The UK economy has returned to growth, expanding by 0.2% in August. The increase, which follows two months of stagnation, is in line with economists’ forecasts and was largely driven by a good month for construction, retail and accountancy. Tesla boss Elon Musk has unveiled a new “Cybercab”, a driverless robotaxi with no pedals or steering wheel. The billionaire claims it will cost less than $30,000 and go into production before 2027, but he is notably vague on “crucial details”, says the FT, such as what technology is involved and how he will bring the price down so low. The Northern Lights splashed vivid colour across UK skies last night, in what BBC Weather said was the “strongest and most widespread” display since May. Pictures of the phenomenon, known as the aurora borealis, were captured as far south as East Anglia, London and Kent.

Come on Keir, stop the cock-ups

You have to hand it to Keir Starmer, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. Just 100 days in, the prime minister is already “running as the change candidate” against his own administration. So it’s out with Sue Gray, replaced as chief of staff by Morgan McSweeney, a man who has “the look of a supporting actor in a regional detective show”. Of course, Gray was never the star-hire that columnists made out. She was perfectly well respected in Whitehall, but the only reason most people had heard of her was because of the Partygate inquiry. Much like certain artists who are dismissed as “music for people who don’t really like music”, Gray always felt like “politics for people who don’t really know a lot about politics”. Like, perhaps, Keir Starmer.

The PM’s recent ruthlessness is being cast as more proof that this is “a guy who learns from his mistakes”. But Starmer is only “about three more cock-ups” from just being “a guy who makes too many mistakes”. Perhaps his biggest problem is that he decided long ago his persona should be “telling people off”. He has done this very well, looking “pained, disgusted and superior” at a succession of fabulously incompetent Tory prime ministers. But someone who’s always telling other people off ultimately comes across as “a ballache who will eventually be telling you off”. Plus, to make that shtick work you have to be “whiter than white” yourself – which, what with all his freebies, Starmer clearly hasn’t been. Is it any wonder one poll now has Labour leading the Conservatives by only a single point? “It’s hard to think of anyone who has squandered so much electoral capital so quickly for so little.”

At the launch party for his new book Unleashed, Boris Johnson claimed that the soirée had only been possible because another writer had unexpectedly returned his advance for an unwritten book, freeing up HarperCollins to afford the champagne, says Charles Moore in The Spectator. The author was Keir Starmer, who Johnson insinuated had been paid to write “one of those books on the future of Britain which sadistic publishers enjoy inflicting on the reading public”. The alleged amount was £18,000, and judging by the look on the book editor’s face as Johnson made the revelation, it contained at least a grain of truth. “Poor Sir Keir, rich Boris.”

Few people realise quite how powerful China’s military is becoming, says Seth Jones in Foreign Affairs. China has roughly 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US – a single one of its shipyards can produce more ships than every American shipyard combined. In the past three years, the country has more than doubled its stockpiles of nuclear warheads, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles; produced more than 400 modern fighter aircraft; and increased its satellite launches by 50%. The Chinese now acquire weapons systems around five to six times faster than the US. Admiral John Aquilino, the former commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, describes Beijing’s military expansion as “the most extensive and rapid buildup since World War Two”.

The overlooked minority that could decide the US election

US presidential candidates have long targeted specific ethnic groups, says Adrian Karatnycky in Foreign Policy: chasing the black vote, say, or trying to win over Latinos. But it’s been decades since Poles have figured in a candidate’s electoral calculus. That’s all changed. During the presidential debate in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris appealed directly to the “800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania”, arguing that Poland would be Vladimir Putin’s next target after Ukraine, and calling the Russian president a “dictator who would eat you for lunch”. If Donald Trump had been president these past four years, she told them, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now”.

This may be a smart move. The key battleground states that will decide November’s election – not just Pennsylvania but Michigan and Wisconsin too – have significant populations of Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Hungarians, Slovaks and other central Europeans. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, these groups were an important voting bloc, often backing Republican candidates who promised to be tough on Moscow. In the 1992 election, Bill Clinton made financial aid and “democracy assistance programmes” to former Soviet states a tentpole of his foreign policy offer, which helped him win the crucial states of Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania. Today, Harris is trying to use Trump’s ambivalence about Putin to rally those who fear Russia to her cause. Pennsylvania was won by a margin of just 80,550 votes in 2020. Even a tiny swing among the state’s 800,000 Poles could carry the day.

Bubble pop is a simple and oddly relaxing online game in which players click on bubbles to pop them. If all the bubbles are popped, a new set appears. Try it for yourself here.

One of my favourite corners of the internet is Wikipedia’s “Timeline of the Far Future”, says Ross Anderson in The Atlantic. It’s based on the fact that various events can be predicted with a comfortable degree of accuracy, and lists 160 of them in chronological order all the way up to the “heat death of the universe”. In 250,000 years, for example, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, “adding an extra island to Hawaii”. In 10 million years, the continents will have slowly drifted together to form a new supercontinent. And in 400 million years, Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels. Lucky us. To see what else the distant future holds, click here.

It’s 128 Grazer, who has won Alaska’s Fat Bear Contest for a second year in a row – defeating the male behemoth that killed her cub this summer. Grazer secured around 40,000 more votes than her rival, 32 Chunk, in an online poll ranking bears in Katmai National Park. Back in July, one of Grazer’s cubs slipped over the side of a waterfall and into the clutches of Chunk – “the most dominant brown bear on the river”. Grazer attacked Chunk to try and save the cub, but it later died. Two weeks ago, her surviving cub placed second in the Fat Bear Junior contest. So that’s something.