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Downing Street emphasises sacrifices of UK troops and reasserts ‘unwavering’ support for Ukraine amid softening US policy towards Russia

Downing Street has criticised Pete Hegseth for downplaying the role of Nato allies in helping the US with combat operations in Afghanistan, saying Donald Trump’s defence secretary had been wrong to do so.

The direct condemnation came as No 10 more carefully distanced itself from Trump’s increasing willingness to engage with Russia, saying the UK’s backing for Ukraine was “unwavering”.

With his war in Iran and siding with Russia, it’s hard to think of someone who has done more to make the world a safer place

It might have been more, shall we say, diplomatic if Donald Trump had taken some deep breaths after finding out he had been overlooked for the Nobel peace prize for the second year running before virtually declaring war on Norway. But maybe we should just be grateful he refrained from rubbishing the South African human rights activist Navi Pillay, who picked up the award, and shelved his plans to livestream the execution of the Norwegian prize committee. There again, you can understand his frustration. It’s hard to think of someone who has done more to make the world a safer place. Where would we be had not The Donald started a war with Iran which he shows no sign of knowing how to finish and which has forced up the price of global energy? And it was so good to see him intervening so positively in Russia’s war with Ukraine by appearing to side with the aggressor. These are just the things everyone is looking for in a Nobel peace laureate. The president is also put out that no one has noticed he has personally ended eight global conflicts; though it would be helpful if he could let us know which ones. Are they ones he has personally started – Trump appears disappointed that Argentina hasn’t invaded the Falklands again – or ones that only he knows about. During a press conference at Chequers in 2025, he claimed to have brought about a lasting peace between Albania and Azerbaijan. Maybe there are other wars going on we just don’t know about. Perhaps Australia and New Zealand have been bombing each other for years with neither side noticing. And perhaps the border between France and Italy has been a no-go zone ever since the fight between Zinedine Zidane and Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final. Still, Trump looks a cert to retain Gianni Infantino’s Fifa peace prize – if only because it seems likely to be scrapped, making him the only winner.

UK defence secretary trying to cool tensions and is arguing it is in America’s economic interests to support Kyiv

Wes Streeting urged the US to stand by Ukraine on his visit to the American capital and sought to cool tensions between the two countries in the wake of the Starlink row that is threatening to set back Kyiv’s war effort.

The British defence secretary, giving a speech before a meeting with his US counterpart, Pete Hegseth, argued that supporting Ukraine was in the long-term interests of Washington – and a business opportunity.

The president is used to bullying his media targets. The quagmire that is his libel actions shows the broadcaster is working to a different script

For the greatest account of the BBC’s finest hour, one must turn to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, written in 1980 and set 40 years earlier, at the corporation’s Portland Place wartime HQ. Flanked by sandbags and infused with a smell of cooking “from the deep hold that suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary”, the organisation that Fitzgerald describes is at once noble and deeply eccentric. “Broadcasting House stood headed on a fixed course south,” she writes. “With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster.”

In other words, a formidable foe, one that in the spring of 1940, in the face of anticipated Nazi invasion, decided “without prompting, that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective”. I bring this up in respect to the gathering storm of Donald Trump versus the BBC, a fight triggered by the US president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit – $10bn! It’s a wonder he didn’t go for $10 gazillion – brought against the corporation at the end of last year in response to a poorly edited episode of Panorama. The BBC was at fault, editing together comments made by the US president at a rally on 6 January 2021 to give, as the corporation’s apology put it, “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. But it is fighting the lawsuit.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

High valuations and debt put sector in danger, while fund also warns on government borrowing and cyber-attacks

• IMF warns global economy ‘could soon test the limits of resilience’

The threat of an AI share price crash rippling out across global markets is putting world financial stability at risk, the International Monetary fund has warned.

In its twice-yearly Global Financial Stability Report, the IMF highlighted the sky-high valuations for AI companies along with their increasing debt pile as one reason that risks in the system are “elevated”.

Boaz Weinstein’s hedge fund is waging an aggressive campaign against the FTSE 250’s Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust

• Business live – latest updates

Here we go again: another episode in the Saba saga, the story of a New York hedge fund causing havoc in the UK investment trust sector by taking big stakes in funds and then demanding change, often in only vague terms.

The best that can be said about Saba Capital (and it’s not much) is that its belligerent boss, Boaz Weinstein, has disturbed the complacency that used to infect corners of the UK investment trust world, meaning companies that invest in other companies. It is now harder for a board to do nothing if the share price sits at a wide discount to the value of the underlying assets for long periods.

David McCloskey’s new book depicts a calamitous collapse of the ‘special relationship’ – could things get darker still?

The “special relationship”, the time-honored emotional bond between the US and Britain that has sustained through war and peace, is in trouble.

The ties of history, culture and language that have bridged an ocean and bound the two countries politically for generations are fraying as perhaps never before – strained relentlessly by Donald Trump, who has gleefully sacrificed traditional alliances and diplomatic niceties on the altar of his “America first” agenda.