Third-round matches continue at Melbourne Park Follow us on Bluesky | And you can also mail Luke The Australian Open issued a statement on social media at 2.36pm local time. “The AO Heat Stress Scale is above 5.0,” it said. “Play is suspended for all matches and practice on outside courts. The roofs on RLA [Rod Laver Arena], MCA [Margaret Court Arena] and JCA [John Cain Arena] will close and remain closed for the remainder of the match. Continue reading...

Partnership with tech giant speaks to push to engage younger fans but also has wider strategic goals in mind In this World Cup year, Fifa has come out of the blocks quickly. In the past few weeks any number of initiatives have been announced or activated, from a data partnership with Opta to facilitate more betting, to the Fifa Pass for speeding up visa applications for the US this summer, to the unveiling of the official Lego World Cup trophy. Among the ever-expanding list is an intriguing deal with TikTok, a partnership that will give digital creators front-row seats at the 104-match tournament. In Fifa language its partnership with the short-form video platform will make “the most inclusive event in football history … even more accessible”. According to TikTok’s global head of content, James Stafford, it will bring fans “closer to the action in ways they can’t get anywhere else”. It plans to do so by granting an unspecified number of online personalities behind-the-scenes access, giving them archive and highlights footage to use in their content and, in return, requesting an avalanche of posts that will make the World Cup inescapable for TikTok users. Continue reading...

Manager keen to finish season strongly after accusing chair of abandoning him and the squad by selling Marc Guéhi Oliver Glasner was about 54 minutes into his latest press conference when he laid out the plan for how his truce with the Crystal Palace chair, Steve Parish, could work after they ate together this week. “Steve and I left our dinner, and really both with a big smile we said: ‘Hey, we achieved so much all together here in the last 22 months. We don’t want and we don’t accept that this ends like the last three, four, five weeks have been. We don’t accept it.’ So we stick together, we work hard all together to get an ending this season that it deserves. Continue reading...

Environmental charity to prioritise water capture and storage as it urges gardeners to prepare for ‘new normal’ The Royal Horticultural Society has unveiled emergency plans to protect its gardens from major water shortages in the future. The environmental charity, which owns and operates five renowned public gardens in England, said on Saturday it will invest in more water-capture and water-management projects in 2026 after severe droughts last year. Continue reading...

Sunday’s table-topping clash with Hearts is a fixture that carries huge meaning for both clubs It is instructive that Thursday evening’s Europa League clash in Bologna could be regarded by Celtic as an inconvenience. Aberdeen hold the Scottish Cup. St Mirren claimed the League Cup in December. Celtic find themselves involved in a title race worthy of the name. In short, domestic dominance is no longer a guarantee. Much has been said – and screamed – about the flow of poor decision-making that at least has Celtic’s hitherto immovable position in Scotland under threat. There has also been wild exaggeration in respect of the current crop of Celtic and Rangers players being among the worst in living memory. Celtic finished fourth and adrift of Motherwell in successive seasons from 1993. Rangers rattled around unconvincingly in the lower divisions, including a failed attempt to win promotion from the second tier, after their financial meltdown of 2012. The relative weakness of others in Scotland’s top flight is a reasonable point for debate but Old Firm fans have encountered much, much worse than this. Continue reading...

Once dismissed as a basement game, table tennis is enjoying an unlikely US revival as the Oscar-tipped biopic Marty Supreme collides with a wave of new players For decades in the US, table tennis has lived a double life: one of the most widely played sports in the country, yet still dismissed by many as a basement pursuit. Now, unexpectedly, it is having a cultural moment. The release of Marty Supreme, a film steeped in obsession and myth, and loosely based on postwar American table tennis champion Marty Reisman, has pushed ping-pong into the pop-culture mainstream – just as US Major League Table Tennis sells out matches, clubs report growing interest, and younger players pick up paddles for the first time. Continue reading...

