At least two explosions and gunfire have rocked Istanbul's Ataturk international airport, with reports of "multiple" people injured.  Gunfire was directed from an airport car park, according to a witness quoted by Reuters news agency.  Taxis were ferrying wounded people from the airport, the witness added.  In December, a blast on the tarmac at a different Istanbul airport, Sabiha Gokcen, killed a cleaner.  Recent bomb attacks in Turkey have been linked to Kurdish separatists or the Islamic State group.

A US State Department travel warning for Turkey, originally published in March and updated on Monday, urges US citizens to "exercise heightened vigilance and caution when visiting public access areas, especially those heavily frequented by tourists."

Although inflation in Italy has slowed to next to nothing, it is still saddled with the effects of earlier inflation and so is uncompetitive. What the advent of the euro has done to Italy – and also to several other countries – is to impose Germanic values in one sphere while having very little effect on performance in most others. It is the combination of Germanic money and Italian practices that is so devastating.  One clear lesson from this is that the EU is far from being the only factor affecting economic performance in Europe. Within the EU, it is possible to do things relatively well, and it is also possible to do things relatively badly. (The same is true for countries outside the EU.) But the Italian experience also makes it clear that the various things the EU supposedly does to improve economic performance aren’t worth very much. Yes, Italy is in the single market and enjoys all the much-vaunted advantages of that arrangement: it has a seat at the table when regulations and standards are framed; these rules apply both in Italy and across the single market; no customs forms are needed when Italian goods head northward; no tariffs are encountered.  Similarly, when Italian goods and services are sold to other eurozone countries there are no problems about exchange rate uncertainty or the cost of changing money. Yet Italy has not been carried forward on a wave of prosperity brought about by the absence of form-filling at borders and the convenience of operating in a common currency. Funny that. It may have had some very successful companies, but Italy has rarely been blessed with stable and effective government. This is why Italy has traditionally been an extremely europhile country. Most Italians felt quite relaxed about Rome ceding power to Brussels. But now, in reaction to recent appalling economic performance, coupled with the EU’s imposition of an unelected “technocratic” prime minister in 2011, more and more Italians are thinking radically about the future. In a recent opinion poll, 58pc of Italians said they wanted a referendum on EU membership and 48pc said that they would vote to leave the EU.  Leaving the euro would be a good start. If the new lira dropped by 20pc-30pc, as it probably would, within a couple of years Italy would be enjoying an export boom as it retook market share from other countries, mostly in Europe. The result would be a resumption of decent economic growth and a fall in unemployment.  Come to think of it, is that a key reason why many business leaders in the countries to the north are pretty keen to keep Italy in?

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier says the EU must not fall into "depression and paralysis" after the UK voted to leave the bloc.  He made the comments arriving for an urgent meeting of the six EU founder members to discuss the decision.  They will consider the process and speed of Britain's exit, and are also likely to discuss how to dissuade others from doing the same.  Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron has said he will step down by October.  The six countries attending the talks in Berlin - Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands - first joined forces in the 1950s and still form the core of the EU.  The first summit of EU leaders with no British representation will be held on Wednesday. The EU has urged the UK to start negotiations to leave quickly.  European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker stressed the "Union of the remaining 27 members will continue".  Global stock markets fell heavily on the news of the so-called "Brexit", where the UK voted by 52% to 48% to leave the EU. The value of the pound has also fallen dramatically.

The European Commission is set to present a new draft of its data-exchange pact with the US, the Privacy Shield, in early July.  EU justice commissioner Vera Jourova told EUobserver in a recent interview that the most contentious issues had been agreed by Washington and Brussels.  These concerned access to data by US security services and bulk collection of people’s personal information.  “We reached an accord on more precise listing of cases when bulk collection can occur and a better definition of how our American partners understand the difference between bulk collection which may be justified and mass surveillance without any purpose, which is not tolerable”, she said.  “These specific points have already been finished and put down in written form”.  The shield is to replace the 15 year-old Safe Harbour pact that failed to protect the privacy of EU nationals whose data was transferred to firms, such as Facebook, based in the US.  The EU Court of Justice (ECJ) invalidated the harbour treaty last year, due in part, to revelations by Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence contractor, of mass-scale US snooping on Europeans. The EU commission and the US, after two years of talks, proposed the shield treaty as a replacement earlier this year. But the EU's main regulatory body on privacy, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, criticised the draft in the strongest possible terms.  The body is composed of EU states’ national data supervisors and EU officials.  Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, its chair, said in April that the shield would fail to protect people's data. “The possibility that is left in the shield and its annexes for bulk collection … is not acceptable," she said.  She sent the draft back to the EU commission, which is now set to present the updated version. That text becomes binding the moment it is adopted by the 28 commissioners, with no subsequent input from the EU Council or MEPs.

