Ukraine has captured nearly 350 sq km of Russia’s Kursk region, in its largest counter-offensive since the war began, says the FT. The operation, which began at dawn on Tuesday, has been denounced by Vladimir Putin as a “large-scale provocation”. The UK government is preparing for further unrest over the weekend, with 5,000 public order officers either on duty or on standby across England and Wales. Almost 500 people have been arrested, and 149 charged, since the riots began. Royal Mail has unveiled new Tower of London stamps, honouring royals who were executed at the historical site. The famous faces include Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, and the so-called Princes in the Tower, who may or may not have been murdered by Richard III.

We British handle race better than most

When London erupted in the summer of 2011, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph, commentators couldn’t help trying to “make sense of the senseless” – generally using the riots as vindication of whatever theory they already advocated, from an epidemic of fatherlessness to “nascent class war”. Mick Jagger was in town at the time, and he offered a rather more persuasive analysis: “It’s a regular feature of English urban life,” he said. “Every 10 years, you get some riots.” Today, the “Jagger theory” makes far more sense than the “Britain-at-war” narrative being peddled on social media.

Elon Musk has been promoting Twitter users who talk darkly of “Muslim patrols” versus “English patriots”. Others watch arsonists targeting migrant hotels, as happened in Sweden years ago, and see Britain heading in the same direction: “towards a two-tier society with a criminal subculture”. But Sweden has the world’s worst record of merging immigrants into the economy. “Britain does far better.” These riots are taking place not against a backdrop of racial tension but in a country where polls show people are more positive about immigrants than almost anywhere else in Europe. Not long ago, Britain had a Hindu prime minister, a Buddhist home secretary, a Muslim mayor of London, a Muslim first minister of Scotland and a black first minister of Wales. “This tends not to happen in countries where skin colour is a serious impediment to progress.”

Vultures are more useful than you might think, says Smithsonian Magazine. By eating the remains of other animals, the scavengers play a crucial role in preventing the spread of disease and bacteria. A case in point is India, where the proliferation of a nasty painkiller for cattle that is fatal to the birds reduced the vulture population from tens of millions in the mid-1990s to near zero. In a new study, scientists calculate that between 2000 and 2005 this drop-off led to the deaths of around 100,000 people a year.

One of the latest TikTok trends is “rawdogging”. Not to be confused with the crude slang for having sex without a condom, this is the term for spending long periods of time awake with no entertainment – usually on a plane – to prove how tough you are. “Just rawdogged a seven-hour flight (new personal best), no headphones, no movie, no water, nothing,” reads one typical post. “Rawdogging the flight map, the only thing to watch while flying Virgin Atlantic,” boasts another user of his 11-hour effort. I gave it a go, on a six-hour Megabus journey from London to Cardiff, says Rich Pelley in The Guardian. “I’ve never been so utterly bored in my entire life.”

What the best stories teach us about ourselves

It’s only when you start re-reading old stories to your children that you realise the extent to which “the characters still live inside your mind”, says Mary Wakefield in The Spectator. I remember the awful realisation that I, like wicked Edmund from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, might well have betrayed my siblings for some of the White Witch’s Turkish delight. “I still sometimes think about how very delicious it must have been.” It’s a useful thing to know about yourself, and a help in understanding others. So it’s sad, and significant, that children across the West are giving up on books. A survey of UK teachers found that they classed a third of their students as “weak readers”; less than half of today’s kids say they read for fun.

It can’t help that many new children’s books are “tediously politicised”, like the noxious (but bestselling) series Little People Big Dreams, which aren’t stories but mini lectures about off-the-shelf “heroes” like Emmeline Pankhurst and Greta Thunberg. Is this really what kids want to read? Or is it what their bien pensant godparents want to be seen buying them? The old stories, the ones that fed a lifelong love of reading, were often written by authors who didn’t imagine that they were even writing for children, let alone indoctrinating them politically. The books of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton are enormous fun, but they certainly don’t toe a political line. “You have to write the book that wants to be written,” said Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time). “And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups then you write it for children.”

Mountain biker Romano Püntener is the only athlete representing Liechtenstein at the Paris Olympics, which is perhaps unsurprising given the tiny landlocked country’s tiddly population of 38,000. But his solitary status has marked him out as something of a celebrity among the other athletes, says BBC Sport. Andy Murray hunted the 20-year-old down in the Olympic Village so that the two could swap pin-badges – the knickknacks are regularly traded by competitors at international competitions, and the shrewd Scot knew Püntener’s would be a rarity.

To The Guardian:

Hannah Ewens’s article (“Do you mind listening to that with headphones?”) must ring a bell with many a traveller. I am reminded of the wonderful account by Sandi Toksvig of an occasion when a group of young men were making thorough nuisances of themselves on a train. She approached them, saying in her cultured headmistress voice: “Now that will do!” It worked.

Bob Caldwell, Badby, Northamptonshire

It’s Shreyas Royal, a 15-year-old chess prodigy who became the youngest ever British grandmaster at the British Chess Championships in Hull last weekend. The previous record holder, David Howell, attained the status aged 16 in 2007. Royal declared when he was seven that he wanted to be the world champion by the time he was 21. Now, he says, a more “realistic and mature me” would be happy with a consistent spot in the top 10.