Tripartite talks in the United Arab Emirates to resume in wake of missile and drone attacks that have killed one and injured dozens Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack targeting Ukraine’s two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, early on Saturday, as US, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in the United Arab Emirates for the second day of tripartite peace talks. With Kyiv and other cities in the midst of widespread outages of heat, water and power following Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, officials in Kyiv said one person had been killed and at least 15 injured in strikes that continued until morning. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: As his movie Bulk tours indie cinemas, director Ben Wheatley recommends the oddball influences that fuelled his most unconventional wor​k • Don’t get The Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Few directors currently working merit the title of ‘cult hero’ more than Ben Wheatley. Over a 15-year-plus career, the British film-maker has dabbled in just about every cinematic genre and style imaginable: psychedelic horror (A Field in England, In the Earth), grimy video nasty (Kill List), stylish, gun-toting thrillers (Free Fire), murderous Mike Leigh homages (Down Terrace, Sightseers), literary adaptations (Rebecca, High-Rise), and even a whopping great studio monster movie (Meg 2: The Trench). Wheatley’s latest film further cements that cult status. Bulk is a defiantly DIY sci-fi-noir-paranoid-thriller hybrid, starring Sam Riley as an investigative journo tasked with rescuing a scientist from his own malfunctioning multi-dimensional creation. With its handwritten title cards, overdubbed dialogue, sticky-back-plastic special effects and general vibe of formal experimentation, Bulk exists a world away from most modern film-making. Even it’s delivery method feels far from the churn of the mainstream: instead of a standard release, the film is in the middle of a tour of independent cinemas across the UK and Ireland – tonight in Liverpool, tomorrow Lewes, with Dublin and Cork on the horizon (you can seek out your nearest screening here). Continue reading...

NHS England pays for private assessments under ‘right to choose’, but can reject diagnoses and is struggling to cope with demand Sameer Modha knows the ADHD system all too well. He has been diagnosed himself, as have his two children, giving him a clear view of how the system works – and where it breaks down. While his own diagnosis was relatively straightforward, the experience with his daughter was very different. The diagnosis he obtained for his eldest child, after an assessment carried out privately by a “very senior ex-Camhs [child and adolescent mental health service] director, someone who knows the system and has seen a huge amount of this”, was later rejected by the NHS. He was told it was not compliant with guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which sets healthcare standards nationally. Continue reading...

In the US, comedy has long filled the space vacated by partisan news media. Now France is following its lead Sometimes the freedom and openness of comedy means it is better able to respond to world events than news media. Take South Park’s raucous, unhinged and visually disturbing depictions of Donald Trump – most recently, cheating on Satan (who is carrying his spawn) with JD Vance in the White House. Fair enough: Trey Parker and Matt Stone very much own this terrain. But there’s no reason why satirical TV programmes such as The Daily Show should have to take on the role of news provider, investigative journalist and critic. And yet, over the past three decades, the failings of the US corporate media to adequately cover the country’s dilapidated politics has pushed people such as Jon Stewart into filling the void. The problem was identified as long ago as 2000 by the US economist Paul Krugman. He castigated the press for being “fanatically determined to seem even-handed”, to the point they were unwilling to call out outrageous untruths. “If a presidential candidate were to declare that the Earth is flat,” Krugman wrote, “you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.” It was this context that provided American satire’s cathartic triumph in the first years of the 21st century. The Daily Show began conducting harder-hitting interviews than most primetime TV shows. Stephen Colbert rose to prominence by playing a fake conservative talkshow host, in an open parody of Bill O’Reilly’s mid-2000s show on Fox. And then John Oliver pioneered “investigative comedy”, frequently doing a better job of breaking scandalous stories than the news programmes he was satirising. Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist. H​is memoir, Generation Desperation​, is published in January 2026 Continue reading...

Hobbycraft removes product from sale after parent sent samples to a lab for testing but declines to issue a recall Bottles of children’s play sand have been withdrawn from shelves by the craft retailer Hobbycraft after a parent discovered they were contaminated with asbestos. The parent, who did not wish to be named, raised the alarm after her children played with the sand at a party. Continue reading...

