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Livingston striker Tete Yengi and former Italy Under-21 winger Cristian Volpato have been named in Australia’s 26-man squad for the World Cup despite the uncapped duo being late additions to Tony Popovic’s pre-tournament training squad.
But 41-times capped Hibernian forward Martin Boyle is one of those who misses out.
Yengi had been loaned out by Livingston to Japanese club Machida Zelvia in January despite his parent club struggling to avoid relegation from the Scottish Premiership.
But the 25-year-old caught Popovic’s eye after scoring six goals in 22 appearances as his new side finished third in Japan’s East Region – and reached the final of the Asian Champions League.
Meanwhile, world governing body Fifa ratified Sassuolo 22-year-old Volpato’s decision to switch on Friday.
Former Brighton & Hove Albion goalkeeper Mat Ryan, now of Levante, and Melbourne City striker Mathew Leckie are poised to equal the national record by being selected for a fourth World Cup.
Former Dundee United left-back Aziz Behich, now of Melbourne, and former Hull City midfielder Jackson Irvine, now at St Pauli are on track to feature at their third.
Meanwhile, Heart of Midlothian midfielder Cammy Devlin and Aberdeen-born Leicester City centre-half Harry Souttar, whose brother John is in the Scotland squad, are among those chosen for their second.
Also included are Swansea City centre-half Cameron Burgess, Watford winger Nestory Irankunda, Norwich City striker Mohamed Toure
Popovic said: “Some difficult decisions had to be made – that’s the nature of major tournaments.
“But it’s also a credit to all the players involved over the past few weeks who worked extremely hard during an extended and challenging pre-camp.”
Former Hearts defender Kye Rowles, now with DC United, had also been added late to the training squad but did not make the final selection.
Australia face Switzerland in their final pre-tournament friendly on Saturday before opening their finals campaign against Turkey on 14 June.
Colombia’s presidential election is headed to a runoff on June 21. Far-right outsider, Abelardo de la Espriella, will face leftist senator, Ivan Cepeda. Professor Jorge Restrepo describes de la Espriella’s rise in the polls as a punishment vote against Colombia’s long-established political class.
Published On 1 Jun 20261 Jun 2026
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Bembou Silaty, Guinea – Mamadou Aliou walks through the small village of Bembou Silaty in northwestern Guinea carrying an irresolvable contradiction.
The 38-year-old works in the environmental health and safety department for a bauxite mining company, yet he is also an activist striving to improve life in his community, which often means criticising the actions of another mining company in the area.
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“Before these companies arrived, we cultivated our land, and it sustained us,” Aliou told Al Jazeera.
“We could cover our daily needs, especially food. But now, when a piece of land is registered and belongs to a mining company, you have nothing there any more.”
The foreign-linked mining companies are part of the global scramble for Guinea’s bauxite. The West African nation holds the world’s biggest reserves of the ore, which is the source material for alumina and ultimately aluminium, a metal essential for car and aircraft frames, windows, wind turbines, and solar panels.
Over the past three decades, Guinea has multiplied its bauxite production tenfold. More than a dozen projects of bauxite production are currently ongoing in the country, according to the online cadastre.
As the global energy transition demands ever more aluminium, it has placed Guinea in a strategically crucial position. Approximately 75 percent of the bauxite exported by the country over the past decade has ended up in China, which produces 60 percent of the world’s aluminium.
Companies from Russia, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates have also established themselves in the country to secure the ore. In Bembou Silaty, an Indian company that began operations in 2019 now holds an exploitation concession until 2034.
Located in the prefecture of Telimele (Kindia region), Bembou Silaty has undergone a transformation since bauxite was discovered on its land about five years ago.
Yet, on the ground, many lament the cost: Contaminated water, loss of farmland, and a steep decline in agricultural productivity.
In the traditional bauxite heartlands of Kindia and Boke, the main roads are in notably good condition, a cut above the rest of the country. Steady jobs in technical roles or transport logistics have created economic opportunities for some Guineans.
