“The English didn’t just lose a penalty shootout on Sunday”, says the Swiss tabloid Blick. After a horrible night of fights, frights and racist slurs as England fell to Italy on penalties at Wembley, the Three Lions can “wave goodbye to a lot of respect from the rest of Europe” too. Bukayo Saka, 19, Jadon Sancho, 21, and Marcus Rashford, 23, were taunted with monkey emojis on social media within minutes of missing penalties. By Monday morning, a mural of Rashford in Manchester had been vandalised with racist graffiti.

A week ago, I was just worried about getting my jab – “now I’m more worried about where we’re getting bread from”, says Paddy Harper in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa). In my hometown of Durban, in the northeast province of KwaZulu-Natal, where rioting started last week, people are being murdered, three malls have been “stripped” and the city centre has been trashed. The spark that ignited this chaos was the imprisonment last week of Jacob Zuma – the former president was put away for being in contempt of a corruption trial that is charging him with fraud, racketeering and money laundering in a £3bn arms deal (which he denies). But then the violence spread to Gauteng, around Johannesburg, and beyond: major roads have been blocked, 200 shopping malls looted and up to $1bn worth of goods stolen or destroyed. At least 117 people have died and more than 3,000 arrested. Vigilante groups are patrolling neighbourhoods. President Cyril Ramaphosa has warned of food, fuel and medicine shortages and has called for 25,000 troops to support the overwhelmed police.

Irina Gladkya, the female arm wrestler who’s gone viral by annihilating male opponents on South Beach in Miami this week. The epitome of girl power, the 5-foot-6 Russian lawyer, known as “Black Diamond”, has been crowned arm wrestling World Champion thirteen times.

In 1972, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Jerry Foster famously went on American television to declare that by “around 2040 to 2050, civilised life as we know it on this planet will cease to exist”. His team had used early computer modelling, based on data including population growth, industrial output and pollution, to predict that society would collapse by the middle of the 21st century.

Despite his sharp criticisms of Islamism and his attempts to cut back France’s generous pension scheme, Emmanuel Macron “has turned into something of a closet socialist”, says Charlemagne in The Economist. He’s handing out €300 to 18-year-olds to spend on “culture” and capping university meals at €1. Poor, retired farmers are being given an extra €100 a month, a policy nabbed from the Communist Party. “In his well-cut suits and shiny leather shoes”, the former banker doesn’t look like a class warrior. Perhaps that’s the idea: his strongest political competition comes from right-wing figures such as Marine Le Pen. But his mixed-up politics suits a country that’s “happy to live with messy compromise”.

I fear London is dying, says Tanya Gold in The Telegraph. People yell at you, homes are hideously expensive and “people prefer to have a breadstick delivered by lorry” than visit the ailing high street, further choking the capital’s heaving roads. On Sunday, Wembley was swamped by fans drinking for 10 hours before the Euros final, but summer violence is a citywide tradition. “Politicians faced with riots pray for rain.” Yet the rain is “monstrous”, as we’ve “covered our gardens for parking spaces” and dug basements into the ground “like the dwarves of Moria”. The waters rose over South Hampstead and Raynes Park on Monday, which never used to happen. It felt like “the story of Noah in concrete”. A city needs to be porous to survive, and London isn’t. There is a sense that things “are slipping out of control”.