Live updates from all the action at Melbourne Park
Dramatic day two marred by retirements | Email Katy

Fritz’s 2025 was a slight disappointment, he didn’t quite push on from his US Open final appearance in 2024, and as a result he’s no longer the highest-ranked American – that’s Ben Shelton. Fritz has also been dealing with a knee injury during the early stages of this season, but he leads Royer, the Frenchman who’s making his Australian Open debut, 7-6, 5-5.

I’m loving the new multiview action on Discovery+. It’s making this job much easier. Gone are the days of needing an extra laptop, mobile and iPad just to keep track of everything. So I’m currently keeping an eye on Sinner v Gaston, Boulter v Bencic, Fritz v Royer and Dimitrov v Machac.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Phil Walter/Getty Images

© Photograph: Phil Walter/Getty Images

© Photograph: Phil Walter/Getty Images

President Donald Trump threatened to hit French wines and champagnes with 200% tariffs in an apparent effort to cajole French President Emmanuel Macron into joining his Board of Peace initiative aimed at resolving global conflicts.

Ivan Sautkin films efforts to help residents abandon their frontline homes, as well as a pensioner acting as a spy for the Ukrainian army from the Russian border

There is a scene in this Ukrainian documentary in which a woman gruffly shrugs off the offer of evacuation from her property on the frontline. Her son has put in the request to the volunteer humanitarian team ferrying civilians to safety in the east of the country. But she is caring for her brother, who is paralysed, the woman protests – and what about her German shepherd? As explosions boom terrifyingly close, a volunteer patiently explains that his team will carry her brother to the minivan – and don’t worry, bring the dog. Eventually, the woman agrees to leave, brusquely wiping away a tear.

Director Ivan Sautkin is a film-maker by trade and served as a volunteer on the evacuation team. A Poem for Little People is his one-man film; Sautkin is behind the camera, recording everything. These are no interviews, explainers or voiceovers (which admittedly makes it hard to follow at times). The leader of the volunteers is Anton, a cool head under the heaviest fire. The trauma is raw, the situations desperate – in one, volunteers drive an elderly woman out of harm’s way, but as they bump along cracked, potholed roads, they question if they are doing the right thing putting her through the agonising journey.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: True Story

© Photograph: True Story

© Photograph: True Story

In this larky autofiction, the ups and downs of creative life are cartoonishly dramatised as the writer becomes an action hero

Rob Doyle’s previous novel, Threshold, took the form of a blackly comic travelogue narrated by an Irish writer named Rob. In one episode before Rob becomes an author, we see him as a sexually pent-up teacher abroad, masturbating over an essay he’s marking. That the scene is an echo of one in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (once named by Doyle as the best book from the past 40 years) hardly lessens our discomfort, and it’s hard not to feel that our unease is precisely the point. “Frankly, a lot of my life has been disastrous,” he once told an interviewer – which might not be quite as self-deprecating as it sounds, given that Doyle has also argued that “great literature” is born of “abjection” not “glory”.

The autofictional game-playing continues in his new novel, Cameo, but instead of self-abasing display, we get a perky book-world send-up for the culture war era, cartoonishly dramatising the ups and downs of creative life. It takes the form of a vertiginous hall of mirrors centred on gazillion-selling Dublin novelist Ren Duka, renowned for a long novel cycle drawn on his own life, the summaries of which comprise the bulk of the book we’re reading. Duka’s work isn’t autofiction à la Knausgård: hardly deskbound, still less under the yoke of domesticity, he leads a jet-set life of peril, mixing with drug dealers, terrorists, spies, and eventually serving time for tax evasion before he develops a crack habit, a penchant for threesomes in Paris and – perhaps least likely of all – returns to his long-forsaken Catholicism.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Bernard Roche/Katie Freeney

© Photograph: Bernard Roche/Katie Freeney

© Photograph: Bernard Roche/Katie Freeney

Shops, restaurants and hotels particularly hit by slowdown in hiring, as unemployment remains at 5.1%

