⚽️ League Cup updates, 8pm GMT kick-off at St James’ Park
⚽️ Live scores | Follow us on Bluesky | And send Barry a mail

Referee: Chris Kavanagh

Referee’s assistants: Dan Cook and Ian Hussin

Fourth official: Matthew Donohue

VAR: Stuart Attwell

Assistant VAR: Craig Taylor

The UK government is threatening Elon Musk’s X with a ban. The social media platform is under pressure from ministers over the use of the Grok AI tool to manipulate images of women and children to remove their clothes. Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, has launched an investigation into X – and the government says it will support a ban if Ofcom decides to press ahead.

Court’s conservative majority signaled it was leaning towards agreeing with legality of Idaho and West Virginia laws, which would be major blow to LGBTQ+ rights

• The trans youth athletes fighting for their rights: ‘Playing is an act of resistance’

• How the US supreme court case on trans athletes could unravel LGBTQ+ rights

On the issue of whether the case is moot, the justices have said they would wait to make a decision about whether to dismiss it until after today’s argument.

A reminder that Lindsay Hecox, the transgender college student who challenged Idaho’s state law, sought to have her case dismissed in September, arguing that she is no longer pursuing sports and doesn’t want further harassment.

Idaho’s law classifies on the basis of sex, because sex is what matters in sports. It correlates strongly with countless athletic advantages, like size, muscle mass, bone mass and heart and lung capacity.

Toby Ovens of Broughton Transport called Brexit a nightmare, and said he hoped a reset with the EU would mean ‘light at the end of the tunnel’

British vets have been forced to chase lorries down the motorway on their way to Dover due to the “pure hell” of Brexit paperwork needed by inspectors in Calais, MPs have been told.

Toby Ovens of Broughton Transport told the business and trade committee that Brexit has been a costly and logistic nightmare, and hopes of a reset with the EU represented “light at the end of the tunnel”.

Attacking Jerome Powell distracts from Republicans’ thin legislative record and policies that continue to squeeze American household incomes

The US government’s authoritarian and vexatious attack on Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, should be seen in the light of America’s affordability crisis, which Donald Trump once dismissed, but is now scrambling to claim as his cause. The cost of living is eroding his support ahead of the congressional midterms. By launching a legal assault on the Fed, Mr Trump is trying to shift blame for borrowing costs.

Yet despite controlling the presidency, Senate and the House, Republicans have passed little beyond a large tax-cutting bill that benefits the rich. They have not legislated on housing supply, childcare, healthcare costs or wages. Indeed most of their actions are worsening affordability, notably deferring action even though millions face a sharp rise in their health insurance bills. Mr Trump’s sudden enthusiasm for credit card caps and housing interventions is pure opportunism.

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.

Approval shortly before Keir Starmer’s trip to Beijing would come despite widespread concern among Labour MPs

A vast new Chinese embassy complex in east London is almost certain to be formally approved next week despite renewed worries among Labour MPs about potential security risks and the effect on Hong Kong and Uighur exiles in the capital.

The green light for the super-embassy at Royal Mint Court near Tower Bridge would smooth relations before Keir Starmer’s visit to China, which is expected to take place at the end of January, but officials insist there has been no political input in the planning process.

Impact of raid on infrastructure rivals early weeks of war when tanks tried to force their way into Ukrainian capital

On the night of 9 January, amid warnings from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of massive and imminent Russian airstrikes, Tetiana Shkred began cooking for her children at midnight.

Concerned that the power was once again about to be knocked out in her apartment block on Kyiv’s left bank – the side of the city that has been most affected by Moscow’s attacks on energy infrastructure – she cooked until 3am, when her flat was plunged into freezing darkness.

Doctors in Tehran tell of overwhelmed medical staff as violent crackdown intensifies

• Iran crisis live – latest updates

An ophthalmologist in Tehran has documented more than 400 eye injuries from gunshots in a single hospital, as overwhelmed medical staff struggle to cope with the toll of an increasingly violent crackdown on nationwide protests by Iranian authorities.

