The state department cites welfare use as it pauses visa processing for Brazil, Iran, Russia, Somalia and others

The Donald Trump administration has indefinitely suspended immigrant visa processing for people from 75 countries, marking one of its most expansive efforts yet to restrict legal pathways to the United States.

The freeze, which takes effect on 21 January, targets applicants officials deem likely to become a “public charge” – who they describe as people who may rely on government benefits for basic needs.

AI tool made by Elon Musk’s xAI makes it easy to harass women with deepfake images, says state’s top attorney

California authorities have announced an investigation into the output of Elon Musk’s Grok.

The state’s top attorney said Grok, an AI tool and image generator made by Musk’s company xAI, appears to be making it easy to harass women and girls with deepfake images on X and elsewhere online.

Some day, perhaps, Mohamed Salah will get the better of Sadio Mané in a major game, but not on Wednesday, not in the Africa Cup of Nations semi-final.

When Senegal beat Egypt in a shootout in the 2021 Afcon final, Mané scored the winning penalty before Salah had the chance to take his. In the shootout in the qualifying playoff for the 2022 World Cup, Salah missed his effort and Mané scored the winning penalty. This time it didn’t get to penalties, but Mané was still the match-winner, thrashing in the only goal with 12 minutes remaining.

Musk attempts to recast AI tool’s misuse. Plus, tech billionaires plot against a proposed California tax on their fortunes

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor for the Guardian. Today, we discuss Elon Musk’s rosy depiction of Grok’s image generation controversy; the seven-figure panic among Silicon Valley billionaires over a proposed wealth tax in California, though with one notable exception; and how AI and robotics have revitalized the Consumer Electronics Showcase.

Under a tax proposal that could be put to voters this November, any California resident worth more than $1bn would have to pay a one-off, 5% tax on their assets to help cover education, food assistance and healthcare programs in the state.

Several Silicon Valley figures have already threatened to leave California and take their business elsewhere. But Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, whose net worth is nearly $159bn, told Bloomberg Television this week that he is “perfectly fine with it”.

No details given of committee members who will run territory but they are expected be technocrats, not politicians

The US has announced the start of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire, including the creation of a committee of Palestinian technocrats who are supposed to take over the day-to-day running of the territory for a transition period.

The announcement was made on social media by Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, but it lacked any detail or names of potential members of the proposed “national committee for the administration of Gaza”. The committee is not expected to begin work until mandated by a “peace board” chaired by Trump, which has yet to be created.

Funding to end immediately for up to 2,800 grantees of US agency that serves thousands seeking help and in recovery

The Trump administration on Tuesday evening unexpectedly canceled up to $1.9bn in funding for substance use and mental health care, which providers say will immediately affect thousands of patients.

“It feels like Armageddon for everyone who’s on the frontlines of the addiction and mental health space,” said Ryan Hampton, founder of Mobilize Recovery, a national advocacy organization for people in and seeking recovery.

Tens of thousands of dollars raised for TJ Sabula after he reportedly calls Trump ‘pedophile protector’ during Ford plant tour

Tens of thousands of dollars have been raised for an autoworker at a Ford plant in Michigan who was suspended without pay after heckling Donald Trump.

TJ Sabula is said to have called the president a “pedophile protector” as Trump toured the automotive giant’s River Rouge complex on Tuesday.

Loan will be repaid only if Moscow pays reparations and plan to use Russia’s frozen assets still on table

Ukraine will be able to buy military equipment from non-European suppliers when it is given access to a €90bn (£78bn) EU loan later this year under a proposal outlined by the EU executive.

The European Commission on Wednesday published detailed proposals to lend Kyiv €90bn, but said an alternative plan based on using Russia’s frozen assets remained on the table.

⚽ Updates from Stamford Bridge; kick-off 8pm GMT
⚽ Live scores | Follow us on Bluesky | Read Football Daily

Liam Rosenior’s pre-match thoughts

I’ve been lucky enough to be with the lads for six days now. We’ve been very strong on what expect as a staff, what we expect as a group, and I hope to see that come out.

[On the various injuries] Reece James took a knock on his hip and he’s not quite ready. Cole [Palmer] should he available for Saturday, Liam [Delap] and Jamie Gittens are ill, Malo [Gusto] will hopefully be fit for Saturday.