• Business live – latest updates

The number of employed people in the UK has fallen, particularly in shops, restaurants, bars and hotels, reflecting weak hiring, while private sector wages grew at the slowest rate in five years, official figures show.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the number of employees on payrolls fell by 43,000 in December from the previous month, to 30.2 million – the biggest monthly drop since November 2020.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Alex Segre/Alamy

© Photograph: Alex Segre/Alamy

© Photograph: Alex Segre/Alamy

The Number of the Beast lights up an unforgettable scene in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple thanks to director Nia DaCosta expertly blending ‘craziness and romance’

There were laughs of surprise around me in screen three of the Everyman in Muswell Hill, north London, as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple drew to its conclusion. Without giving too much away for those who haven’t seen it, Ralph Fiennes dancing semi-naked among piles of human bones to Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast is not how you expect one of our greatest thespians to deport himself on screen.

“Alex Garland chose that song,” says the film’s director, Nia DaCosta. “He wrote it into the script. And you can’t get better than that in a film about satanists.”

Continue reading...

© Photograph: AP

© Photograph: AP

© Photograph: AP

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Britain's plan to cede sovereignty of the island of Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands to Mauritius was an "act of total weakness," adding that it was "another in a very long line of national security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired."

The laws, in the wake of the Bondi terror attack, establish a national buyback, stop the importation of some firearms and tighten background checks

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Parliament has passed some of the most significant changes to Australia’s guns laws since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.

Spurred by last month’s Bondi beach terror attack, the new laws will toughen background checks and fund a national gun buy-back scheme.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Dean Lewins/EPA

© Photograph: Dean Lewins/EPA

© Photograph: Dean Lewins/EPA

In a country plagued by underdog status and a sport fraught with a history of racism, misogyny and homophobia, this adaptation has reimagined what’s possible

I grew up in a hockey town where there was no escaping Canada’s beloved sport. Our suburban streets doubled as rinks; the choppy slap of tennis balls reverberating against hockey sticks a constant sound. As pre-teens, my friends and I would put on lip gloss and tight jeans to hang out at the Friday night junior hockey games. I still find comfort in the sound of skate blades slicing across ice and that sweaty, chemical odour of public arenas.

My experiences are not unique in a country with a 95-year-old broadcast institution called Hockey Night in Canada. Rachel Reid, the Nova Scotian author of the queer hockey romance Heated Rivalry, grew up a hockey fanatic, more interested in playing the game than ogling boys. Jacob Tierney, who wrote and directed the TV adaptation of Reid’s 2019 bestseller, was raised in Montreal, where the Canadiens (or the Habs, as the team is affectionately known) are considered sacred.

Sue Carter is a Toronto-based freelance writer and arts worker

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.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Sabrina Lantos/AP

© Photograph: Sabrina Lantos/AP

© Photograph: Sabrina Lantos/AP

While the famous penalty technique is the ultimate act of showmanship, the cost of failure is too high to justify

Being too smart for your own good is usually drummed out of children before they leave school but sometimes people cannot help themselves. The Panenka penalty, successfully executed, offers the limited benefit of making a goalkeeper look silly and the taker a genius but Brahim Díaz is the latest to learn the cost of what happens when it goes wrong.

Díaz was given 15 minutes to consider what to do with his spot-kick after the ludicrous levels of drama in the Africa Cup of Nations final. Maybe this was his undoing: being able to ponder every option, from the rudimentary to the artistic, until deciding to replicate Antonin Panenka’s creation with what could, and should, have been the last kick of the tournament.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

Dear Abby advises a woman on her parents' technology use.

Maher urged Hollywood elites and members of the Golden Globe Foundation to “get out of your f--king bubble” and stop being “f--king smug assholes.”

From charity workers to synchronised swimmers via a young lad having tea with his nan, these people all inspired award-winning photographs

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Adam Docker

© Photograph: Adam Docker

© Photograph: Adam Docker

Forget draughty bunk rooms and awkward social encounters, hostels now provide home comforts and a sense of community private rentals will never match

‘Penguins? In Snowdonia?” I asked incredulously. “That’s right!” came the enthusiastic reply from our newest hostel companion. We were standing in the large kitchen of The Rocks hostel in Capel Curig, a village in the north-east of Eryri national park (Snowdonia), chatting amiably while waiting for our teas to brew.