Yet Bembou Silaty remains a quiet, peaceful village without electricity, and farming methods that are untouched by mechanisation.
Less than 2km (1.2 miles) away, however, the lush green landscape and mild climate of the rainy season give way to the electric-powered site of the Indian mining company.
There, excavators and trucks laden with bauxite constantly traverse the wide, unpaved roads, built to accommodate the heavy traffic, in a noisy, busy zone where the mining economy bulldozes its way forward.
People working in technical roles at the mine can earn up to about $300 a month.
For other locals who make a living from farming, most don’t have a regular wage and rely on the yield from their crops.
Across Guinea, an estimated half of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihood.
Locals in Bembou Silaty say every hectare claimed by mining is a hectare lost to farming, in a country that spent more than $500m importing rice in 2024.
“They give you compensation for your land, but it’s not enough, and in the end, it’s mismanaged,” Aliou said.
“Within a month or two, someone who received 50 or 100 million Guinean francs ($5,700-11,400) has nothing left. No land, no money. They have to start over, from below zero.”
Locals who still own land continue to grow rice, cassava, peanuts and cashews in the village, but they have ever less space and agricultural productivity is falling.
The village women have set up an association, “Allawalli” (which means “God help us” in Fula), to work cooperatively.
Walking through the alleys of Bembou Silaty, a few houses stand out.
They are made of cement, which withstands the rains better than the more common mud-brick homes, though many remain unfinished.
Locals say they were built with compensation money.
Fatoumata Binta Bah, a neighbour of Aliou’s, comes from a family of farmers. They once cultivated cashews, their livelihood.
Then the Indian mining company started up operations and offered them less than 50 million Guinean francs (about $5,700) for their land. That compensation, paid as a lump sum, seemed like a decent amount of money, she says.
But now, the money is gone, and their new house is still incomplete.
“The land they took from us was productive. That’s what we lived on,” said Bah, 20, as she prepared tea over a fire in the family courtyard.
“In the end, it wasn’t enough,” she lamented.
The Indian company did not respond to Al Jazeera’s questions on the purchase of land.
Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the village, surgical holes drilled into the ground mark where mining companies have tested for bauxite – a reminder to the farmers that the impact on the land is felt even before extraction begins.
In a recent report, Djami Diallo, the Guinean minister of the environment and sustainable development, stated that each year, certain companies had their impact studies and evaluation reports rejected for failing to comply with environmental standards.
Three or four companies in Boke, Kindia’s neighbouring region that is considered the bauxite capital in the country, were said to be affected. But the minister acknowledged that “just because companies do not meet the conditions to obtain the compliance certificate does not mean that everything stops.”
Not all homes in Bembou Silaty, a community of about 5,000, have indoor toilets and plumbing. In the centre of the village, there are communal latrines for those who do not have facilities available in their homes. Showers can be taken in the same place, using a bucket and water collected from the spring.
One small gain for the community since the mining company’s arrival is a new water point in the village. The tap serves nearly all the residents. Even Aliou uses it to fill buckets for his household – for cooking and drinking – though he says he knows the water contains iron, as contamination occurs.
Still, he considers himself luckier than his friends in the neighbouring village of Koussadji Dow, who rely on now-brown, contaminated river water.
Tala Oury Sow, a trader and farmer, washes her cooking utensils in the murky river water – a daily struggle.
She starts speaking softly, surrounded by neighbours, but her voice rises to a shout.
“Do you think we can live like this?
“We had hoped the mining company’s arrival would improve things, but it has gotten worse,” she protested.
“Since the mining companies came, we’ve had this problem with the water. The children get sick, and the parents too,” added Mariama Kindi Diallo, a farmer, in her courtyard.
“The doctors tell us not to drink the rain or river water. There are no roads, no school, no phone signal. What are we supposed to do? We are asking for help to have a dignified life,” she pleaded, as her family and neighbours nodded in agreement.
