In some places the water was waist high and emergency services had to rescue people by boat. As many as 500 homes were flooded on Friday night, with many more under threat as the rains were due to return on Saturday night. The Environment Agency had 151 flood warnings and alerts in place yesterday as shop keepers and home owners cleaned up and assessed the damage.

“It was a pretty devastating picture,” said Simon Young, a councillor in the town on Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire, where the River Calder overflowed. “Countless homes and businesses were under water in the centre. A lot of a people cannot remember anything like this in the last 24 years.”

Along the river in Hebden Bridge, many more traders had lost their stock. The rising waters forced sewage into the guest house run by David and Sally Henry, who said they faced being “ruined”. Mr Henry said: “It will take six months to clean this up, everything’s contaminated.” South west Scotland and Northern Ireland continued to endure torrential rain yesterday, while the Isle of Wight festival was a mud bath. But it was the north of England that suffered most.

Forecasters said Saturday the storm has maximum sustained winds of 50 mph (80 kph). A tropical storm warning has been issued for part of the Louisiana coast. The storm is moving north at 6 mph (10 kph). The center of Debby is expected to be moving over the northern Gulf during the next few days.

The National Hurricane Center says this is the first time four tropical storms have been recorded before July 1 during the Atlantic hurricane season since record keeping began in 1851. Alberto was the first storm this year. It formed off the South Carolina coast on May 19.

Mr Peña Nieto, currently ahead of the other two candidates by a comfortable 12 points, has been accused by his critics of taking Mexico back to the dark days of the past, when his party was notorious for corruption, autocratic rule and shady deals. His main opponent is already claiming electoral fraud - a precursor to challenging the result, say his supporters.

Earlier Mr Peña Nieto, a handsome 45-year-old former governor of Mexico State with a soap opera star wife, had fought his way through screaming fans to punch the air and chant "Yes we can", telling 15,000 flag-waving aficionados that his party would restore security to Mexico after 12 years in opposition. Why does he think Mexico appears ready for a change? "The answer is obvious," he told The Sunday Telegraph after the raucous rally. "Mexico is in a situation in which society is weakening. There is a lack of growth and employment for Mexican people. Above all there is a climate of insecurity, which evidently Mexicans just do not want."

Indeed, exhausted by six years of bloody drugs wars, Mexico looks likely to usher in a new era of rule by his centrist Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) – the party which governed the country for 71 years until 2000. In the eyes of many, this amounts to relinquishing attempts at political pluralism in exchange for a return to stability.

In a televised statement issued as tens of thousands of Brotherhood protesters poured into Tahrir Square in central Cairo, SCAF warned that the military and police would respond “firmly” to attempts to “harm public and private interests”. The Muslim Brotherhood is convinced that its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won but fear that the military intends to hand victory to his rival, Ahmed Shafiq, a former air force commander who also served in the regime of the ailing former president Hosni Mubarak.

Mr Morsi condemned what he said was an attempt by the military “to mislead public opinion” and denied that the Muslim Brotherhood would orchestrate or condone a campaign of violent protest. “This [plan for violence] does not exist, will not exist, cannot exist and there is no scope for it to exist,” he said, surrounded by secular politicians including young activists who launched the uprising that unseated Mr Mubarak last year.

Casting himself as the standard bearer of the revolution against an entrenched military elite, the Islamist leader reiterated his rejection of new measures announced last week by SCAF which are widely seen as a “soft coup”. He vowed that peaceful protests would continue until the changes have been rescinded but, striking a conciliatory tone, also said had no problems with “the patriotic armed forces.”

After five years of declining property taxes, massive layoffs and questionable spending, leaders of the blue-collar, family-oriented city outside Las Vegas declared a state of emergency, invoking a rarely used state law crafted for unforeseen disasters.

No matter that the statute, which allows municipalities to suspend union contracts and avoid paying scheduled salary increases, doesn't actually include fiscal emergencies among the list of potential disasters. "It says, in case of 'emergency such as.' You can't list how many different types of emergencies there are in the world," City Council member Wade Wagner said of the move, which will save the city $9 million.

For nearly two years, the city, where residents have long paid the highest tax rate in southern Nevada, has teetered on the edge of insolvency. One in every 195 homes is in foreclosure, the state's highest rate. Once the nation's fastest growing city, it lost more than 3,000 businesses in three years after the recession hit in 2007. Its total revenue has plunged from $817 million in 2009 to $298 million this year.

Israeli security chiefs held a series of emergency consultations on Saturday — including a meeting of defense chiefs with Defense Minister Ehud Barak — and decided to try to avoid a further escalation of hostilities. Amid reports from Gaza Saturday night that Hamas was now seeking a ceasefire, security sources said “quiet will be met with quiet, but further rocket fire will be met with further fire [from Israel].” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was also involved in the consultations.

The sources said Israel had no interest in a major military response to the upsurge in rocket fire, given the current sensitivities in the region including the tension surrounding Egypt’s elections, the ongoing violence in Syria and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Israel this week.

