On the net today

Sickness brings David Beckham to his knees. Photograph: Alex Livesey/Getty

It's summer, the sun is out (more or less), and everyone's trying to concentrate on the football. It must be animal story season.

In ancient times Britons marked the passing of the seasons by the falling of leaves and the first cuckoo. Nowadays we know the summer is building to its height when photographs of puppies wearing sunglasses appear in the papers accompanied by "hot dog"-style captions.

But the animals this year are more exotic: the BBC claims that a tiger may have turned up in Yorkshire and the Times has uncovered a snake that changes colour in Borneo. In Germany, tributes continue to pour in for the late Bruno the bear.

As for the only other story of the moment, the Guardian gives us some vital analysis of Beckham's queasy moment on Sunday, and the New Yorker takes us back 40 years with a reprint of an account of the 1966 World Cup in London. Some things haven't changed:

The extent to which the attention of the world was concentrated on this tumultuous series of football matches is pretty staggering ... one person in five of the world's population had watched at least a part of the competition, transmitted by satellite ... practically thirty-one million inhabitants of the British Isles--a bit over half the population--gave themselves over to following the Cup ... on off days the British Broadcasting Corporation produced panels of wordy experts, replays of games already over, and a spate of analyses and predictions of every sort.