The Indian company did not respond to requests for comment on these issues.
To escape the increasingly difficult conditions in villages like Bembou Silaty, some people leave the rural areas and head to the capital, Conakry.
Bauxite mining so dominates Guinea that one can chance upon a driver of one of the trains hauling ore from the mines to the port of Kamsar.
Alpha, who did not want his real name published, works for a United States-backed company and provides a window into the immense volume of resources being exported.
“We operate six trains of 150 wagons each day,” he said, explaining that the annual target for 2025 was to export 17.5 million tonnes of bauxite.
“The government wants to change things, because the profits we make in Guinea right now are small. We need refineries here to increase the state’s revenue,” he added.
Alpha lives near the coast, where his job has allowed him to build a house for his family and achieve a standard of living unattainable for most of his compatriots.
The government of Mamady Doumbouya, which came to power in a 2021 coup, is attempting to reorganise the mining sector. It is pressing investors to process bauxite within Guinea, ensuring a portion of the value stays in the country.
Processing bauxite into aluminium can multiply its price by 37 times.
Instability in Iran amid the US and Israel’s war has contributed to rising aluminium prices, which surpassed $3,600 per tonne in April.
Doumbouya is set to lead the country for the next seven years, after winning the December 2025 elections with nearly 87 percent of the vote. While opponents view him as illegitimate, many Guineans agree on the need to reform the mining sector.
Achieving this, however, requires a huge increase in electricity generation – power that is non-existent in villages like Bembou Silaty and unreliable even in Conakry, where blackouts are frequent when fans and TVs are switched on at night.
Guinea is working with neighbouring Senegal on a solution: Using Senegalese gas to generate enough electricity to process its bauxite on African soil. Currently, both countries export raw materials, while jobs and wealth are created elsewhere.
More than 3,000km (1,900 miles) away, across the ocean, Spain is also a part of the Guinean bauxite story.
Parets del Valles, a municipality of 18,000 people less than 30km (19 miles) from Barcelona, represents the journey’s end.
From the town centre to its industrial outskirts, businesses specialising in aluminium are plentiful: Aluminium distribution, carpentry, and window fitting, much of them serving household needs.
For Spain, Europe’s largest consumer of Guinean bauxite, more than 90 percent of its imports come from Guinea-Conakry.
The aluminium produced there, mainly in the country’s north, feeds the automotive industry and serves both industrial and domestic purposes.
Parets is another world compared with the bauxite’s point of origin in Guinea.
In Spain, there is light, hot water, paved roads – all the base elements of a decent life. It’s why many say growing numbers of West Africans are arriving in Parets and across the Valles Oriental region. This is part of a broader trend in Catalonia and Spain, according to the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE): The Guinean population has quadrupled in Spain since 2000 – from 2,700 to 11,000 people – and in Catalonia from 1,000 to 4,000.
These figures don’t include those who go unregistered.
Increasingly, more boats are leaving directly from Guinea, towards the Canary Islands and on to mainland Europe. According to Frontex, the European Union border security agency, more Guineans arrived in the Canary Islands, Spain, in 2023 (2,324) than in the previous 13 years combined. In 2024 and 2025 combined, another 6,000 Guineans arrived.
Migrants, predominantly men from Senegal and increasingly from Guinea, come alone, settling where they have contacts and job prospects. The newest arrivals, often very young, spend long hours with their mobile phones as their sole companion – the only tether to the country they left behind.
Many left, following the bauxite trail, hoping to find something more in the places where their resources are both enjoyed and exploited.
As Aliou, back in Bembou Silaty, says: “If you compare the bauxite we export with what we get in return, the difference is enormous. We gain almost nothing. Just enough to survive.”
This article was produced in collaboration with the Catalan association SETEM Catalunya, promoted by the Connect for Global Change consortium and Lafede.cat, and with financial support from the European Union and the Government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya)
Matt Brown, who starred with his family in the Discovery reality television show “Alaskan Bush People,” was found dead in the Okanogan River in Washington state, law enforcement officials said Sunday.