A senior IDF official also speculated that Hamas wants to stop an escalation of hostilities in Gaza. He said that the group aims to prevent the launching of long-range rockets, despite pressure from other Islamist groups in Gaza to act otherwise. He summed up the nature of the ceasefire terms as “Quiet met by quiet, and fire met by fire.”

For one thing, wind turbines and solar panels, which only produce energy if massively subsidized by the state, drive up electricity prices, which kills off manufacturing jobs. That’s why NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s “solution” to the “Dutch Disease” he says is caused by the development of the oilsands without carbon pricing, which is to impose cap-and-trade, is absurd.

All that will do is raise energy prices even more, costing more jobs, which only helps the environment if you believe deliberately causing a recession, which lowers pollution and greenhouse gas emissions because of economic collapse, is a good idea. It isn’t.

One of the reasons environmentalists are denouncing the failure of the ongoing Rio 20 UN conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro is that Europe, the main driver of all things green for the past 25 years, including the useless Kyoto accord, has bigger things on its mind these days, such as impending financial collapse. This underscores a basic reality. Only countries with healthy economies have the capacity to improve their environments. Those going broke, don’t.

Problem is, greens are against nuclear power, shale extraction and the expansion of gas use. That’s because they’re not interested in practical solutions to environmental challenges. They’re interested in driving us back into the Stone Age.

Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist whose Gaia theory — that the Earth operates as a single, living organism — has had a profound impact on the development of global warming theory. Unlike many “environmentalists,” who have degrees in political science, Lovelock, until his recent retirement at age 92, was a much-honoured working scientist and academic. His inventions have been used by NASA, among many other scientific organizations.

Lovelock’s invention of the electron capture detector in 1957 first enabled scientists to measure CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and other pollutants in the atmosphere, leading, in many ways, to the birth of the modern environmental movement. Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.”

Now, Lovelock has given a follow-up interview to the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which he delivers more bombshells sure to anger the global green movement, which for years worshipped his Gaia theory and apocalyptic predictions that billions would die from man-made climate change by the end of this century. Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

Finally, about claims “the science is settled” on global warming: “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”

Gro Harlem Brundtland, author of a major UN sustainable development report 25 years ago, said corporate power was one reason for lack of progress. Nations will spend three years drawing up sustainable development goals. They will also work towards better protection for marine life on the high seas. But moves to eliminate subsidies on fossil fuels - recommended in a number of authoritative reports as likely to boost economies and curb CO2 emissions - came to naught.

Plans to enshrine the right of poor people to have clean water, adequate food and modern forms of energy also foundered or were seriously weakened during the six days of preparatory talks. And many governments were bitter that text enshrining women's reproductive rights was removed from the declaration OVER OPPOSITION FROM THE VATICAN backed by Russia and nations from the Middle East and Latin America.

Developing countries had argued that they needed financial assistance in order to meet the costs of switching onto a green development path. But with the US in an election year and the EU deep in eurozone mire, any mention of specific sums was blocked. As a consequence, developing countries refused to let the declaration endorse green economics as the definitive sustainable development path.

Animal welfare, religious tolerance and political correctness all seem to be conflicting with each other in Britain as politicians, educators and community leaders try to balance dietary customs and liberal values. While the government tries to find a way to accommodate Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughter and at the same time conform with what they see as acceptable limits on cruelty to animals, schools across London are taking pork sausages, a long-time staple of children's meals, off the menu.

Two reports over the weekend highlight the clash. The Sunday Telegraph reported that in many areas of Britain's capital, schools were being advised by their local councils, or deciding on their own initiative, to ban all pork products from their menus. This move was out of consideration to Jewish and Muslim children and teachers yet has not been taken following official requests by either community. While many see this as another admirable effort by local British authorities to exhibit sensitivity towards religious and ethnical minorities, the move has attracted criticism from Conservative politicians and farmers' associations who see this as yet another attempt to encroach upon the traditional British way of life, in this case embodied by the good old bangers and mash, in the name of multiculturalism.

Indeed, for all devout Jews and Muslims, this will not render the school meals more palatable, as non-Kosher and non-halal meat, beef, lamb or chicken, will still be on the menu. Jon Benjamin, the chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told the newspaper that “this is simply not an issue. Jews of a certain level of observance would not eat in non-kosher restaurants or dining halls."

A European army, an IMF-style monetary fund and a finance minister for the whole EU were among radical suggestions put forward. The group aims to set the scene for a summit in Brussels next week of EU leaders – and to encourage further thinking about how “political union” might be achieved. Tuesday’s meeting of the 10-nation “reflection group”, including France, Italy, Spain and Austria as well as non eurozone EU members Poland and Denmark, underlined how many influential figures on the Continent wish to see a United States of Europe – and was immediately seen by some as a plan for Berlin domination.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who chaired the talks, urged: “We should take advantage of the crisis to take a historic step towards more integration.” He added that the forces of nationalism “have to be countered by pro-European arguments”. He said: “Only a long-term perspective for Europe will restore the confidence that we also need to come out of the debt crisis now.”

