Labour has held on to Keir Starmer’s old seat in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, thwarting Zack Polanski’s attempt to become an MP. Sagal Abdi-Wali, a Somali-born refugee and leader of Camden Council, took 45% of the vote compared with the Green leader’s 33%. Polanski, whose party hailed his defeat as an “incredible result”, says he will “of course” stay on as leader. The Pentagon says it will livestream the execution by firing squad of former US army major Nidal Hasan, who shot dead 13 unarmed soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009. The execution is scheduled for 3 December; if it is carried out, Nidal will be the first person to be publicly executed in the US since 1936 and the first soldier to be put to death by firing squad since World War Two. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to South African jurist and former UN human rights commissioner Navanethem “Navi” Pillay. Unfortunately the committee weren’t able to get through to her before the announcement in Oslo this morning. “If you see a Norwegian number calling,” said chairman Jørgen Watne Frydnes, “please pick up.”

When White House tech advisor David Sacks wrote last week that “the Trump economy is strong”, he got the numbers right, says Ramesh Ponnuru in The Washington Post. Growth has accelerated faster than expected and unemployment is lower than the average of any of the past eight decades. Inflation, at 3.4%, is at a level most Americans between the 1970s and the 1990s would have welcomed. Yet, crucially before the forthcoming midterm elections, “the public still hates this economy”. In a recent poll, voters who rate the economy as “poor” or “only fair” outnumbered those who say it’s “good” or “excellent” by three to one. The share who say the country is heading in the right direction has collapsed over the past year from 40% to 20%.

Should Trump’s party lose both houses of Congress next month, says Ruchir Sharma in the FT – “which betting markets see as a live possibility” – it would be the first such defeat in economic conditions this favourable since the 1950s. The reason is that for many Americans, “this feels like the wrong kind of boom”. America’s stellar growth is driven by consumption among the very richest and extraordinary investments in AI, which the electorate has come to “hate and fear” more intensely than any previous tech breakthrough. Concerns about humanity aside, AI is making energy (already expensive due to the Iran war) unaffordable for millions. Nine out of ten Americans don’t want a data centre in their town, yet Trump has dismissed critics, saying they want people to be “backwards and poor”. All the while, voters watch their richest compatriots, who own all the stocks, get vastly richer thanks to spiking AI share prices in a vast “reverse Robin Hood”. Trump has lost his instinct for reading the national mood, and “turned his party into a target”.

There was an enjoyable exchange overheard at the Tory conference this week, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. A delegate approached his local politician, who asked whether he was enjoying the new free parking in their area. “Well,” the constituent replied, “perhaps my driver is.”

American airports have started opening exclusive “private terminals”, says Aashna Shah in Bloomberg. In Miami, for example, members of PS (formerly the Private Suite) pay around $5,000 a year and then $895 a trip to skip the main airport experience entirely. They are driven directly to a swanky lounge in the former Pan Am HQ, where they complete security and passport checks in comfort, and enjoy caviar, champagne, spa treatments and other luxuries before being taken straight across the tarmac to their plane. The idea is to give commercial air travellers many of the perks of flying private, while charging them a fraction of the difference.

Last week, says Sean Thomas in The Telegraph, Singapore came as close as it ever might to establishing a “Ministry of Buns in the Oven”. The city-state launched a national dating service, FirstDate, which allows Singaporeans to sign up with their national ID (presumably to stop punters “knocking 10 years off their age”) and then receive romantic matches determined by a “governmental algorithm”. Users get three days to say “yes” whereupon the state will suggest a date idea – “try a dish neither of you has eaten before” – to help get things moving. It sounds bonkers. But perhaps Britain, also struggling with a sluggish fertility rate, could use a bit of this “nationalised necking”.

Just imagine “Great British Dating”. There’d be the regulator, “Ofsprog”, which after five years of meetings would publish a “dead-eyed” list of approved filthy words for the bedroom: “ooh”, “yes, there”. It’d have a roster of Approved Sexual Positions, rated A to G, “like fridges”, according to their likelihood of producing a new taxpaying citizen. “At least three will be anatomically impossible.” The app would be delivered by the people who brought us HS2, ready for partial implementation after 30-odd years and a bill “more expensive than the Normandy landings”, and would then “assign 78 people to a candlelit bistro table meant for two”. All of which might just be enough to make the young finally realise that the best way to find love is to log off and return to the glorious, and very successful, old ways: the office party, the wedding disco, the “fumbled approach after the fourth pint”. Please, prime minister, do the birth rate a favour and “nationalise Hinge”.

Borderline is a humbling game in which players must try to draw a country’s borders on an unmarked map, earning (scant) points for accuracy. Give it a go here.

The bond markets are frequently in the headlines for their ability to make or break governments, says Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. They also have an under-appreciated knack for an enjoyable acronym. The latest crisis, centred on worries that France’s political class has lost its grip on public finances, has been dubbed “French Oversized Government and Social Security”. Or FROGS.

It’s an unassuming property in Reading, says Hollie Busby in The Reading Chronicle, that hides a network of tunnels and an underground railway. The subterranean complex, painstakingly dug out over 20 years by civil engineer and previous owner Tony Deane, is spread across four levels and more than 1,300 square feet. One room is accessed by a secret entrance, hidden inside a 23ft rocket by the pool. There is also a one-tonne goods lift and two other secret doors, one formed by a 1.5-tonne sliding concrete wall. Incredibly, Deane (and his six children) completed all the excavations by hand. It’s up for auction later this month with a guide price of around £300,000. Click here to see the full listing.