The Conservatives are “on the rack”, says the FT, after being “trounced” in the Blackpool South by-election and suffering big losses in yesterday’s local elections. The party was beaten by Labour in Blackpool with a whopping 26% swing, only just pipping Reform UK into second place, and “could lose half the council seats it was defending”. In one bit of good news for No 10, Tory Ben Houchen was re-elected as Tees Valley mayor. Fossil fuel companies will be allowed to explore for oil and gas under offshore wind power sites for the first time. In a decision clearly intended to quell “restive backbenchers”, says The Guardian, Rishi Sunak will grant around 30 firms a licence to hunt for hydrocarbons at locations earmarked for future wind farms. King Charles has been presented with his official “Coronation roll”: a 69ft-long, 11,500-word scroll detailing his coronation. The hand-stitched manuscript, which took a calligrapher 56 days to complete, is the first in 700 years not to be made with any animal skin.

Feminism never did much for me

I’m beginning to think feminism has “failed my generation”, says Petronella Wyatt in The Daily Telegraph. Growing up, I was taught over and over again that career was everything – that in our new, enlightened times, marriage and children were a secondary consideration. At St Paul’s Girls’ School, we were told: “Paulinas do not cook, they think.” Well, I more or less followed that advice, and where has it left me? I’m 54, single, and childless. It’s miserable – my “solitary existence” has made me so depressed I’ve had several spells in hospital. I’m far from alone: one in 10 British women in their 50s have never married and live alone. And I can’t help thinking what my life would have been had I not accepted the feminist credo that I had to “behave and think like men”.

Women were certainly led to believe they could “have it all”, says Allison Pearson, also in The Daily Telegraph. In reality, having it all meant a “brutal double shift” of doing our fathers’ jobs while retaining our mothers’ responsibilities with the children. But I think many women just enjoyed behaving like men, and “found it hard to give up”. I certainly did – I waited until 36 to have my first child, after “almost two decades of love affairs and selfishness”. Besides, feminism brought women “unimaginable opportunities”: Wyatt would never have become the deputy editor of The Spectator without it, for example. And while her “searing” honesty is laudable, plenty of women get a huge amount of life satisfaction without marrying or having children. Jane Austen never did either – if she had, we may have been denied some of the greatest novels in the English language. “There are more ways than one to give birth.”

Richard Madeley is not to be underestimated, says Tom Peck in The Times. One of the daytime TV host’s most infamous interviews, “sadly not on YouTube”, was with Bill Clinton in the early 2000s. Madeley explained to the former US president that they had both endured “the unforgiving glare of the public spotlight”: Clinton when he faced impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair, and Madeley when he was accused of shoplifting from Tesco. “But what got me through it,” Madeley said, “is that I knew I was telling the truth. But you were lying, weren’t you?” Oof.

The latest nightlife trend is, improbably, Bingo, says Axios. Nightclubs, raves and pop-up parties themed around the chance-based number game are becoming popular not only in the UK but across the US too, in cities including New York and Los Angeles, with top prizes including everything from giant teddy bears to holidays and lawnmowers. Two fat ladies? You betcha.

The dangers of using Russian cash to buy weapons

“Using Russia’s money to pay for Western weapons deliveries to Ukraine seems like a clever idea,” says Wolfgang Münchau in The New Statesman. “Maybe it’s too clever by half.” Of Russia’s $280bn in foreign currency reserves, $210bn is held at Euroclear, “a financial depository based in Belgium” – and the US is proposing that the G7 raid these assets, which have been frozen since the Ukraine invasion. It would put us in uncharted territory. “Never before has anybody tried to extract war-crimes reparation payments while the war was still raging.” Russia might retaliate by moving against the substantial number of Western businesses still operating in the country – German firms alone are said to have €21.3bn in turnover there. There’s also the risk of jeopardising trust in our financial systems: the likes of China and Saudi Arabia could pull their assets out of the EU and “create their own financial infrastructure”.

Two G7 countries are currently against the idea: Germany and Japan. They worry that expropriating Russian money will make them more vulnerable in their own tussles with reparations. Poland wants €1.3trn from Berlin to compensate for World War Two war crimes, and “Japan is facing similar compensation claims from South Korea”. Nevertheless, the asset seizure is probably inevitable. Previously, the West’s support for Ukraine was funded by large deficits. Now nations are tightening their belts, they’d rather use Russian money than their own. Western leaders will be too tempted by the short-term benefits of the move to consider its long-term dangers.

Diners in London and New York are now paying through the nose to buy reservations at hot restaurants from touts, says Howard Chua-Eoan in Bloomberg. Some of Japan’s top culinary establishments take a different approach: ichigensan okotowari, or “no first-time customers”. These restaurants let in only regulars and their guests. If the guests “pass muster”, they are then allowed to book seats under their own names. In Tokyo, “I had one of the most memorable meals of my life” at one of these places with a friend who was “a member of the restaurant’s faithful”. To my dismay, “I wasn’t asked about a reservation for my next visit”.

It’s what a Neanderthal woman would have looked like 75,000 years ago, says New Scientist. The remarkable reconstruction was produced using the flattened, shattered remains of a skull excavated in Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan five years ago. Researchers say the bones initially had the consistency of “a well-dunked biscuit”, but after a year of painstaking restoration work they were able to reassemble the various fragments. These were then used by a pair of Dutch twins renowned for their ancient hominin reconstructions to create the life-like face.