The US has said that clearing mines from the Strait of Hormuz could take six months, and that it has “no time frame” for ending the war. The US military has intercepted three Iranian-flagged tankers in Asian waters after the IRGC stormed three other vessels in the strait yesterday, detaining two of them for “endangering maritime security”. A summer holiday crisis is looming in Europe as jet fuel stocks begin to run low. Lufthansa Group, one of the world’s biggest airline companies, announced yesterday that it was cancelling 20,000 flights in the coming months because of the crisis, while the EU energy commissioner said the shortage of aviation fuel would likely affect “many people’s” holidays. An AI-powered robot has learnt to defeat elite table tennis players, an achievement that has long been viewed as a demanding benchmark for robotics, requiring split-second reactions, precise perception and refined motor control. Sony AI’s bot, known as Ace, won three out of five matches against elite players, though lost its two matches against professionals.

In the likely event that this Labour government serves only one term, it will at least have one great legacy, says Polly Toynbee in The Guardian: “homegrown clean energy”. The biggest nuclear building programme in 50 years has been green-lit. Recent renewables auctions will secure enough clean, UK-generated power for 23 million homes, and our largest-ever solar project has been approved. Ed Miliband’s target of generating 95% of electricity from renewables by 2030 is within reach, bringing with it a significant boost to Britain’s national, economic and energy security. The great success of the NHS was not just the service it offered, but how it removed fear about the cost of illness from ordinary Britons. Homegrown energy has the potential to do the same, freeing us from “rollercoaster markets” and the whims of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and the ayatollahs.

Increasing Britain’s renewables capacity is important, says The Times. But so too, given everything that’s going on, is oil and gas exploration in UK waters. Even in modest amounts, this would boost tax revenues, create jobs and give the country control of additional deposits essential for enduring the kind of protracted international crisis we’re currently facing. Aside from Denmark, we are the only country on earth “deliberately failing to maximise its oil reserves”. For what? Environmental obligations? If Britain were an energy consumer on the scale of China, the US or India, this “self-denying ordinance” might make sense. But the UK produces less than 1% of global CO2 emissions, meaning Miliband’s “masochistic” aversion to exploratory drilling not only harms the country, but does nothing for the planet, either. As the former Labour leader himself has admitted, gas and oil will remain in the energy mix for decades. “So it may as well be British.”

London could wake up to a “sea of Green” after the local elections on 7 May, says Megan Kenyon in The New Statesman. New polling by Ipsos suggests that around half the capital’s voters are considering voting for Zack Polanski’s Greens, which are hoping to overturn Labour’s control of councils in Hackney, Haringey and Newham. Thanks to the party’s big victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election, they are, crucially, no longer seen as a “wasted vote”.

The New York Times has put together a highly enjoyable quiz of British insults, testing whether readers can tell real put-downs from nonsense. Surprisingly tricky. Give it a go here.

Political violence landed in Silicon Valley this month, says Aaron Zamost in The New York Times, when an anti-AI radical hurled a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI boss Sam Altman in the dead of night, and was later arrested trying to break into the AI firm’s offices with a jug of kerosene and a lighter. It’s a spiky development in an unmistakable trend: people hate AI. Fully 77% of Americans believe the tech poses a threat to humanity, not least thanks to the apocalyptic hype pushed by the likes of Altman himself. And the vast majority feel they have no say or recourse. AI has faced “little to no” accountability for its many failures – no regulator has the power to recall a harmful software update – and boycotts are impossible with products that are rapidly becoming infrastructural. When anger has no productive outlet, nutters strike.

It doesn’t help that Big Tech’s titans seem to have given up trying to win over the public. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, proudly announced last month that he practises “zero” introspection. Mark Zuckerberg has said he’s “done apologising”. It’s some brass neck. This is the same Mark Zuckerberg who renamed his company and spent $80bn on the virtual reality “metaverse”, then gave up and sacked a fifth of his workers when he realised it was a terrible idea that nobody wanted. Imagine a boss in any other industry making such a colossal cock-up – there’s no way he’d still have a job. But the tech titans invariably have share structures that leave them effectively invincible. When the business barons of the day are this unloved, and this insulated, that Molotov cocktail feels like just the beginning.

The royal biographer Hugo Vickers says Queen Elizabeth II’s favourite gospel passage was Luke 2, verse 19: “But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” It’s an “illuminating” choice, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. The moment described comes shortly after the shepherds have come to see Mary, Joseph and the newborn Jesus, and gone off to tell everyone in wonderment what they saw. Mary, however, stays put, and ponders. I find it moving to imagine a monarch thinking, not just as anyone might think, but as someone “charged with a unique responsibility”. The late queen, like Mary, felt she had been entrusted “with something too important to talk about”.

Since leaving office in 2022, says Nicky Woolf in The New World, Boris Johnson has trousered something like £8m. Much of this is from speaking engagements: a whopping $405,000 from the US bank Centerview Partners, £250,000 for a speech in California, and plenty more from talks in cities including Abu Dhabi, Delhi, Dubai, Riyadh, Taipei and Lagos. The rest is from TV, specifically a forthcoming Channel 5 show about Ukraine; his “million-pound-per-year” weekly column at the Daily Mail; and the reported £2m advance for his underwhelmingly received autobiography Unleashed.

It’s a Lego version of one of the most important machines in the world, says Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal: an extreme ultraviolet lithography tool made by Dutch firm ASML, which is essential for producing the chips that power computers, phones and data centres. The real thing costs more than $400m, and contains over 100,000 individual pieces. The Lego version, made by one of ASML’s data analysts, contains fewer than 1,000 plastic bricks, and costs just $200, but it may be even harder to get hold of. The collectibles are exclusively available to ASML employees and strictly limited to one per person.