Keir Starmer has left Andy Burnham with a £5bn black hole in his defence investment plan. The Treasury has found savings covering only £10.3bn of the £15bn in promised additional spending, meaning Burnham will have to make up the difference through cuts or tax rises to fulfil the spending commitment. The PM-in-waiting was reportedly briefed on the plan before it was published, but wasn’t warned about the funding shortfall. Donald Trump earned more than $1.16bn from his cryptocurrency businesses last year, according to a financial disclosure document. The US president pocketed $526m from selling tokens in his family’s crypto company World Liberty Financial, and $635m from a licensing agreement with a group specialising in “meme” coins bearing his name. The UK has more private companies worth more than £1bn than any other country except the US and China. The Hurun Research Institute in Shanghai found that Britain has a record 80 “unicorns”, more than Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden combined.

I am one of the few people to have worked closely with both Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham, says Nazir Afzal in The Guardian, watching them lead, up close and under real pressure. For five years I served as a chief prosecutor while Starmer was director of public prosecutions, and for much of Burnham’s time as Manchester mayor I worked with him on violent crime and community cohesion. And the quality that most separates the two – “personable warmth” – is the exact quality that Britain needs most right now.

Starmer is a forensic, principled and “fundamentally decent” man. But human connection has never come naturally to him. When we brought in outsiders to advise on the Rochdale grooming gangs scandal, such as the leaders of the NSPCC and the children’s commissioner, Starmer applied his huge legal knowledge ably but sometimes lacked the “human element” that the moment required. So while he delivered justice to hundreds of victims, many left meetings with him not knowing if he was with them or against them. “Burnham is the opposite.” I watched him repeatedly do the thing that cannot be taught: relate to people, instantly and effortlessly. He can sit with a grieving mother and a frustrated official in the same hour and make each of them feel that he is “wholly on their side” – because, in that moment, “he is”. Following “emotionally raw moments” such as the Manchester Arena terrorist attack, his instinct is to unite people, not divide them. The politicians who survive are the ones who people trust and believe in. Having watched both men closely, “I think Burnham might just be one of them”.

Andy Burnham’s proposed “No 10 of the North” is no gimmick, says Dan Hodges in the Daily Mail. An aide says the PM-in-waiting wants to make it the “primary nerve centre for his whole operation”, and plans to spend at least one day a week there. And after discussions with his family, Burnham has apparently decided to keep his current home in Golborne, just outside Wigan, as his primary residence. “He will not be using No 10 as his main home,” says a friend. “He said if he was elected Prime Minister, he wouldn’t forget where he was from, and he meant it.”

Circuitousness is an enjoyable online game in which you have to rearrange a scrambled circuit board. You click on a tile (or red circuit breaker) to rotate it, with some tiles moving in concert with one another. Tricky at first, but worth persevering. Give it a go here.

For the past two decades, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been cementing his particular brand of “pragmatic authoritarianism” in Turkey, says Hannah Lucinda Smith in Engelsberg Ideas. He has clamped down on the judicial system, the electoral commission and central bank, concentrating power in his palace. Now, in a sign that his coup is “complete”, the Turkish president has “pacified” the main opposition party, the CHP. Its popular presidential candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu, is languishing behind bars, and in May the party’s leader, Özgür Özel, was removed from office by the courts, turning the CHP into little more than a “tame force”. The future looks bleak for İmamoğlu and Özel. For Turkish democracy, “it looks bleaker still”.

Turkey’s democracy might be in peril, says Gonul Tol in Foreign Affairs, but on almost every other measure it is becoming “firmly anchored” in the West. Over the past three years, finance minister Mehmet Şimşek has toured Western capitals reassuring investors that Turkey is returning to orthodox economic principles, while foreign minister Hakan Fidan has worked to stabilise US relations and revive Turkey’s EU membership bid. Ankara has taken steps to reduce its dependence on Russian energy, and quietly shelved plans to establish a Russian gas hub that would have helped Moscow evade import restrictions. Last year, it extended expiring Russian gas contracts by just one year while agreeing a 15-year liquefied natural gas deal with the US. Turkish officials describe next week’s NATO summit in Ankara as a “historic opportunity” to reaffirm the alliance’s unity. After years of flip-flopping between Russia and Europe, Turkey has decided it’s “better off aligned with the West”.

Guests on Steven Bartlett’s inexplicably popular podcast, Diary of a CEO, go through “an operation of psychological disarmament”, says Eleanor Halls in The i Paper. They are offered a stay in a five-star hotel the night before, then driven to Bartlett’s studio in Shoreditch in a swanky car where they arrive to hear their favourite music playing through the speakers. The air is measured for the “optimum CO2 levels for cognitive function” and the room is perfumed with the interviewee’s favourite scent. After the recording is finished, guests are handed a photobook containing glossy photos taken during the interview and their most poignant quotes, “handwritten, alongside relevant time stamps”.

In 2020, at the height of the worldwide mania sparked by the tragic death of George Floyd, the UK Treasury made a strange decision, says John Connolly in The Spectator. The department responsible for the nation’s finances decided to drop the specialist “Numerical Reasoning Test” from its application, after noticing that it was having an “adverse impact on candidate diversity”. Encouraging people from all backgrounds to succeed is obviously laudable. But you do rather think that at the Treasury, of all places, a decent grip on numbers ought to be a basic requirement for the job.

It’s a tennis robot, says Seren Hughes in The Times, which is offering fans at Wimbledon the chance to try their hand at returning professional serves. The ball-hurling bot can recreate the exact speed, angle and trajectory of a serve within a second of it being delivered on Centre Court. It is also loaded with famous serves from history, such as Andy Murray’s Championship-winning efforts from Wimbledon 2016, John McEnroe’s from his 1981 “you cannot be serious” match, and Serena Williams’s humdingers in the 2008 final against sister Venus.