Fans were celebrating on Trafalgar Square and across the country until 2am after England reached a major football final for the first time since 1966. More than 27 million people watched last night’s 2-1 victory over Denmark at Wembley. England will play Italy at 8pm in Sunday’s final. Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated yesterday. Armed mercenaries disguised as US law-enforcement agents broke into his home outside Port-au-Prince. Thousands of people are deleting the Covid tracing app to avoid self-isolating, including some NHS staff. The BBC says 4.5 million people could be asked to isolate between now and August 16.
The world’s deepest indoor pool has opened in Dubai. A scuba diver’s paradise, Deep Dive Dubai has a depth of 60 metres and is filled with 14 million litres of fresh water. The pool contains 56 underwater cameras and a sunken city with abandoned apartments, a library and a pool table. Run by cave diver Jarrod Jablonski, it resembles a giant oyster from the outside.
Sport
“It’s the Telegraph wot won” yesterday’s football match, says Alex Wickham in Politico. Gareth Southgate became England manager after his predecessor, Sam Allardyce, was caught in a newspaper sting. While drinking a pint of wine out of a plastic cup in a fancy restaurant in 2016, Allardyce boasted to undercover Telegraph journalists that he could get around player transfer rules for a fee. Within 36 hours of the story’s publication, he was out and Southgate was in as his replacement. “Would England have ever been set on a path to glory” otherwise?
Tomorrow’s world
China is planning to use facial recognition technology to enforce a video-game curfew for minors. The curfew, brought in two years ago, decrees that teens shouldn’t be gaming between 10pm and 8am, and limits their playing time to 90 minutes a day, or three hours at the weekend.
Noted
A three-eyed cow has been saved from a Welsh slaughterhouse by a group of Hindus who believe it is a god. The calf was bought from a beef farmer for £5,000 by the Jain Animal Sanctuary so it can be worshipped. Cows are sacred to Hindus, and this group believe the third eye in the middle of the calf’s forehead means it is special and should be pampered, not killed.
Quoted
Quoted 08.07
“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Life
“Thank God I had football,” England forward Raheem Sterling told The Players’ Tribune back in 2018. His dad was murdered in Jamaica when he was two, he says, and the family moved to Stonebridge, northwest London. There was one saving grace. He watched the new Wembley stadium being built from his back garden. “I grew up in the shadow of my dream. Literally. One day I walked outside and I saw this massive arch in the sky. It was rising up over the top of the housing estates like a mountain.” He and his friends used to kick a ball around on a nearby patch of grass and, when they scored, they could turn round to celebrate facing the famous Wembley arch. “It was like you were there. I was really, like, I can play there. I can do it.”
Snapshot answer
It’s the bass guitar broken by the Clash’s Paul Simonon during a New York concert in 1979. Furious that the crowd didn’t appear to be enjoying themselves, he smashed it up on stage. The moment was captured by photographer Pennie Smith and the picture was used on the cover of their album London Calling. Q magazine named it the best rock’n’roll photograph in history. The Fender bass has now been acquired by the Museum of London.
