“I hope the formula of co-sovereignty – to be clear, the Spanish flag on the Rock – is much closer than before,” the minister said, adding that “no one should think that I am celebrating this situation.” Spain is planning to urge Gibraltar not to engage in negotiations with the European Union and will strive for talks regarding the possibility of joint sovereignty of the territory, Garcia-Margallo also noted.

Chief Minister of Gibraltar Fabian Picardo expressed certainty in the UK’s ability to adapt to changes and responded to Spain’s claims at a parliament session in Gibraltar later on Friday. “So let others make irrelevant noises about flying flags over the Rock if they want to waste their breath. Such ideas will never prosper. Gibraltar will never pay a sovereignty price for access to a market. Gibraltar will never be Spanish in whole, in part, or at all,” Picardo asserted.

And just as the Shemitah year ended last September, massive wildfires began erupting all over the country. Thanks to that unprecedented outbreak of large fires, 2015 ended up being the worst year for wildfires in all of US history. And since 2016 began, things have continued to get worse. As far as the total number of acres burned is concerned, we are more than a million acres ahead of the pace that was set last year.

The wildfires that are ripping through many parts of California right now are making headlines all over the world. In particular, the extremely quick moving Erskine fire in Kern County has already destroyed more than 200 homes and authorities are picking through the rubble hoping that they won’t discover too many bodies…

At this point more than 1,000 firefighters are fighting this enormous fire, and it has already burned more than 35,000 acres. The latest update that I saw said that it was now “10 percent contained”, and high temperatures in central California are expected to hit 110 degrees by mid-week. Meanwhile, West Virginia is dealing with a “500 year flood” after it received approximately a quarter of its entire average annual rainfall in a single day.

Our weather is getting crazy, the ground underneath our feet is shaking with frightening regularity, our economic and financial systems are crumbling, and there is political instability all over the planet. If I am right, natural disasters are going to continue to get even worse and global events are going to continue to spiral out of control. A great shaking is coming, and yet most people are completely oblivious to what is happening and they are going to be completely blindsided by it.

The House of Commons Petition Committee has been forced to investigate the alleged fraud saying it “undermines parliamentary democracy”. Remain campaigners are using the second EU referendum petition, which has attracted more than three million names since Friday, to fuel a campaign to block Britain’s exit from the European Union.

But signatories from across the globe – including the United States, Germany, France, and even Syria and Saudi Arabia are using fake addresses to try and plunge Britain into more uncertainty after the Brexit result. Some of the names will undoubtedly be genuine, as any UK resident or British citizen is entitled to sign e-petitions, and they may be abroad.

But express.co.uk has seen tweets showing Remain campaigners offering postcodes to foreigners so they can sign the petition. Nick Martinek, of West Yorkshire, set up a new email address and found a postcode for a street in Hilary Benn’s Leeds Central constituency to prove how easy it was to fraudulently sign. He said: “The way the BBC has been falling over itself to promote this petition makes me laugh. Politicians will use this as leverage to try and stop Britain leaving the European Union – until the joke and scam becomes clear.”

Under the radical proposals EU countries will lose the right to have their own army, criminal law, taxation system or central bank, with all those powers being transferred to Brussels. Controversially member states would also lose what few controls they have left over their own borders, including the procedure for admitting and relocating refugees.

The plot has sparked fury and panic in Poland - a traditional ally of Britain in the fight against federalism - after being leaked to Polish news channel TVP Info. The public broadcaster reports that the bombshell proposal will be presented to a meeting of the Visegrad group of countries - made up of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia - by German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier later today.

Excerpts of the nine-page report were published today as the leaders of Germany, France and Italy met in Berlin for Brexit crisis talks. In the preamble to the text the two ministers write: "Our countries share a common destiny and a common set of values that give rise to an even closer union between our citizens. We will therefore strive for a political union in Europe and invite the next Europeans to participate in this venture."

The revelations come just days after Britain shook the Brussels establishment by voting to leave the European Union in a move some have predicted could lead to the break-up of the EU. A number of member states are deeply unhappy about the creeping federalism of the European project with anti-EU sentiments running high in eastern Europe, Scandinavia and France.

It is important to understand that the Brexit vote was not the beginning of a new crisis – it has simply accelerated a global financial crisis that started last year and that was already in the process of unfolding. As I noted on Friday, we have been waiting for “the next Lehman Brothers moment” that would really unleash fear and panic globally, and now we have it.

The next six months should be absolutely fascinating to watch. We were already dealing with a new global economic crisis without the Brexit vote. But what this does is it introduces an element of panic and fear that had been missing up until this current time. And markets do not like panic and fear very much. In general, markets tend to go up when things are calm and predictable, and they tend to go down when chaos reigns.