Listening to Brian May’s multi-tracked epic on a battered cassette player when I lived in repressive Havana inspired lit a spark of rebellion inside me Throughout my childhood and teenage years growing up in 80s Cuba, Fidel Castro’s presence, and the overt influence of politics, was everywhere – on posters, on walls, in speeches that could last four hours at a stretch. The sense of being hemmed in, politically and personally, was hard to escape. I had been raised to believe in communism, and for a long time I did. I even applied twice to join the Young Communist League, only to be rejected for not being “combative” enough: code for not informing on others. Friends were expelled from university or jailed for speaking too freely and my family included people in the military and police, so I had to be careful not to endanger them. But amid that stifling conformity, something else had begun to take hold. Continue reading...

From Blue Monday and Candy Girl to ‘Violet, you’re turning violet’, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz 1 Lydia of Thyatira is claimed to be the first person in Europe to do what? 2 In what country do mountain lions eat penguins? 3 Single pot still is a style of what drink? 4 “Violet, you’re turning violet” is a line in what book? 5 Whose Easter Sonata was originally attributed to her brother? 6 Which two small UK cities share a name? 7 Who spoke the pitmatic dialect? 8 Which football team won five NASL titles? What links: 9 Mercedes-Benz cars; MySQL database; Tootsie Roll sweet; Wendy’s burgers? 10 Michael Henchard; John Loveday; Elfride Swancourt; Clym Yeobright? 11 Beg, Steal or Borrow; Blue Monday; Candy Girl; Hangin’ Tough? 12 1 (1st); 55 (10th); 75,025 (25th); 12,586,269,025 (50th)? 13 First Consul for Life; Co-Prince of Andorra; King of Italy; Sovereign of Elba? 14 Women’s 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, long jump, discus, shot put and heptathlon? 15 Chicago; Buenos Aires; Marktl, Bavaria; Wadowice, Poland? Continue reading...

The process of learning to catch a wave is an all-consuming activity that can prove to be a powerful therapeutic tool I can’t remember when my terror of waves began in earnest. Maybe it was a singular incident that triggered it, like that monster wave in Biarritz, France, almost 20 years ago that body-slammed me on to the seabed, taking all the skin off my chin. More likely is that my transition from fearless to frightened had been more of a slow creep, and a perfectly rational one when you consider the danger of riptides, hidden rocks, sharks and concussion. But for me, I feel it goes deeper. Almost inevitably my job will have had something to do with this. Nearly two decades of working as a journalist reporting on the very worst things that human beings can do to other human beings in a wide array of contexts has definitely eroded my sense that I can keep myself – and others – safe from harm in a dangerous world. Continue reading...

Meal at Mayfair club took place on day Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick criticised former PM’s mini-budget If it was on the menu, a side helping of lettuce never made it to the table. Over blood-red steak and chips, Nigel Farage and Liz Truss came together on Monday for a discreet lunch at a swish Mayfair club, organised by a climate-denying US thinktank. Lois Perry, a former leader of the far-right Ukip party who is now Europe director of the Heartland Institute, posted photographs, now deleted, on X of Farage addressing others, including Truss, at the meal. Continue reading...

From handbags to drug gangs to central banks – one of Britain’s finest investigative reporters reveals the surprising links in a global chain of crime Question: why, if almost half of us now use cash only a few times a year, are high-denomination banknotes being printed in increasingly large numbers? In April 2024, the value of all the dollar bills in circulation reached an all-time high of $2.345tn, and may well be even more than that by now. The total value of dollars in the world has doubled every decade since the 1970s. Similarly, there are 1.552tn euro notes in circulation, while most other currencies – the British pound, the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc and so on – are all at something like their highest levels in history. This at a time when so many of us have pretty much stopped using cash altogether, and even the people who sell the Big Issue in our streets are equipped with card readers. When I talk about “us”, I mean those who don’t have to worry about hiding huge cash profits from drug dealing, people-smuggling and so on. And that of course provides the answer to the question: while law-abiding citizens like you and I have to jump through hoops when we move even relatively small sums around for entirely legitimate reasons – buying a fridge or a secondhand car, say – drug dealers just shove bundles of the stuff into their coat pockets or suitcases and whisk them round the world in order to keep their business going. The number of dogs trained to sniff out cash at international airports is growing, but nothing like as fast as the rate at which big-denomination notes are being pumped out by the world’s central banks. And the ways in which money is laundered are growing in complexity and sophistication. Continue reading...

