Orlando has no relevance to Brexit

The ad created today by Leave.eu was not only in poor taste - it was a lie.

Given that we are in the final week before the UK's momentous referendum on EU membership, there has been a lot of speculation today about what effect this weekend's tragic event in Orlando will have on the vote.

Some, it appears, were eager to ensure it had an impact. This morning the Leave.eu campaign sent out a tweet with this political ad, with an accompanying message saying the EU allows free movement for AK-47s.

After divorce, UK and EU unlikely to be 'friends with benefits'

The EEA was not built for a country the size of Britain. To think that the EU will allow it to easily join is folly.

This week the EU's most powerful finance minister, Germany's Wolfgang Schäuble, will say in an exclusive interview to be published by Der Spiegel that the UK should not be given special access to the EU common market, à la Norway, if it quits the bloc.

"In is in, out is out," he will say in the interview, which was seen and previewed by The Guardian.  “That won’t work, it would require the country to abide by the rules of a club from which it currently wants to withdraw. If the majority in Britain opts for Brexit, that would be a decision against the single market."

No, the EU does not have 'five presidents'

How many Brits could name John Bercow, Mark Carney or George Osborne? Well these are the equivalents for three of the "five presidents" cited by Michael Gove in the Sky News debate.

During the live Brexit debate on Sky News last week, 'out' campaigner Michael Gove, the former UK minister for education, was taken to task by interviewer Faisal Islam.

Asked to back up his claims with hard facts, Gove deflected. Asked to name notable experts saying the UK would be economically better off outside Europe, he demurred. But he could tell he was on to a winner when he distracted from the questions by turning to the audience and asking them a question himself, "There are five presidents run the EU. Can you name them all?"

There was an awkward silence from the audience, and from Islam. No, it turns out, nobody could name them. Since then the Leave campaign has ran with this 'five presidents' line, and the British media has heralded it as an excellent point for the leave camp (The Guardian called it a "superb" moment for Gove in the debate).

There's only one problem - it's completely bogus. 

Just because there are a number of people with the title "president" in the European institutions does not make them all comparable to the "president" of the United States, France or Russia. But this is what Gove is implying.

Ryanair for rail? Don't hold your breath

New 'budget trains' between Brussels and Paris give the illusion of competition, but in fact are designed to block new market entrants.

After 24 years in the making, today there is finally light at the end of the world's longest tunnel. Today in Switzerland the first train is passing through the monumental Gotthard Base Tunnel, carrying Germany's Angela Merkel, Italy's Matteo Renzi and France's Francois Hollande.

It will carry passengers between the German-speaking canton of Uri and the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino in an astonishing 16 minutes. It will cut the journey time between Zurich and Milan by one hour. 

Though you might expect a massive infrastructure project like this to be opposed by environmentalists, it was in fact welcomed. It will stop the daily journey of hundreds of trucks carrying goods over the Alps between Northern and Southern Europe, a journey which has been causing huge environmental damage.

It is part of the steady expansion of high-speed rail across Europe. Trains will be able to link up with Italy's impressive Frecciarossa trains, which whizz passengers from Milan to Naples in just four hours, at 360 km/h (224 m/h). New high-speed routes are coming online all over Europe.

Why is the BBC afraid to call UKIP a nationalist party?

Populism is other people, according to the British media.

Austria's presidential election on Sunday, in which the country came within a hair's breadth of electing its first far-right head of state since World War II, has generated a new round of media coverage on the rise of extremist parties across Europe.

Today the BBC published an analysis of the 'Widespread revolt against the political centre', tracing the rise of these parties. It is accompanied by a map showing the percentage of votes won by "nationalist parties" in the most recent elections. 

Notice anything strange about this map? According to the BBC, the UK is either not part of Europe, or has no nationalist party. 

What planet are the Brexiters on?

No, Turkey is not about to join the EU. And the only country that wants it to is the UK.

Yesterday, on one of the UK's main Sunday morning politics shows, the UK's defence minister Penny Mordaunt made an astonishing claim. 

The pro-Brexit Tory politician told the BBC's Andrew Marr that Turkey is about to join the European Union, which would open the flood gates to Turkish immigrants coming into the UK. Asked if the UK has veto power over Turkish accession, Mordaunt replied, "No, it doesn't".

Except that it does - quite obviously. Any new EU member state must be approved unanimously by every county in the union, something that UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who is trying to stop the UK from voting to leave the EU, was quick to point out later in the day.