Brown’s body was discovered Saturday by a group of private citizens who were conducting a search, the Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
Brown’s brother, Bear Brown, said in a video posted Saturday on social media that fellow brother Noah had been with the search team, helped pull the body out of the river and identified him.
The official cause and manner of death is still to be determined by the coroner, the sheriff’s office said. But the Brown family believes Matt Brown died by suicide, Bear Brown said in the video.
Witnesses said they saw Matt Brown in or near the river and that he “took his own life,” Bear Brown said on social media.
“I would have never suspected he would hurt himself, honestly,” Bear Brown said in the emotional video. “He struggled for a long time.”
Bear Brown said his brother had battled with alcohol and drugs and that Matt Brown told him in their last conversation that he had “fallen off the wagon.”
The Brown family and their life in the Alaskan wilderness were the subject of the reality TV show “Alaskan Bush People,” which ran on the Discovery Channel from 2014 to 2022.
Suicide prevention and crisis counseling resources
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek help from a professional or call 988. The nationwide three-digit mental health crisis hotline will connect callers with trained mental health counselors. Or text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line.
NEWARK, N.J. — The mayor of Newark imposed a curfew early Sunday around an immigration detention center in New Jersey after a series of intense clashes between protesters and police.
The curfew around Delaney Hall will be in place between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. until further notice, Mayor Ras Baraka said in a statement.
The move came after another night of standoffs between law enforcement and demonstrators at the facility, as protesters could be seen in photographs and videos fighting over barricades as police used riot shields to push them back. A video posted on social media showed police on horseback marching into crowds, attempting to break up groups of demonstrators.
The high-profile demonstrations at Delaney Hall began this month after advocates said detainees launched a hunger strike over poor living conditions at the 1,000-bed facility, the latest focus of opposition over the federal government’s immigration crackdown.
The private company GEO Group operates the lockup under the supervision of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The shuttered facility reopened for immigration detainees in February 2025.
New Jersey state police on Friday replaced federal immigration enforcement agents who had been facing off against protesters at the facility for days.
In a statement Sunday morning, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said masked people attacked a barrier in a designated protest area set up by state police and were “throwing projectiles, utilizing the barriers as weapons, and lighting tires on fire in the street.”
“These actions put both peaceful protesters and law enforcement in danger,” Sherrill said, urging calm to focus on advocating for “better conditions for the detainees, for their families, and ultimately, for the closure of Delaney Hall.”
Sherrill also said that the federal government has reopened family visits at Delaney Hall starting Sunday.
Asked about visitations resuming, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, “To be clear: Visitation was only suspended because of violent riots. Now that we have a secure perimeter, visitation can resume.”
With Iga Swiatek’s early French Open exit meaning new men’s and women’s champions will be crowned, BBC Sport analyses how the draws have been blown open.
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Cuba has begun distributing donated powdered milk from Mexico and Uruguay as the island faces severe shortages and a deepening economic crisis. Officials say young children, pregnant women and paediatric facilities will be prioritised.
Published On 1 Jun 20261 Jun 2026
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Brunei had been a British protectorate since 1888, and as such, was reliant on the British armed forces for protection and defense.
On 31 May 1961, to prepare for future independence, recruits from Brunei began military training, creating the first Brunei military force named the Brunei Malay Regiment. On 31 May 1965, the regiment was honoured with the royal title.
When Brunei gained independence from Britain on 1 January 1984, the Royal Brunei Malay Regiment was renamed as the Royal Brunei Armed Forces.
There is no compulsory military service and only Brunei citizens with Malay ethnicity are allowed to enlist in the Royal Brunei Armed Forces.
This is a day to recognise and pay tribute to the services of the land, air and navy forces. Around the country, the festival is celebrated with military parades, artillery shows, parachuting displays and exhibitions by various units of the armed forces.