Josh Finan continues to be brilliant in Waiting for the Out. Plus: buckle up for the final double bill of Heated Rivalry. Here’s what to watch this evening 9.25pm, BBC One Continue reading...

Australian Open reigning champion beats world No 85 by 4-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 Italian makes most of suspension in play in win at Melbourne Park The grim expression across Jannik Sinner’s face as he limped gingerly to the bathroom said enough. As play was briefly suspended in the overbearing Australian heat, the two-time defending champion was suffering from full-body cramps and at serious risk of suffering one of the great Australian Open upsets in recent memory. Sinner, the second seed, survived thanks to the combined force of his supreme mental toughness and a significant amount of luck, holding off a spirited challenge from Eliot Spizzirri to reach the fourth round at Melbourne Park with a 4-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 win. Continue reading...

Buffeted by political storms and excluded from continental federations, Greenland find their chances are limited but a tournament in Croatia is a priceless opportunity Greenland’s futsal players string out in a line before angling their bodies to the left, facing the flag on the far wall. Nobody averts his gaze as the strains of their national anthem fill the hall. The red-and-white-halved banner, with its reverse-coloured semi‑circles, hangs comfortably among those of this week’s rivals. Scotland on the right, Morocco to the left; further along, there are even representations of Uefa and Fifa. The moment always feels special. Their long-serving coach, Rene Olsen, has been imagining it for several days. His team also know these occasions, all too rare, are to be seized. “It gives me goosebumps,” Patrick Frederiksen, one of their stars, will say later. “It’s when you realise that it is time.” Continue reading...

For workers sending money to support their relatives, payments are both a burden and badge of pride From Senegal to Somalia and Egypt to South Africa, credit alert notifications from fintech apps such as Western Union or WorldRemit often set the mood for the rest of the day, week or even month. Transfers from workers within the continent and the diaspora to their relatives are often referred to as the “black tax”, whereby one person’s salary and relative success can become the safety net for a whole extended family. Continue reading...

An extraordinary mosaic of wildlife has made Britain’s urban jungle its home London is the only place in the UK where you can find scorpions, snakes, turtles, seals, peacocks, falcons all in one city – and not London zoo. Step outside and you will encounter a patchwork of writhing, buzzing, bubbling urban microclimates. Sam Davenport, the director of nature recovery at the London Wildlife Trust, emphasises the sheer variation in habitats that you find in UK cities, which creates an amazing “mosaic” of wildlife. Continue reading...

I see the manure sellers as part of some lost and deeply English tradition, which is why I prefer my wife to deal with them I am in the kitchen watching the dog and the cat fight when the tortoise suddenly appears. Or to put it another way: I watched the dog and the cat fight for a while, until it became tiresome; the next time I looked up – possibly 15 minutes later – the tortoise was also there. That’s what I mean by suddenly. In real terms, the tortoise doesn’t do anything suddenly. “Where have you been?” I say, even though I know the answer. I haven’t seen the tortoise in six weeks, but I’m certain he’s been butted up against the left rear leg of the sofa for that whole period. Continue reading...

Toby, a data analyst, meets Liam, a civil servant. Both are 29 What were you hoping for? I wanted to go in with no expectations. Continue reading...

As the two cartoonists set out to draw on the same theme – ‘Trump and a world in turmoil’ – to the same deadline, Guardian photographer David Levene visited them in their studios How we draw the age of Trump and turmoil: two cartoonists go head-to-head Continue reading...

Brooklyn’s Instagram bombshell tested decades of image control, revealing how fame, PR and power collide behind the scenes On a personal level, it’s all extremely sad. A once close family ripped apart by feuding and bitterness. A much-loved son blocking all contact with his parents and siblings. From another perspective, however, for those who have followed the movements of David and Victoria Beckham in their 30 years in the (carefully curated) spotlight, the public falling out this week of Britain’s alternative royal family has been a car crash from which it is hard to look away. Continue reading...