“Head up Moel Siabod to the lake, and that’s where the penguins are. You’ll see a sign warning about feeding them,” he said. “But even if they’re hiding and you don’t see one, it’s one of the best walks in the area.”

Continue reading...

© Photograph: PR

© Photograph: PR

© Photograph: PR

Shortage raises rates of maternity intervention, while improving access to care could potentially save 4.3m lives a year, say experrts

A global shortage of nearly a million midwives is leaving pregnant women without the basic care needed to prevent harm, including the deaths of mothers and babies, according to new research.

Almost half the shortage was in Africa, where nine in 10 women lived in a country without enough midwives, the researchers said.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Stefanie Glinski/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Stefanie Glinski/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Stefanie Glinski/AFP/Getty Images

We are in 1942 Stuttgart – though the sight of modern wheelie bins says otherwise – as a woman at a facility dedicated to breeding Aryan babies tries to smuggle two Jewish children to safety

This second world war-set drama should not be confused with a famous unrealised film project of similar name. That one is the Holocaust-themed feature based on the novel Wartime Lies by Louis Begley that Stanley Kubrick tinkered with for years before finally abandoning; Suspiria director Luca Guadagnino is now rumoured to be trying to get it off the ground. Like the Kubrick/Guadagnino, this Aryan Papers, written and directed by ultra-low-budget film-maker Danny Patrick (The Film Festival, The Irish Connection), takes its name from the Nazi-issued certificate, also known as the Ariernachweis, which people were compelled to carry during those dark times to prove they weren’t Jews, Roma or from another persecuted minority.

Apparently, Kubrick abandoned his Aryan Papers in part because he feared it wouldn’t do as well at the box office if it came out after Schindler’s List – just as Full Metal Jacket appeared to have been eclipsed by Platoon. Fortunately for Guadagnino, no matter if and when his Aryan Papers comes out, he will have little to worry about with regards to Patrick’s film, a work that with any luck will be forgotten by next week. Like the embarrassingly bad comedy The Film Festival (AKA The Worst Film Festival Ever), this is a shockingly poor effort on just about every level, from the inept, back-of-a-beer-mat script, the lazy use of obviously not-German, non-period-proofed locations (a modern plastic wheelie bin is visible in several shots), to the frankly insultingly bad acting throughout.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image

As a study says a pet death can hurt as much as that of a relative, three people describe their emotions

Grief over the death of a pet could be as chronic as that for a human family member, according to research. The study, published in the academic journal PLOS One, suggests grieving pet owners can suffer from prolonged grief disorder (PGD).

PGD is a mental health condition that can last months or even years, and often involves intense longing and despair, and problems socialising and going about daily tasks. Currently, only those grieving the loss of a person can be diagnosed.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Lisa Schaetzle/Getty Images

© Photograph: Lisa Schaetzle/Getty Images

© Photograph: Lisa Schaetzle/Getty Images

Studies detecting microplastics throughout human bodies have made for alarming reading in recent years. But last week, the Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington, reported on major doubts among a group of scientists about how some of this research has been conducted.

Damian tells Ian Sample how he first heard about the concerns, why the scientists think the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives, and where it leaves the field. He also reflects on how we should now think about our exposure to microplastics

Clips: Vox, Detroit Local 4

Continue reading...

© Illustration: Guardian Design

© Illustration: Guardian Design

© Illustration: Guardian Design

Latest data will help to reassure Bank of England that inflationary pressures are easing

US president says Keir Starmer’s plan to give away territory is ‘weakness’

Gold hits record high as US president insists ‘there can be no going back’ on demand for island

The “Tonight Show” host joked that President Trump hung his new Nobel Prize on the wall “right next to his McDonald’s customer of the month plaque.”

Many of the closed beaches were in Sydney, the site of three of the attacks.

© Jeremy Piper/Reuters

The decision permitted the Trump administration to continue restricting inspections of the conditions inside immigration detention compounds.

© Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times