With her shy laugh, Naomi Osaka greeted everyone on Center Court at Flushing Meadows. It had been many years since the Japanese player had been seen playing the way she is at this US Open. On Monday night, she surprisingly defeated Coco Gauff, a two-time champion of the tournament in recent years, in straight sets (6-3, 6-2). And she qualified for the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam tournament for the first time in 1,658 days. 1,658 days. More than four years. The last time she had done so, the world was still talking about the pandemic and Donald Trump was fighting in the courts, far from his return to the White House.

The Labubu craze not only forces people to queue up at Barcelona's Portal del Àngel to get one, no matter how hot it is, but it also makes money, a lot of money. Pop Mart, the Chinese company that produces and sells them, has broken records and increased its profits fivefold during the first half of the year thanks to these plush toys with a simultaneously devilish and tender appearance.

"It's like being little again with stickers, but now this is what jackpot "of toys for grown-ups," Pau admits, holding two cardboard boxes about 10 centimetres in his hands. He and his friend Marc are just two of the more than 2,600 people who flooded Barcelona's Portal del Ángel this Saturday to be among the first to get their hands on a Pop Mart figure. collectors and has now landed in the heart of Barcelona with Labubus – plush toys that hang from your backpack – as its main attraction. And, as with the packs of stickers, you buy a figure for about 15 euros without knowing which character you'll get. Labubu The Monsters Wacky Mars, which is made up of characters dressed as food items such as a pot of Chinese noodles or a tempura-battered shrimp, one of the products that has already sold out on the first day of the new store in the Catalan capital.