For years, we thought it would be Greece that would trigger Europe's collapse. It turns out it is England that has brought us to the edge of the abyss.
The world woke up to terrifying news this morning. Against the recommendations of nearly all experts and world leaders, against the expectations of the financial markets and the bookies, England has voted to leave the European Union.
As expected, the world's financial markets went into panic mode. The pound lost 8% of its value, hitting a low not seen since 1985. Continental European markets have lost about 8%, US markets are currently down 3%. Analysts expect further losses on Monday.
It is all reminiscent of the panic after the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008, or perhaps more relevant to Europe, the height of the Greek debt crisis of 2011 and 2012.
A tell-all Facebook post by a former journalist at The Times has gone viral this weekend, exposing a truth that most in the EU press corps already know.
On Friday Martin Fletcher, a former foreign correspondent for Britain's The Times newspaper, posted some explosive allegations on Facebook.
"For 25 years our press has fed the British public a diet of distorted, mendacious and relentlessly hostile stories about the EU," he wrote. "And the journalist who set the tone was Boris Johnson."
Fletcher describes how, in 1999, he arrived in Brussels as The Times' Brussels correspondent, shortly after Boris Johnson's stint covering the EU capital for The Telegraph. Johnson later went on to become the Mayor of London and the main politician backing a British secession from the European Union. If there is a vote for Brexit on Thursday, Johnson is likely to be the next UK prime minister.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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