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7 July

In the headlines

There will be a six-week wait before double-jabbed adults and children can avoid home quarantine. Holding off until 16 August is “isolation insanity”, says the Daily Mail, ruining plans for up to 3.5 million workers and holidaymakers every week as new Covid cases rocket. A 19-year-old obsessed with Satanism has been convicted of murdering sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in London last summer. “I’ve already forgiven him,” their mother, Mina Smallman, told Radio 4 this morning. England will face Italy on Sunday in the Euro 2020 final if they beat Denmark tonight. “Bring home the bacon, lads,” says The Sun.  

Comment of the day

 

 

Gone viral

Prince Charles has wished the England football team good luck with a rendition of Three Lions by the Band of the Coldstream Guards outside Clarence House, his London residence. It’s not the first cover of the football anthem this week – Andrew Lloyd Webber posted a music-hall version on Twitter. The song was released 25 years ago, when England hosted Euro 96, but in the past four weeks has been streamed more than three million times on Spotify. 

Noted

An African tree bark could be the key to curing addiction, says Time magazine. Ibogaine, a compound extracted from iboga bark, can be packed into a pill that allows users to enter a “waking dream state” and rewatch a movie of their lives that will “pull up any traumas’. Former Navy Seal Marcus Capone found his alcoholism symptoms so reduced after a 12-hour trip that he didn’t touch drink for a year. The treatment is two to three times more powerful than anything currently approved. 

Tomorrow’s world

ITV is launching Britain’s first “shoppable” television programmes, starting with Love Island. With a click of the remote, fans who opt in to the service on internet-connected LG TVs can buy the products contestants are wearing from Boots. 

Quoted

“Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.”

American chemist James Bryant Conant

Snapshot answer

It’s Jessica Springsteen, daughter of Bruce, who has qualified for the US Olympic showjumping team with her 12-year-old stallion, Don Juan van de Donkhoeve. The 29-year-old is one of four American riders heading to Tokyo, in what will be her first Olympic Games. Springsteen has made $2m as a rider, but failed to make the US squad in 2016. 

Quirk of history

MI6 employed a real spy named James Bond. In 1964, 11 years after Ian Fleming published Casino Royale, James Albert Bond was sent to Warsaw to collect military secrets from behind the Iron Curtain. According to recently unearthed documents, his arrival did not go unnoticed by Polish counterintelligence officers. Their report found the real Bond “talkative but very cautious” and, perhaps unsurprisingly, “interested in women”.