Far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella will face left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda in the run-off for Colombia’s presidential election next month.
After polls closed on Sunday, the two candidates quickly surged ahead in the vote tally, extinguishing the hopes of right-wing Senator Paloma Valencia, a former frontrunner.
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As of Sunday afternoon, with 99 percent of the votes tallied, de la Espriella took the lead, with 43 percent of the ballots cast in his favour.
Cepeda trailed him by more than 600,000 votes, earning 40 percent support.
Neither candidate breached the 50-percent threshold needed to avoid a head-to-head match-up on June 21. But the results are likely to buoy de la Espriella’s campaign going into the final round.
Cepeda had consistently topped public opinion polls in the final weeks before the vote. A May 24 poll from the National Consulting Centre (CNC) showed him with more than 33 percent support, ahead of de la Espriella’s 30.9 percent.
Questions about security were at the forefront of voters’ concerns going into Sunday’s election.
De la Espriella, a businessman and lawyer who has never held elected office, leaned heavily into fears of crime as he launched an outsider campaign, similar to the dark-horse bid of Argentinian President Javier Milei.
By contrast, Cepeda is a well-known quantity in Colombian politics. His father was a senator, too, before he was assassinated in 1994, in what was widely considered to be an act of political violence.
Cepeda himself has served as a senator since 2014. Before that, he served in the Chamber of Deputies, representing the capital, Bogota.
During his political career, he became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute with former right-wing President Alvaro Uribe, whom he accused of complicity with right-wing paramilitaries.
Uribe initially sued Cepeda for defamation, but in a dramatic twist, Colombia’s Supreme Court dismissed the charge and instead investigated Uribe for witness tampering.
While Uribe was initially found guilty and sentenced to 12 years of house arrest, an appeals court ultimately struck down the verdict, citing procedural errors, including insufficient evidence.
Central to the rift in Colombia’s politics is the country’s six-decade-long internal conflict.
Since 1964, criminal networks, government forces, left-wing rebels and right-wing paramilitaries have all jockeyed against one another for power and territory.
Cepeda has been critical of right-wing efforts to solve the conflict through military might alone.
Instead, he has allied himself with Colombia’s outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing figure ever elected to the country’s highest office.
A former rebel fighter, Petro has championed a policy he calls “Total Peace”, which actively seeks negotiated solutions to the fighting.
While critics have questioned the efficacy of “Total Peace”, pointing to a recent uptick in violence, Cepeda has nevertheless pledged to carry it forward. He represents Petro’s left-wing Historic Pact party in this year’s election.
In an interview this month with CNN, Cepeda acknowledged the policy’s “immense challenges”, saying: “We cannot continue to develop conversations that do not yield clear results.”
But he rejected overly militaristic solutions, as well as the prospect of intervention by the United States. The US-led “war on drugs”, Cepeda said, has “failed spectacularly”.
De la Espriella, meanwhile, has embraced the kind of hardline security platform commonly associated with El Salvador’s leader, Nayib Bukele.
His platform includes a pledge to crack down on crime and build 10 megaprisons in Colombia.
Nicknamed “The Tiger”, he founded the Defenders of the Homeland political party and is known to rally with the slogan, “Stand firm for the nation”.
“The only peace process I believe in is one imposed by the force of arms and the laws of the republic,” de la Espriella told The Associated Press news agency this month.
Like US President Donald Trump, de la Espriella has also threatened to launch a bombing campaign to disrupt drug-trafficking, killing suspects by downing planes and shooting boats.
But such campaigns have been widely denounced as a form of extrajudicial killing, effectively denying suspects the chance of defending themselves in a court of law.
More than 23.6 million Colombians voted in Sunday’s election, though there was a high number of blank or nullified ballots.
Early estimates, with 99 percent of ballots tallied, indicate that 245,342 voting sheets were null, and another 406,830 were left blank.
The second round is likely to be an uphill battle for Cepeda. Colombia’s right-wing is expected to consolidate behind de la Espriella in the second round.