[On the relevance of last year’s semi-final defeats to Newcastle and PSG] There are a lot of learnings from that journey. Every competition is different. Today we are in a different place to where we were a year ago. We are away from home; last year we started at home. We’re very excited, very motivated and willing to start again.

[On coming up against Liam Rosenior] Every manager has his fingerprints. The players remain the same and they will have certain habits and qualities that they want to exploit on the pitch. They are a very strong team who we respect.

⚽ Updates from the Afcon semi-final; kick-off 8pm GMT
⚽ Read Football Daily | Follow us on Bluesky | Mail Billy

Morocco in their red and green, Nigeria in all white. Captains Hakimi and Osimhen exchange pennants and handshakes. It’s go time. The noise is something else.

Nigeria’s national anthem is well observed. Morocco’s is raucous – the stakes are huge. Kick-off is upon us.

Tests showed horses that smelled body odour from people watching scary films startled more easily

Horses can smell fear, or at least whether you have scared yourself witless watching a horror movie, according to researchers who say the effect has consequences for riders, trainers and others who work with the animals.

In a series of tests, horses that smelled body odour from people watching scary films startled more easily, had higher heart rates and approached their handlers less often than when the odour came from people watching more joyful scenes.

New polling suggests 58% of Britons think X should be banned in the UK if the social network fails to crack down on nonconsensual images

Elon Musk’s X is understood to have told the government it is acting to comply with UK law, after nearly a fortnight of public outcry at the use of its AI tool Grok to manipulate images of women and children by removing their clothes.

Keir Starmer told the House of Commons on Wednesday that photographs generated by Grok were “disgusting” and “shameful”, but said he had been informed that X was “acting to ensure full compliance with UK law”.

Fifty-six percent of Americans said fatal shooting of Renee Good was an inappropriate use of force, survey by CNN finds

Donald Trump repeated his threat to withhold federal funding to sanctuary cities on Truth Social today.

“ALL THEY DO IS BREED CRIME AND VIOLENCE! If States want them, they will have to pay for them!,” the president wrote in a post.

Exclusive: Artist reminisces about his life in film using interviews recorded in last four years of his life

Fifteen years ago, Sir Ian McKellen was among the leading arts figures who criticised the Tate for not showing its collection of paintings by LS Lowry in its London galleries and questioned whether the “matchstick men painter” had been sidelined as too northern and provincial.

Now, 50 years after Lowry’s death, McKellen is to star in a BBC documentary that will reveal a trove of previously unheard audio tapes recorded with Lowry in the 1970s during his final four years of life.

The singer will reunite with her Wicked co-star in a revival of the musical inspired by artist Georges Seurat in summer 2027

Wicked co-stars Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey are to reunite on stage in Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer prize-winning musical Sunday in the Park With George. The production, hotly rumoured and finally announced on Wednesday, will run at the Barbican Centre, London, in summer 2027.

Sunday in the Park With George, which has a book by Sondheim’s long-term collaborator James Lapine, is a tale of two artists. One is inspired by the pointillist Georges Seurat and the other is the character’s great-grandson. On Wednesday, Bailey and Grande shared a photo on Instagram of them sitting in front of the Seurat painting that inspired the production, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which is on display in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Human Rights Watch says attorney general has power to facilitate immediate bail, one of activists’ key demands

Human Rights Watch has written to the attorney general saying ministers’ claims that they cannot intervene in the hunger strike by Palestine Action-affiliated prisoners is “not fully true”.

One of the demands by those refusing food is for immediate bail and the NGO says Richard Hermer, the government’s most senior law officer, could facilitate this by instructing prosecutors not to oppose their bail applications, although the government denied this.

Protesters face execution as the Iranian regime continues its violent crackdown, defying the US president, Donald Trump, who has threatened ‘very strong action’ if demonstrators are killed. Erfan Soltani, 26, is the first protester to be sentenced to death, but it is unclear whether or not his execution has taken place. Lucy Hough speaks to journalist Deepa Parent about what she is hearing from those inside Iran – watch on YouTube

There was a time when nobody picked up after their dogs – and it would have been considered disgusting to do so. What caused the change in attitude?