In a preliminary report, the group backed tighter central control over national budgets to ensure the euro was an “irreversible” institution. Leading Tory eurosceptic MP Peter Bone said: “We as a country shouldn’t sit on the fence and say it’s up to them. We should be saying ‘No, this is wrong, wrong for Europe’. THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE DON’T WANT TO BE DOMINATED BY GERMANS.”

Fellow senior Tory Douglas Carswell yesterday introduced a Private Member’s Bill in the Commons proposing that Britain should leave the EU, in line with a Daily Express crusade which has received huge public backing.

Dangerously high borrowing costs for Spain and Italy have eased a little on market hopes for policy initiatives at the Brussels summit on June 28/29. If it falls short, both countries may be pushed closer to eventually needing sovereign bailouts. Without a successful summit, "there would be progressively greater speculative attacks on individual countries, with harassment of the weaker countries," Italy's Mario Monti said in an interview carried in a number of European newspapers ahead of the mini-summit, at which German Chancellor Angela Merkel is likely to be outnumbered.

"A large part of Europe would find itself having to continue to put up with very high interest rates that would then impact on the states and also indirectly on firms. This is the direct opposite of what is needed for economic growth," Monti said. Friday's meeting will search for ways to achieve fiscal and banking union in the euro zone and, more urgently, it may also be the occasion for Spain to formally request assistance of up to €100 billion for its struggling banks. An audit released on Thursday found Spanish banks would need up to €62 billion in extra capital to weather adverse circumstances.

The judges in Germany's highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court, had asked the president to delay signing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the European Union fiscal pact into law. The Constitutional Court, anticipating challenges to the legislation, wanted more time to review documents. Gauck, hardly three months in office, was already faced with an important decision. If he complied with the request from Karlsruhe, at least one piece of legislation proposed by Chancellor Merkel and her coalition government - the permanent bailout fund known as the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) - would undoubtedly be delayed. The ESM was originally scheduled to come into force on July 1, 2012.

Now the ESM will have to wait. Gauck doesn't want to sign the two laws, at least for now, when they are presented to the two houses of the German legislature - the federal parliament, the Bundestag, and the upper legislative chamber, the Bundesrat - for ratification next week. However, laws in Germany are only considered ratified, and therefore binding under international law, when signed by the president. Now it could take another two or three weeks before the court rules on possible emergency appeals.

Declining a request by the Constitutional Court judges, especially on such a delicate matter, would have created a massive conflict and set off a debate on the question of whether a German president in cases of doubt has the power to ignore Karlsruhe. It was a conflict Gauck was anxious to avoid. According to a statement by the president's office, Gauck intended to "comply with the request, in keeping with standard government practice among the constitutional bodies, and out of respect for the Federal Constitutional Court, as soon as the Bundestag and the Bundesrat have adopted the corresponding treaty laws."

For Merkel, this means that what has already been a grueling struggle over rescuing the euro is now entering the next phase. A ratification on July 1 would have sent a strong signal to the financial markets: Namely that the euro rescue is going according to plan. But now, at least for a while, it will remain under the priviso of a decision from the Karlsruhe court. That may not be a disaster, but it is a symbolic setback for European leaders seeking to rescue the euro. Once again, those plans face another delay.

The Italian leader is to hold talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the French president, François Hollande, and Spain's prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, in the hope that the single currency's big four countries can pave the way for a breakthrough at next week's meeting.

Speaking to the Guardian and a group of leading European newspapers, Monti said that, without a successful outcome at the summit, "there would be progressively greater speculative attacks on individual countries, with harassment of the weaker countries". The attacks would be focused not only on those who had failed to respect EU guidelines, but also on those like Italy, which he said had abided by the rules "but which carry with them from the past a high debt".

Monti warned: "A large part of Europe would find itself having to continue to put up with very high interest rates that would then impact on the states and also indirectly on firms. This is the direct opposite of what is needed for economic growth." Outlining the result of a failure at the talks, Monti said that, faced with creeping economic paralysis, "the frustration of the public towards Europe would grow," creating a vicious circle.

"To emerge in good shape from this crisis of the eurozone and the European economy, ever more integration is needed," said Monti. Yet, if the summit failed to resolve the problems quickly, "public opinion, but also that of the governments and parliament… will turn against that greater integration."

The Telegraph has been receiving emails from angry customers. Gemma said: "I am a student and I depend on wages from my part time job to survive. Today I was supposed to receive my tax rebate and wages in order to buy food and pay my household bills and I haven't been able to do either. I have literally nothing to eat until I get paid."

David said: "I have recently moved to a new area where I am still finding my feet, I am 19 and living away from home with my family living 240+ miles away. I have no food in the house and I was hoping to go food shopping today with my wages. I have no source of borrowing money from anyone around this area or my family because they cannot transfer it via Natwest. Looks like i'm not eating today."

Andrew wrote: "Just been reading your article and thought i would give you my story too, I was meant to receive a payment of nearly £3000 from student finance yesterday, still not showing in my account. I think the most worrying thing is that nobody can give you any idea as to when this will be fixed and what has caused the issue."