In Sunday’s vote count, more than 10.3 million ballots were cast for de la Espriella, compared with roughly 9.7 million for Cepeda.
A victory for the right would continue a regional trend in Latin America. Last year alone, left-wing governments in Chile, Honduras and Bolivia were all replaced by right-wing presidential contenders.
De la Espriella signalled his optimism about the second round in a social media post as the results rolled in.
“We are going to defeat tyranny and absolutism,” de la Espriella wrote. “We have advanced to the run-off thanks to the more than 10 million Colombians who answered the roar. In 21 days, we will make history!”
ROCKER Ronnie Wood has got satisfaction on his birthday today – after being surprised with a classic red phone box from his wife.
The Rolling Stones legend was gifted the timeless telephone booth by his honky tonk woman Sally Humphreys to mark his 79th birthday.
The original British Telecom K6 phone box, costing some £5,000, did the moonlight mile as it was delivered to his country estate in Little Gaddesden, Herts.
The fixture means the former hard-partying icon won’t be going off the hook anymore.
Wood married his current wife, theatre producer Sally, 48, in 2012 and welcomed their twin daughters just four years later.
Speaking to Hello! Magazine he said: “Any time I’m with her and the girls, that’s the best for me, nothing tops it.
“When the twins come into our bed and we’re all snuggled up together, that, for me, is wonderful. My idea of heaven.
“It’s special. The girls are so cuddly and gorgeous. I’m a lucky man.”
A source said Ronnie is celebrating his birthday at his holiday home in Barcelona.
WASHINGTON — The congressman returned home last Fourth of July to startling stories in Southern California as immigration patrols swept through communities, and one constituent told him about starting to carry a passport as proof of the right to be in the country.
Rep. Mark Takano, whose American-born parents were both incarcerated as young children with their families during the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II, could not help but see the parallels between that chapter of American history and this one.
“I do feel like there’s a similarity of circumstance of my own 2-year-old father and my 1-year-old mother being labeled as enemy aliens and they’re considered a danger to national security,” the Riverside Democrat told the Associated Press in a recent interview.
“They’re put into these incarceration camps,” he said. “Similar arguments have been made by this administration — that immigrants pose a grave danger to our country and it’s for the security of our country that we’re doing this.”
President Trump’s campaign to achieve the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history is at an inflection point. Americans are seeing what it looks like to round up, detain and deport thousands of people, particularly in the aftermath of the deaths this year of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, U.S. citizens protesting the federal crackdown in Minneapolis.
The White House changed the leadership at the Department of Homeland Security as it reframes its approach. New Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised to keep the department off the front pages.
But Trump is also under mounting pressure from conservative groups not to let up on the goal of deporting 1 million people a year. The president’s Republican allies in Congress are fueling the immigration and deportation actions with billions of dollars in special funds.
Takano, the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, has drawn from his own family history — and the country’s eventual redress to Japanese Americans who were detained — to challenge Trump’s approach.
“We look back on that era of history as a shameful one, as a time when our political leaders failed the Constitution, failed the American people,” he said.
A high school history teacher before being elected to Congress in 2012, Takano grew up in Southern California and came to understand the family stories.
His grandfather Isao Takano arrived in the U.S. from Hiroshima and married Kazue Takahashi, a U.S.-born citizen. Together they settled in Bellevue, Wash., and started a business growing tomatoes, strawberries and chrysanthemums for the marketplace in Seattle.
When the U.S. entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they were among some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, immigrants and those born in the U.S., forcibly relocated.
His father, William, was 2 years old when his family was sent in 1942 to the incarceration camp at Tule Lake in Central California. His mother, Nancy Tsugiye Sakamoto, born in California to American-born parents, was a year old when she was relocated to the detention facility in Heart Mountain, Wyo.
Then, as now, he said, people are being swept up in the anti-immigrant detentions.
