The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was among 24 prisoners from seven countries freed last night, in the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War. The 32-year-old, who spent 16 months in a Russian prison on bogus spying charges, was one of three Americans released; the Russian returnees include Vadim Krasikov, an FSB hitman convicted of shooting dead a Chechen rebel in Berlin in 2019. GPs have voted in favour of industrial action for the first time since the 1960s. Around 8,500 family doctors are now “working to rule” – by limiting the number of patients they see each day, for example – in a row over funding. Andy Murray’s tennis career is over, after he and doubles partner Dan Evans lost in the Olympics quarter-finals yesterday. The 37-year-old began retirement with some of his trademark dry humour, tweeting: “Never even liked tennis anyway.”

The “ugly truth” behind the prisoner swap

We’re obviously delighted that our reporter Evan Gershkovich has been released from “the Russian gulag”, says The Wall Street Journal. The espionage charges against the 32-year-old were obviously bunk; he endured 491 days behind bars for the crime of doing his job. It was the same for the other Westerners released in yesterday’s prisoner swap: Paul Whelan, a former Marine, had been held on trumped-up espionage claims since 2018. Enormous credit is due to the White House for pulling off such a complicated deal. Also worthy of praise is German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who risked significant political criticism at home by agreeing to release Vadim Krasikov, a convicted FSB assassin serving a “deserved life sentence”.

Yet the swap also highlights an “ugly truth”: Russia takes Western hostages “because it works”. Vladimir Putin has paid no price for imprisoning Gershkovich, and by securing the release of Krasikov he can reassure all his other killers that he has their backs, even if they are captured abroad. Other “thuggish regimes” are using the same playbook. Tehran has pretty much made it official policy to arrest innocent Americans and trade them for Iranians “justly held” in the US. China has done the same with Canadians. The only way to stop this happening is to make it clear to the hostage-takers that they’ll pay a price. Why not arrest some high-profile Russians living in the US? Or even just expel a few Russian journalists? None of this reduces our joy at Gershkovich’s release. But unless something changes, “more Americans will be taken hostage”.

📚📝 Gershkovich didn’t waste his time behind bars. Determined to “leave prison a better writer than he’d arrived”, he read dozens of famous Russian novels and discussed them with his interrogator. (His mother Ella worried about the mental impact of these “dark and voluminous” tomes, and urged him to swap them out for “lighter reads”.) And as part of the prisoner swap, Gershkovich had to complete an official request for presidential clemency addressed to Putin himself. He ended his written submission with a proposal: “After his release, would Putin be willing to sit down for an interview?”

In their first speeches to parliament, new MPs customarily “doff a cap to their predecessor”, says Private Eye. Al Pinkerton, the Lib Dem MP for Surrey Heath, chose to tell his colleagues about Claude Duval, a notorious highwayman who plagued his constituency in the 17th century. “Gracious to the point of obsequiousness, he would relieve you of your jewels while dancing with your wife and complimenting you on the finery of your apparel,” he said. “History books recall him as a master of politeness, smiling pleasantly while sticking the knife in. The sharp-eared among you may recognise a passing similarity between Duval and another more recent gentleman of Surrey Heath’s roads. I refer, of course, to my predecessor Michael Gove…”

Professional table tennis players suffer an everyday indignity that most athletes never face, says The New York Times: strangers think they can take them on in their sport. “You’ll meet someone, and their first reaction is ‘I bet I can beat you, let’s play’,” says US Olympian Lily Zhang. Of course, casual players could barely return a serve from a professional, let alone win a game – as the England football team recently found out (video here). Not that Zhang minds too much. When she was challenged by “frat guys” at university, she would occasionally oblige. “I’d hustle them a little, give them a little,” she says. “And then destroy their egos.”

Why have plastic bottles become such a pain?

You may have noticed, in recent months, that drinking bottled water now comes with “all sorts of extra perils”, says Isabel Oakeshott in The Daily Telegraph: spillages, scratched skin, lacerated lips. The reason for this is a new EU law mandating that the lids must be attached to the bottles, to encourage people to recycle both bits. But trying to drink anything with the cap still attached is basically impossible. And wrenching them off typically involves spilling half the contents down your front or tearing your lips on the jagged edge. Why on earth are we bothering with this stuff? I thought the whole idea of Brexit was so that we didn’t have to follow all their idiotic rules?

Ah, “welcome to the real world”, says Jonty Bloom on Substack. These bottle tops haven’t been imposed on us at all: manufacturers don’t want to set up two factory lines for their products – one for the EU, one for us Brits – so they just give everyone the EU stuff. This reflects a fact that die-hard Brexiters seldom remember: “The EU is a regulatory superpower, we are not.” So, as people endlessly warned before the referendum, we now have to play by their rules without any say in how those rules are set. It’s not just plastic bottle tops: the new government has promised to “mirror” EU rules wherever necessary. Soon, perhaps, the Brexit brigade will finally realise that their long-held dream – of some low-regulation UK, “free of pointless directives and unburdened by red tape” – will remain just that: a dream.

The coverage of Katie Price’s bankruptcy trial reminded us of a “quite astonishing fact”, says Popbitch. When the celebrity’s second novel Crystal was released in 2007, it “outsold the entire Booker Prize shortlist”.

A Berlin start-up is bringing cryonics to Europe, says The Times. Tomorrow Bio, thought to be the first company of its kind on the continent, is offering to cryogenically freeze people in liquid nitrogen after they die, for as long as it takes “until science can find a way to revive and rejuvenate them”. The full-body service costs a cool €200,000, but the “brain-only” offering is a more reasonable €75,000. More than 650 people have signed up, and the company says it has already frozen six “clients” as well as five pets.

It’s a map of the route taken by a cyclist who wanted to recreate the shape of the discus thrower image used for the 1948 London Olympics. Fashion designer Nico Georgiou says it took him 40 hours to cover the 264-mile journey, which he recorded using the route tracker app Strava. “I am a proud Londoner and love my city,” he tells BBC News. “What a great way to celebrate and to look back.”