A PE teacher from Cardiff called Tony is frozen solid after being caught in an avalanche in 1979. There he remains until global heating sees to his thawing and he pops up in the present day, exactly as he was back then. Comedy ensues. This is make-believe, by the way; it’s the premise of Mike Bubbins’ BBC series Mammoth. In the masterful opening scenes, to the sound of Gerry Rafferty’s Get It Right Next Time, we see Tony being scornful, angry, frightened and disgusted by four things that didn’t happen before his big freeze.

He scoffs at a bloke carrying a baby in a sling, gives a charity chugger very short shrift, and jumps out of his skin when a youth on a hoverboard zips past him. But it was Tony’s disgust at a woman picking up her German shepherd’s poo that got me thinking. When did picking up dog poo become the thing to do? Or, put another way, when did just leaving it there become the thing not to do? When did we start becoming disgusted at those who didn’t pick it up rather than those who did? This is a pretty seismic cultural shift, I’m sure you’ll agree.

A line has been crossed, and it’s vital to understand that. A system that sends paramilitaries on to the streets will observe no limits

A few years ago, towards the end of the second Obama administration, a friend and her wife flew back to New York from a holiday in Mexico, landing for a connecting flight in South Carolina. At immigration, the officer looked from one to the other, asked their relation to one another and on receiving the reply, made a noise of disgust – “ugh”. On the pretext that American citizens can’t go through the same lane as a spouse on a green card (not true), he sent them to the back of the line, causing them to miss their connection. But that’s not the point of the story.

My friend is a white Australian who is generally conflict-averse; her wife is a Japanese-American who can stop traffic with a single, hard stare, and who teaches in the South Bronx, where many of her students have been harassed by law enforcement since the day they were born. As trouble got under way, my friend kicked off like a good’un, swearing and muttering sarcastically in the Australian style, while her wife shot her desperate, angry looks. Shut up. Shut Up. SHUT UP.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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James Comer says action follows refusal by the former first lady and Bill Clinton to testify about Jeffrey Epstein

• US politics live – latest updates

The House oversight committee will move to hold Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress, its Republican chair James Comer said Wednesday, after the former first lady refused to comply with a subpoena for testimony regarding the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The announcement came a day after both Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president Bill Clinton, said they would not honor subpoenas from the investigative panel to discuss Epstein, a one-time friend who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

Social media star says ‘justice has been done’ in cases involving cakes and Easter eggs being promoted as charitable initiatives

The Italian fashion influencer Chiara Ferragni has said “the nightmare is over” after being acquitted on fraud charges in a trial linked to Christmas cake and Easter egg charity initiatives.

The social media star, 38, had been on trial in Milan accused of duping consumers in two separate fundraisers – one a Christmas campaign in 2022 promoting pandoro cake, an alternative to the more famous panettone, and the other selling chocolate eggs during Easter campaigns in 2021 and 2022.

Legault’s abrupt resignation follows months of chaos that has rocked the governing Coalition Avenir Québec party

Quebec’s premier, François Legault, has announced his resignation as leader of the province, in an abrupt departure for the polarizing figure whose embattled government faces the prospects of an electoral wipeout in the coming months.

Speaking at a hastily arranged press conference in Quebec City on Wednesday, Legault said he was proud to have founded the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) party and won consecutive majority governments beginning in 2018.

Jumping up as soon as the seatbelt sign goes off can provoke fury among fellow passengers. And what goes on at the luggage carousel is possibly even worse …

Name: “Aisle lice”.

Age: Any age, as long as they’re ambulatory.

The small screen phenomenon, and its publicized use of intimacy coordinators, has arrived as established Hollywood names have started to criticize the role

If you could pinpoint a moment where things change for Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), the two professional hockey players secretly hooking up in the show Heated Rivalry – a moment when the relationship breaks through into fraught emotional territory, when the hazy, undefined thing has become a thing – it would be midway through episode four.

Ilya’s couch, mid-morning, post-breakfast. (The exponentially growing fandom of this six-episode show from Canadian streamer Crave, which premiered in North America in late November with virtually no promotion and has rapidly become one of the most organic TV phenomena in recent memory, knows exactly what I’m talking about.) Hollander overhears Rozanov’s distressing phone call from home and asks how his father is (he doesn’t know Russian, but agitation needs no language); Rozanov responds by wrapping a sculpted arm around his neck. The two then get intimate, in one of the show’s many near-wordless sex scenes, culminating in them each using the other’s first name for the first time.