Donald Trump has renewed his trade war, hitting 60 countries with fresh tariffs on a wide range of American imports. The new levies, under which, among others, the UK, EU, Canada and China face rates ranging from 10% to 12.5%, use a novel interpretation of forced labour laws to replace the original tariffs imposed last year. These expired today after being struck down by the Supreme Court in February. Andy Burnham is ready to “move quickly” on scaling up North Sea oil and gas production, says The Times, with a decision on drilling at some of Britain’s biggest undeveloped sites due within weeks. Burnham is considering giving the green light to drilling at the Rosebank and Jackdaw sites off the Scottish coast. The King and Queen stepped out of a Tardis in Glasgow last night to kick off the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, which are taking place in the Scottish city over the next 11 days. Andy Burnham and Scottish cycling great Chris Hoy were also in attendance as athletes from the 74 competing nations paraded through the city’s Hydro Arena.

One of the reasons I wrote so many history books, says Niall Ferguson in The Free Press, was to ensure people “learned the lessons of history” – like the vital lesson that anti-Semitic language can easily explode into genocidal violence. So it’s with profound dread that, today, I see this ancient hatred normalised and trivialised. Influential American conservatives like Tucker Carlson calmly tolerate revisionist “anti-historians” like Darryl Cooper, who deny the Holocaust and make mad claims such as “Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War”. Online, far-right trolls like Nick Fuentes don’t merely deny the Holocaust, they openly “mock it and celebrate it”. As AI permeates social networks, this kind of anti-history is spreading “like a cancer”. More than a generation after William F Buckley exorcised it from American conservatism, “anti-Semitism is back”.

Myron Gaines, a leading “men’s rights” influencer with more than a quarter of a billion views on YouTube pulls no punches: “Yeah, we like Hitler,” he posted on X last year. “No one gives a f*** what you woke Jews think any more.” A recent guest on his show, when asked how best to “take down” Jews, replied: “We gotta kill the motherf***ers.” In the past, such bile was confined to the filthy bedrooms of sad sacks, but today’s algorithms are primed to maximise user engagement, the angrier the better. And in the hellscape of social media, these clips – which can now be generated on a vast scale at no cost using AI – appear for a matter of seconds, with no opportunity for rebuttal, subtly polluting the minds of the young. “Real historians are powerless.” We naively believed that if we went to the right archives, read the right documents, and published scholarly books with the right footnotes, the Holocaust deniers would be driven from the field. “What fools we were.”

Bloomsbury Publishing have successfully sued Anthropic – the AI firm that makes the Claude chatbot – for $1.5bn, says ITV News, after a judge ruled the techies had stolen mountains of copyrighted work to train their models. More than 14,000 titles printed by the British publisher were included in the settlement – the largest copyright payout US history – with the prize pot being shared out equally between the publisher and the authors, who will receive around $3,000 per book.

Andy Burnham likes to present himself as a normal, t-shirt-and-jeans, pints-down-the-pub, stick-the-footy-on sort of bloke. He even has a tattoo, says Popbitch – a “Manchester bee” etched on the inside of his bicep. Remarkably, he’s not the first prime minister to sport body art. Like many sailors, Jim Callaghan was inked during World War Two. But unlike Burnham, he was so embarrassed by his tats he refused ever to wear short sleeves.

Each day this week, says Ross Clark in The Spectator, Andy Burnham has announced a new initiative to bring down the cost of living. But it has all been spoilt by the “galloping price of oil”. The US-Iranian ceasefire is “well and truly over”. And just as the world was adapting to the blockage in the Strait of Hormuz – with the Saudis re-routing 3.6 million barrels of oil a day through existing pipelines to its Red Sea coast – the Houthis have started attacking tankers in the Red Sea, destabilising not just oil supplies, but everything else Europe imports through the Suez Canal. None of this is Burnham’s fault. But that won’t help him much if households reach the next election feeling they are worse off than they are now.

So it’s encouraging to see Burnham seriously considering drilling in the North Sea. Much as Ed Miliband liked to claim this would make no difference to UK consumers because the oil would be sold “at the global price”, any extra production will help. North Sea gas, meanwhile, would be a clear win: gas is hard to transport, so local supply is far cheaper than imports. Wholesale gas prices in Europe are four times higher than they are in the US, thanks to both the Republicans and Democrats pursuing an “unashamed policy of energy security” through exploiting shale reserves. Burnham has just appointed an energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, who is even keener on banning North Sea oil and gas licences than her predecessor was. Burnham may find himself having to overrule her. If he wants to keep his cost of living drive on the road, the case for more drilling has never been stronger.

For Gen Zs, reading has suddenly become super sexy, says Michaela Makusha in The Guardian. This is partly down to “BookTok”, but it’s also thanks to the rise of a “hot literati”, fuelled by an ever-increasing number of celebrity book clubs. Dua Lipa, Kaia Gerber (daughter of Cindy Crawford) and Reese Witherspoon all have their own popular versions, encouraging readers to weigh-in on a different novel each month. And, perhaps most importantly for their algorithms, looking incredibly hot while doing so.

Crime in London is massively down, says Jessica Coates in My London. New Metropolitan Police figures show that “neighbourhood” offences across the capital, including theft, robbery and burglary, fell by more than 14% in the 12 months to June, with thefts from people down 23%. In the West End, where the number of patrolling officers has been doubled, the number of phones pinched has halved. The wider drop in crime is thanks to drones and high-powered e-bikes, which are helping officers catch and arrest around 1,000 suspects a month.

It’s a battery made of algae, says Rima Sabina Aouf in Dezeen, which can harness the power of photosynthesis to generate electricity. Created by bio-designer Lucia Giron and scientists at Cambridge, the biocells work by converting the energy created through photosynthesis into an electrical current, and because the algae is in a living environment that provides it with light, water, CO2, and so on, the cells can continue operating for years. The hope is that one day, these living batteries could replace the disposable chemical ones in low-energy devices such as remote controls.