Voting is under way in England’s local elections, with the Conservatives “braced for heavy losses that could destabilise Rishi Sunak’s premiership”, says The Guardian. More than 2,600 local council seats are up for grabs, along with 11 mayoralties, including London – which is expected to be retained by Labour’s Sadiq Khan – and the Tees Valley and West Midlands, both of which have Tory incumbents in races too close to call. Magic mushrooms are more effective at treating depression in pensioners than in young people. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in the funky fungi, has well-established psychological benefits, but authors of a new BMJ study say older patients “report a higher ‘blissful state’ experience” from the drug. A town in Sardinia has announced it will permit naked weddings at a local nudist beach. “It will not be a case of anything goes,” says Luigi Tedeschi, the mayor of San Vero Milis. “All the brides will need to wear a nice veil for tradition’s sake.”

Are we in for yet another Tory regicide?

It’s local election day, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian, and predictions for how the Conservatives will fare range from “very badly” to “Jesus Christ – did you see that?!” In a way, this is good news for Rishi Sunak. Expectations are so low that anything less than a complete drubbing will be talked up by Downing Street as the “green shoots” of something or other. “Hemlock, possibly, or deadly nightshade.” Problem is, most of the Tory mayoral candidates have totally distanced themselves from the Conservative Party and Sunak personally. So even if they do pull off a narrow win, No 10 can’t take any credit.

The Tories’ losses, on the other hand, will “very much be chalked up” to Sunak, and that means we could be in for yet another Tory leadership contest. Mad as that seems to the rest of us, it’d be business-as-usual for a party “compulsively obsessed with regicide”. There’s already talk of a “caretaker leader” stepping in until the next election. One name being bandied about is former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, a man so uninspiring his colleagues nicknamed him “Robert Generic”. Another is Penny Mordaunt, an “unbelievable lightweight” who is forever being linked to the top job for the sole reason that she “silently held a thing still for an hour at the Coronation”. Still, Mordaunt would at least complete the sequence whereby the runner-up in the last leadership race gets to have the next go. Who knows, there might even be time for “Mordaunt to give way to Jenrick” before the next election. With these Tories, nothing can be ruled out.

Japan’s Kansai airport hasn’t lost a single piece of luggage since it opened in 1994, says Nikkei Asia. It’s hardly a backwater – staff successfully handled around 10 million baggage items in the past year alone. And globally, airline firms are responsible for around 7.6 bag cock-ups for every 1,000 passengers. Unsurprisingly, Kansai has been named “world’s best airport for baggage delivery” eight times at the World Airport Awards. Only eight?

Female footballers are six times more likely to get injured in the days leading up to their period than during the rest of the month, says BBC Sport. Researchers made the finding after tracking players in the Women’s Super League for three years. They’re not sure why the risk is elevated – it may be because muscles are affected by fluctuations in the sex hormones oestrogen and progesterone.

Dearie me, we’re caught in a zugzwang

The SNP is caught in what chess players call a “zugzwang”, says Iain Macwhirter in The Spectator: “every move puts them in a worse position”. There are only two plausible candidates in the party’s leadership election: the “Nicola Sturgeon bag man” John Swinney, who declared he was running this morning, and the socially conservative former finance secretary Kate Forbes, who is expected to put her hat in the ring imminently. Swinney is seen as the “continuity candidate” who’ll keep the faith with wee “Saint Nicola” and win back the hearts of the Scottish Greens. Forbes is – “shock” – a practising Christian who, despite being attacked as a bigot for her opposition to gay marriage, still ran Humza Yousaf very close in the last leadership race. But “both are losers before they start”.

Swinney has already been leader, back in the early 2000s, and “by common agreement” made an absolute haggis of it. By the time he stood down in 2004, the party had crashed to less than 20% at the European elections, and a year later won just six seats at the general election, to Labour’s 41. “That is the kind of ballpark the SNP will be entering under Swinney.” But it’s far from clear that Forbes can cut it either. The all-important Greens are ultra-progressive – when their co-leader Patrick Harvie complains about “the most reactionary and backward-looking forces in the SNP”, there are no prizes for guessing who he means. To form a majority without them would require a hypothetical Forbes government to strike a deal with the Tories, which in the present “fractious and embittered” climate could be “too much for the SNP to take”.

Iceland has a rather peculiar problem, says The Browser: dozens of its citizens are inadvertently running for president. Potential candidates need at least 1,500 endorsements from their fellow countrymen, a process that was recently digitised. But people going on the website are getting confused and unwittingly registering as candidates rather than endorsing one. As one Icelander explains: “To date, 82 people are collecting endorsements, including a comedian, a model, the world’s first double arm transplant receiver, and my aunt Helga.”

It’s an archaeological enigma, says The Independent: a hollow dodecahedron from the Roman era with no known purpose or use. Only 33 of these 12-faced trinkets have ever been found in Britain, and now this 8cm-tall, 2.45kg example is going on display at a Lincoln history festival. The cryptic copper artefact is not mentioned in any surviving Roman literature, and the different examples come in varying sizes, so historians are still “at a loss” as to what exactly they were for.