Unfortunately, I believe that we are going to see quite a bit more chaos for the rest of 2016, and the trillions that were lost on Friday may turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Summing up yesterday's events, Suzanne Evans, a prominent Vote Leave campaigner and Ukip spokesperson, wrote on her Facebook: 'If this was the predicted apocalypse, well, it was a very British one. It was all over by teatime. Not a bad first day of freedom.'

The about-turn in the markets was sparked by the Bank of England pledging to do whatever it takes to prevent a full-blown financial crisis. In the hours after the Brexit vote, the pound plunged to a 31-year low, and the FTSE 100 index sank 550 points or 8.7 per cent in a matter of minutes yesterday morning.

But the stock market clawed back more than half its losses as the day wore on, before closing down 3.2 per cent or 199.41 points at 6138.69. The blue-chip index of leading British companies finished the week 2 per cent higher than it started, despite warnings of catastrophe following Brexit.

Angela Merkel's country faces having to pay an extra £2.44 billion a year to the annual EU budget once Britain has left. Fears for the future of the EU have prompted German government officials to propose that Britain is offered “constructive exit negotiations”. The aim is of making the UK an “associated partner country” of the EU, according to German newspaper Die Welt today.

Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, warned that Europe needs to change its ways. “Brussels must hear the voice of the people, this is the biggest lesson from this decision," he told public radio. “But Europe is strong only if it can give answers to major issues such as immigration that would strengthen Europe itself and not weaken it. The EU failed to give these answers."

Another critic of the EU, the leader of Poland's ruling party, said that the UK referendum result shows the need for reform of the EU. “The conclusion is obvious. We need a new European treaty," said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who heads the Law and Justice party. “We need a positive reaction, and not persistent movement in the same direction, a direction which has led to crisis," he added.

Tensions are rising across the EU, with Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden all facing demands for referendums over Europe. In a statement, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: "There is no point beating about the bush: today is a watershed for Europe, it is a watershed for the European unification process."

There are times, not very often, when you can feel history being made. An archduke falls, a wall comes down, a plane hits a building, and in that moment you can feel the ground shifting beneath your feet. When those initial results came in from Sunderland and Newcastle in the early hours of yesterday morning, I could barely believe it. Even now, to write the words 'Britain has voted to leave the EU' feels extraordinary, like a leap into some alternative reality.

For once, all the cliches are justified. This was not merely an electoral earthquake. It was a popular revolt by vast swathes of England and Wales against the political, financial and cultural elite, whose complacent assumptions have been simply blown away. Indeed, for once it really is impossible to exaggerate the significance of the moment. What happened was undoubtedly the most dramatic, the most shocking and even the most revolutionary event in our modern history. We will live with the consequences for the rest of our lives.

Every rule of politics has been broken. Barely a year after winning a stunning majority, the Prime Minister has gone, a broken man. The Tory Party, plunged into a three-month leadership battle, has been divided almost beyond repair, while Labour's leaders have been exposed as almost comically unpopular and out of touch.

MPs who campaigned for Remain were warned to respect the will of the people last night amid fears they could try to frustrate the Brexit result. Some on the In side have called for sympathetic members on all benches – Tory, Labour, Lib Dem and SNP – to use their overwhelming majority in the Commons to keep Britain in the single market.

They want to sign the UK up to a Norway-style relationship with the EU that would bring full access to the single market on the same terms as now, but would result in Britain having to accept continued freedom of movement. Former Tory MP Matthew Parris today said the single market had not been on the ballot paper, stoking concern among Brexiteers the Commons could refuse to pass the necessary laws.

Out campaigners have warned that such a move would spark a constitutional crisis because it would counter the spirit of a pro-Brexit referendum result and ignore public concerns over EU immigration. Some legal experts point out that the referendum is not legally binding – meaning MPs could in theory ignore it, no matter how politically difficult. The closeness of the result – 52 per cent in favour of Leave – could also give some MPs the excuse to call for not complying with the result.

The Commons is overwhelmingly pro-EU, with just over 70 per cent of members having campaigned for Remain. A slight majority of Tory MPs were pro-Remain, along with almost all Labour, SNP and Lib Dem MPs.

On the same day President Barack Obama announced his controversial transgender school bathroom policy last month, a somewhat more sinister mandate was finalized by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with consequences for health care providers, insurance companies, and American taxpayers.

The rule contains an explicit definition of gender identity that states a person can claim to be male, female, neither, both, or some combination of the two, said Roger Severino, director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation. “It’s now federal policy that you could be both male and female in some combination,” he said. “That’s a pretty radical statement, and impossible to know what it really means.”

If a medical doctor, based on biological evidence, sees a male patient, but the patient claims to be a female, the doctor must treat the patient as a female. Failure to do so could leave the doctor vulnerable to lawsuits, lost federal funding, and federal investigation by the Office of Civil Rights, the HHS arm implementing this policy.