Three doctors, in messages forwarded to the Guardian on Monday, described overwhelmed hospitals and emergency wings overflowing with protesters who have been shot. Medical staff said that the gunshot wounds were mostly concentrated on protesters’ eyes and head – a tactic that rights groups said authorities used against demonstrators in the country’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

In 2026, when it feels as though the world is moments away from any number of disasters, there is nothing hotter than watching someone do their job really, really well

Name: Competency porn.

Age: Relatively new.

Ballot initiative, opposed by the ultra-wealthy, would levy one-time 5% tax on individuals worth more than $1bn

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, renewed his pledge this week to fight a controversial plan to tax billionaires in the state. The proposed ballot measure, which could go to voters in November, has gained public attention recently amid heavy criticism and threats from tech moguls to leave the state.

In interviews with Politico and the New York Times published on Monday, Newsom described his office’s efforts to kill the proposed billionaire tax and told the Times he would “do what I have to do to protect the state”. As a direct-to-voters ballot initiative, Newsom would not have the power to veto the tax if the proposal passed.

Cartoonist – who was dropped from US papers in 2023 after calling Black people a ‘hate group’ – had prostate cancer

Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the satirical comic strip Dilbert and conservative commentator, has died aged 68 after being diagnosed with prostate cancer.

On Tuesday, Adams’s ex-wife Shelly Miles revealed his death in a tearful livestream of his YouTube channel Real Coffee with Scott Adams.

As US president tells protesters ‘help is on the way’, any military action would be unlikely to succeed

• Iran crisis live – latest updates

Donald Trump may not be unafraid to use military force against Iran, according to the White House, but the reality is the US president has few to no options that could obviously help that country’s protest movement, never mind the fact that the history of US intervention in the region has hardly been a success.

Emboldened by the seizure of the erstwhile Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, after an operation that took months of planning, Trump talked up military intervention against the Iranian regime with no military pre-positioning having taken place. In fact, there has been a drawdown in the last few months, reducing military options further.

A study has shown the devastating impact of arts funding cuts on institutions across America and many within the industry are concerned for what’s next

From Times Square to the Washington Monument, America saw in the new year with a bigger bang than usual, celebrating the fact that 2026 marks the nation’s 250th birthday. Yet as the US looks back, precious repositories of the nation’s history are facing an uncertain future.

Museum attendances are down. Budgets are precarious. Cuts in federal funding are taking their toll. And Donald Trump’s culture wars are spreading fear, intimidation and self-censorship among some directors and donors.

• World No 2’s victory continues run of 6-2 match results

• John Higgins faces Barry Hawkins in late Tuesday game

Kyren Wilson, the 2024 world champion, defeated Si Jiahui in impressive fashion to reach the Masters quarter-finals with the 6-2 result continuing a curious statistic: every match at Alexandra Palace this week up to their encounter had finished with the same scoreline.

After edging the first frame following a run of snookers, Wilson – yet to win a tournament this season having broken his cue at the start of the campaign – looked set to build a maximum in the next, but just missed the 11th red into the bottom corner pocket as he moved 2-0 ahead.

A rainstorm swept across the Gaza Strip, flooding hundreds of tents and collapsing homes sheltering families displaced by two years of war. At least six people have been killed, local health officials said. Three months since a ceasefire halted major combat, Israeli forces have ordered the near-total depopulation of nearly two-thirds of Gaza. More than 2 million people have been forced into a narrow strip near the coast, with most living in makeshift tents or damaged buildings

Defense secretary says AI tool will join military systems later this month as it comes under fire for sexual imagery

Pete Hegseth announced on Monday that the US military will begin integrating Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks.

Speaking at the SpaceX headquarters in Texas on Monday evening, the US defense secretary said that the integration of Grok into military systems would go live later this month. “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said.

Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London
There’s no escape from the torments of the past in this show, which celebrates the German artist at his most Wagnerian, enchanting and sickening you simultaneously

Born in 1921, Joseph Beuys was the “perfect” age to fight for Hitler and he did, with the wounds to prove it. The Andy Warhol portraits that complement this exhibition, without actually being part of it, brutally catch his gaunt, ravaged face in the glare of a photo flash under the hat he wore to hide burns sustained in a plane crash while serving in the Luftwaffe. The most haunting portrait turns Beuys into a spectral negative image, all darkness and shadow, his eyes wounded, guilty, lost. This was in the 1970s when Beuys was a charismatic one-man artistic revolution, inspiring young Germans to plant trees, lecturing about flows of ecological and human energy – and, in breathtaking performances, speaking to a dead hare or spending a week locked in a cage with a coyote.

All that remains today of those actions, protests and performances are posters, preserved scrawls on blackboards and mesmerising videos. Yet the moment Beuys disappeared – he died in 1986 – his solid, material sculptures took over. He believed passionately in flow and flux, promoting an animist vision of humanity and the cosmos. When he stopped talking and acting, entropy gripped his art, making it a static, slumped set of dead objects. And all the greater for it.

Late-night hosts discussed national outrage over the killing of Renee Nicole Good as the Trump administration ramps up ICE operations in Minneapolis

Late-night hosts recapped a weekend of nationwide protests over the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer as Donald Trump made a social media post referring to himself as the “acting president” of Venezuela.

Yoon is on trial for insurrection charges, after trying to declare martial law in late 2024

South Korean prosecutors have demanded the death penalty for former president Yoon Suk Yeol over his failed martial law declaration in December 2024, in the first insurrection trial of a Korean head of state in three decades.

Prosecutors characterised the case as the “serious destruction of constitutional order by anti-state forces”, telling Seoul central district court that Yoon had “directly and fundamentally infringed upon the safety of the state and the survival and freedom of the people”.

Hired as a systems coach, the manager was undermined at a club where players – and Florentino Pérez – call the shots

Pep Guardiola sat in the press room at the Santiago Bernabéu and told Xabi Alonso to do it his way but around here, he knows, it tends not to work out like that, which is precisely why he said so. Saying it is one thing, doing it another, doing it successfully something else entirely and a month and day after being offered that advice, handed that defence, Alonso was gone. On Monday afternoon, not long after landing from Saudi Arabia, a meeting was held at Valdebebas and then came the statement, short and unsentimental. He was a “legend” as a player, but no longer coach at Real Madrid.

Alonso is the 11th manager to last less than a year in two decades under the president, Florentino Pérez. He had begun work only seven months before, and that was earlier than he intended. It had started with the Club World Cup in the US, his first big decision to accept the demand to take over sooner than he wanted, and it ended with the Spanish Super Cup in Jeddah, where it was an open secret that final judgment awaited. For a month it had been impossible to avoid the feeling of a manager on borrowed time, especially for the manager himself, exposed and undermined, and you cannot go on like that. There will be hurt pride, regret, but release too.

Star overtook Scarlett Johansson after success of third Avatar – her films have now made more than $15.46bn worldwide

Zoe Saldaña has become the highest-grossing actor of all time.

The 47-year-old Oscar winner has overtaken Scarlett Johansson after the success of Avatar: Fire and Ash added more than $1.2bn to her total. Saldaña’s films have now made more than $15.46bn worldwide, according to the Numbers.

Island’s PM tells media event with Danish counterpart ‘we choose Denmark’ and will not be owned or governed by US

Greenland’s prime minister has said “we choose Denmark” before high-stakes talks at the White House as Donald Trump seeks to take control of the Arctic territory.

Amid rising tensions over the US president’s push, Jens-Frederik Nielsen on Tuesday told a joint press conference with his Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, that the island would not be owned or governed by Washington.

Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner are dominating men’s tennis. Will anyone stop them at the Australian Open?

Click here to submit a picture for publication in these online galleries and/or on the Guardian letters page