Here is a longer extract from Nigel Farage's controversial 'victory' speech:  "If the predications now are right this will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people. We have fought against the multinationals, against the big merchant banks, against big politics, against lies against lies, corruption and deceit and today honesty and decency and belief in nation I think now is going to win.  We will have done it without having to fight, without a single bullet having been fired.  I hope this victory brings down this failed projects and brings us to a Europe of sovereign nation states trading together.  Let June the 23rd go down in our history as our independence day."

For Britain, the dangers of Brexit are not immediate. They are hazily distant and they have been well-rehearsed in this campaign. If a post-Brexit government fails to offer a credible trade and finance policy, Britain could lose its global footing and slide into decline, like the Dutch in the 18th Century. My preference is the European Economic Area, the Norwegian option, a temporary way-station to retain unfettered access to the EU market and 'passporting' rights for the City. It is a withdrawal in safe stages, with all the compromises that this entails.  Remainers warn that the EU might block this. Some even claim that it would have to crush a post-Brexit Britain as a demonstration to prevent others breaking loose. There would be no kid gloves for "deserters" in the telling words of Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission chief.  But to argue such a case is to imply that the EU can be held together only by coercion, like the British, French, Spanish, and Russian empires in their day. It is to suggest that the EU is a prison, and if that were the case the project could not possibly have any future...

Mr Lacey made his claim about the Queen questioning dinner guests in a blog for the Daily Beast website.  He told The Telegraph: "She asked the question in the context of a general debate - she loves a bit of forthright discussion and this sort of remark is tossed around the dinner table like a ping pong ball. That is the way she frames her questions."  A spokesman for Buckingham Palace said: "We would not comment on private conversations the Queen may or may not have had, but the Queen is above politics, has remained politically neutral for the 64 years of her reign and we are very clear that the EU referendum is a matter for the British people."

 

Before referendum campaigning paused following the tragic murder of Jo Cox, there was growing disbelief among leading Remainers – the careerists, the big businessmen, the Bilderbergers, the Davos groupies and that tragic subset of my own trade that sees the journalist’s job as being to propitiate the governing elite – that polls should show a consistent lead for the Leave camp. It is disbelief born of their almost complete detachment from the realities of life outside London’s more exclusive postal districts. In their blissfully ignorant private world, they applaud each other’s existences, praise each other’s insights, and rejoice in their smug membership of an elite in which they feel safe because its ways are beyond democratic will: until now. As their presumptions and assumptions have been assaulted and undermined they have flailed about in panic: witness the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a straight face and to the embarrassment even of his supporters, promising an austerity budget to punish the nation should it vote Leave – even though he must have known a combination of his own MPs, the SNP and Labour would never allow such a measure through parliament...In the real world, as some politicians have belatedly recognized, people want change. They dislike being told that the United Kingdom cannot run itself. They deplore doomsayers who have lost faith in their country. They are angry that their country’s borders are open not just to geniuses with PhDs, nurses, teachers, plumbers, electricians and others who can contribute to it, but to welfare tourists, pickpockets, rapists and murderers. They resent a foreign power overruling their courts and their elected government. They are frustrated at being unable to change key policies when they vote. They detest contributing £8.5 billion a year net for Brussels to spend in countries less efficient, less productive and more corrupt than ours. They have had enough, above all, of being told that unless the UK concedes in perpetuity to foreign rule it will be worthless, and face ruin, danger and unremitting failure.