“Will Americans generations from now visit ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and think to themselves, how could our government do this?” Takano said during a House floor speech, referring to the Trump administration’s immigration detention facility in Florida.
“These future generations of Americans will look to us, the Congress, to see what we did to try to stop it.”
Takano remembers his father taking him to see the land the family once owned. He learned about his great-uncles who served in the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team of Japanese American soldiers; one was killed in action in Italy. He recalls his own father later collected donations for the national redress campaign.
In 1988 Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which sought to apologize for the “grave injustice” that had been done and provide $20,000 to each person detained. President Reagan signed it into law.
Takano’s parents were among those who received a letter of apology from the federal government, he said, and a payment.
Talks are underway among some in Congress, he said, for a similar redress to the people who have had their car windows smashed in, their homes raided and livelihoods upended as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement operations.
“Remarkably the country did come to realize the mistake,” he said. “I believe we’re living through one of those eras of mistakes, and I believe we can come out of this moment stronger.”
Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.
Amid the excitement of youth, world number three Zverev underlined his status as favourite for the men’s singles title with a clinical straight-set win over Jesper de Jong, which sent him through to the quarter-finals at Roland Garros for the sixth consecutive year.
The second seed, 29, has long been earmarked as a future Grand Slam champion but despite reaching finals at three of the four majors – and leading Carlos Alcaraz by two sets to one at the French Open in 2024 – he is still searching for his maiden title.
However, with world number one Jannik Sinner and Djokovic both eliminated in the first week, plus defending champion Alcaraz absent because of injury, the German’s route to the title has opened up.
De Jong, ranked more than 100 places below Zverev, went toe-to-toe with the heavy-hitting German in the opener, racing into a 3-0 lead and later leading 3-0 in the tie-break before Zverev reeled off seven consecutive points to take the set.
Zverev had to be patient in the second, waiting until the 10th game to convert one of only two break-point opportunities offered to him, but was too strong for his opponent in a 24-minute third set, completing a 7-6 (7-3) 6-4 6-1 win.
Relentless on serve in the final two sets, he conceded just six points across nine service games while also showing his formidable touch at the net, winning 29 of 38 points.
“It was a bit difficult in the beginning,” Zverev said on court. “I didn’t start strong and he started really fast. But once I found my rhythm, I was comfortable.
“My game is there. It’s about showing it on the match courts.”
Zverev is one of only three top-10 seeds left in the draw, one of just two players with experience of playing in a major final and is competing on a surface on which he has won nine of his 24 ATP titles.
Perhaps most crucially, while many of his rivals have battled through multiple five-set matches, he has won three of his four matches in straight sets.
A military vehicle patrols on the road in Yangon, Myanmar, in February 2022. An accidental explosion in a rebel-held part of the country on Sunday killed 55 people and injured many more, rebel leaders said. File photo by Stringer/EPA-EFE
May 31 (UPI) — Fifty-five people were killed, including six children, in an accidental detonation of mining explosives in a rebel-held area of Myanmar, the armed group said Sunday.
The Palaung Self Liberation Front/Ta’ang National Liberation Army, also known as the PSLF/TNLA, said in a statement that many others were also hurt in the blast, which happened Sunday afternoon local time in northern Shan State.
Rescuers told the Shwe Phee Myay News Agency the entire village of Kaung Tat in Namkham Township had been virtually destroyed and that “dozens” had been injured in the disaster.
Local officials have sent out an urgent call for blood donations as emergency workers tried to free victims trapped in rubble.
The PSLF/TNLA confirmed that many homes in the village were damaged when soft gunpowder stored for mining operations accidentally exploded at around 12:30 p.m.
The fatalities included 25 females and 30 males, they said, adding that the cause of the explosion will be investigated in detail.
Authorities, they said, “will take action in accordance with the law.”
The Ta’ang National Liberation Army is one of the main ethnic rebel groups in Myanmar fighting for independence from the central government, which along with its ally the Palaung Self Liberation Front comprise a front of resistance to the country’s military government.
