - striking a blow to the government's promise to deliver 1.5 million homes by the next election. Steve Reed, who has taken over from Angela Rayner as housing secretary, said fixing the planning system won't happen overnight. Conservative shadow housing secretary Sir James Cleverly said that Labour had promised to'build, build, build' but their flagship planning reforms clearly aren't working. You can see the figures for your local area in BBC Verify's housing tracker.

US and UK sign major nuclear power deal: What does it include? British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and United States President Donald Trump have signed a multibillion-pound deal to expand nuclear power across both nations. Known as the Atlantic Partnership for Advanced Nuclear Energy, the agreement aims to speed up the construction of new reactors and provide reliable, low-carbon energy for high-demand sectors, including energy-intensive artificial intelligence data centres. Britain's largest energy supplier, Centrica, will pair up with the US firm X-energy to develop up to 12 advanced modular reactors in Hartlepool, a port town in northeast England, which could power 1.5 million homes and create up to 2,500 jobs. US nuclear technology company Holtec, France's state-backed energy giant EDF Energy, and United Kingdom real estate and investment firm Tritax will develop advanced data centres powered by small modular reactors (SMRs) in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, valued at about 11 billion pounds ($15bn).

A former Reform UK MP is under investigation over alleged racial abuse against a Sky News journalist. James McMurdock, who represents South Basildon and East Thurrock in Essex, is accused of starting a chain of posts on X that spelled out a racial slur on 4 August. He appeared to deny making the post, saying his accuser, Huntingdon MP Ben Obese-Jecty, had nothing better to do. The Parliamentary standards commissioner is due to rule if he breached the House of Commons code of conduct. It was investigating a potential violation of rule 11, defined as actions causing significant damage to the reputation to the House of Commons or its MPs.

Anti-Trump Protesters Take Aim at'Naive' US-UK AI Deal Thousands marched in London to protest President Donald Trump's second state visit. Among them were many environmental activists unhappy with Britain's new AI deal with the US. They played extremely loud music. They let off foul-smelling smoke from a can. Thousands of people gathered on Wednesday in central London to protest against Trump's presence in the UK, accusing the UK government of kowtowing to him by hosting him for a state visit for the second time.

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? A Ukrainian drone has struck a car in Russia's Belgorod border region, killing one person and injuring another, according to the region's governor. The Ukrainian army lost more than 1,500 troops during front-line fighting over the past day, reported Russia's state TASS news agency, citing the Ministry of Defence.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in automated inspection, delivery, and navigation tasks that require reliable autonomy. This project develops a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to enable a single UAV to autonomously navigate between predefined points without manual intervention. The drone learns navigation policies through trial-and-error interaction, using a custom reward function that encourages goal-reaching efficiency while penalizing collisions and unsafe behavior. The control system integrates ROS with a Gym-compatible training environment, enabling flexible deployment and testing. After training, the learned policy is deployed on a real UAV platform and evaluated under practical conditions. Results show that the UAV can successfully perform autonomous navigation with minimal human oversight, demonstrating the viability of RL-based control for point-to-point drone operations in real-world scenarios.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a surge in computational models to simulate disease dynamics and guide interventions. Agent-based models (ABMs) are well-suited to capture population and environmental heterogeneity, but their rapid deployment raised questions about utility for health policy. We systematically reviewed 536 COVID-19 ABM studies published from January 2020 to December 2023, retrieved from Web of Science, PubMed, and Wiley on January 30, 2024. Studies were included if they used ABMs to simulate COVID-19 transmission, where reviews were excluded. Studies were assessed against nine criteria of model usefulness, including transparency and re-use, interdisciplinary collaboration and stakeholder engagement, and evaluation practices. Publications peaked in late 2021 and were concentrated in a few countries. Most models explored behavioral or policy interventions (n = 294, 54.85%) rather than real-time forecasting (n = 9, 1.68%). While most described model assumptions (n = 491, 91.60%), fewer disclosed limitations (n = 349, 65.11%), shared code (n = 219, 40.86%), or built on existing models (n = 195, 36.38%). Standardized reporting protocols (n = 36, 6.72%) and stakeholder engagement were rare (13.62%, n = 73). Only 2.24% (n = 12) described a comprehensive validation framework, though uncertainty was often quantified (n = 407, 75.93%). Limitations of this review include underrepresentation of non-English studies, subjective data extraction, variability in study quality, and limited generalizability. Overall, COVID-19 ABMs advanced quickly, but lacked transparency, accessibility, and participatory engagement. Stronger standards are needed for ABMs to serve as reliable decision-support tools in future public health crises.

A House Oversight Committee hearing produced a flood of bizarre claims about cloud seeding, chemtrails, and solar geoengineering. Proven, human-driven changes to the weather were dismissed. "What this whole debate comes down to is who controls the skies," Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told the audience at a House Oversight Committee hearing on Tuesday. "Do we believe in God and that he has dominion over his perfect creation of planet Earth? Do we believe that he has given us everything we need to survive as a civilization since the beginning of time? Or do you believe in man's claim of authority over the weather, based on scientists that have only been alive for decades and weren't here to witness the climate changes since the beginning of time?"

The state banquet is the spectacular showstopper of a state visit, a glittering feast with speeches, royal toasts, trumpet fanfares and fancy food and wine. It's diplomacy served up with fine dining. A cut-glass shock-and-awe approach to hospitality designed to make a visiting leader like President Trump feel special. The setting in St George's Hall inside Windsor Castle is a remarkable sight, a mix of medieval banquet and Harry Potter film. Elaborately uniformed staff around the hall are as drilled as the soldiers who have been on parade during the day.