US Capitol attack committee subpoenas Rudy Giuliani and other Trump lawyers

House special committee demands documents and testimony from ‘war room’ team involved in effort to overturn election result

The US congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack has issued a blitz of subpoenas to some of Donald Trump’s top lawyers – including Rudy Giuliani – as it examines whether the former president oversaw a criminal conspiracy on 6 January 2021.

The House panel subpoenaed four of Trump’s legal team on Tuesday: the former president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and his associate Boris Epshteyn, as well as Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, who all defended Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims as he attempted to overturn the election result.

Covid live: France reports nearly half a million new cases, a record increase; Italy records 228,179 daily infections

France registers 464,769 new Covid-19 infections over the last 24 hours; Italy’s cases jump from 83,403 a day earlier

• Nicola Sturgeon announces lifting of Omicron restrictions in Scotland
• More than 900 Covid deaths in England and Wales in first week of January
• Calls for French MP to resign after announcing Covid protocol from Ibiza
• Hong Kong to cull thousands of hamsters after Covid found on 11
• UK Covid and Boris Johnson developments – live

China’s postal service has ordered workers to disinfect international deliveries and urged the public to reduce orders from overseas after authorities claimed mail could be the source of recent coronavirus outbreaks, Agence France-Press reports.

In recent days, Chinese officials have suggested that some people could have been infected by packages from abroad, including a woman in Beijing whom authorities said had no contact with other infected people but tested positive for a variant similar to those found in North America.

Tory MPs openly discuss Johnson challenge as mood ‘turns dramatically’

MPs from across party confident of enough letters to trigger leadership contest after Sue Gray’s report

The mood of Conservative MPs was hardening against Boris Johnson on Tuesday night, with open talk of how to oust the prime minister and who should succeed him as he gave a disastrous interview claiming not to have lied over Downing Street parties.

A string of Tory MPs from various ranks and wings of the party said they believed there would be enough letters to trigger a leadership contest after the publication of the Sue Gray report into allegations of lockdown breaches.

Cabinet expected to approve relaxation of plan B Covid restrictions in England

Measures introduced to fight spread of Omicron could be lifted next week with millions told to return to workplaces

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Boris Johnson is expected to instruct millions to return to workplaces across England as he tries to placate furious MPs with a review of Covid restrictions that could end all rules introduced to combat Omicron.

The cabinet will meet on Wednesday morning to examine Covid data and review plan B restrictions imposed in December amid the rapid spread of the variant, with Johnson set to update the Commons later in the day.

Ghislaine, Prince Andrew and the Paedophile review – a grisly story of sexual abuse and royal palaces

How did a newspaper tycoon’s daughter become a paedophile’s accomplice? And how does the royal family fit in? Abuse survivors and others speak out in this disappointingly brief show

What a piece of work is man. And, just occasionally – relatively speaking – woman, too. In Ghislaine, Prince Andrew and the Paedophile (ITV), reporter and presenter Ranvir Singh traces the grisly story of Ghislaine Maxwell and her conviction on charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy for her part in procuring underage girls – a child of just 14 in one of the cases brought to trial – for the convicted paedophile and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

At 45 minutes (plus adverts) it is not an in-depth investigation to match either the four-hour Netflix miniseries Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich nor the three-part documentary by Sky, Epstein’s Shadow (the latter skewing close to the view of Maxwell as victim, but nevertheless covering a lot of ground in detail).