The photo is indeed iconic. And not just in the shallow celeb meaning of that word. It’s iconic in the traditional sense, too, in that it’s being venerated as an actual icon, a devotional image of an apparently holy human. It’s an image we’re all expected to bow down to, whose essential truth we must imbibe; an image you question or ridicule at your peril, with those who refuse to genuflect before it facing excommunication from polite society. Yesterday’s Jennermania confirms how weirdly authoritarian, even idolatrous, trans politics has become.

There is a palpable religiosity to the wild hailing of Bruce/Caitlyn as a modern-day saint, a Virgin Mary with testicles. Within four hours, more than a million people were following Bruce/Caitlyn’s new Twitter account, hanging on her words like the expectant horde waiting for Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai. Her every utterance, all banal celeb-speak, was retweeted tens of thousands of times. Celebs and commentators greeted her as a kind of messiah. ‘We’ve been waiting for you with open arms’, said an overexcited editor at Buzzfeed. Across the Twittersphere Caitlyn was worshipped as a ‘goddess’, a ‘goddess in human form’, a ‘goddess made manifest on Earth’.

The American gay-rights group GLAAD is scouring the mainstream media for any use of the word ‘he’ in relation to Caitlyn, like a modern incarnation of the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which monitored the public sphere for any less-than-gushing commentary on God. It has issued speech-policing guidelines for the media. ‘DON’T refer to her by her former name… DO avoid using male pronouns and Caitlyn’s prior name, even when referring to events in her past.’

With its millions of agog followers, its worship of an iconic image, its insistence we all ‘bow down’, the Cult of Caitlyn gives Catholic mariolatry a run for its money in the blind-devotion stakes. And of course, as with all venerated icons, anyone who refuses to recognise the truth of Caitlyn’s Vanity Fair cover has faced mob punishment or finger-wagging corrections of their goddess-defying blasphemy.

Moments ago, this committee released its preliminary findings, and here is the conclusion from the full report presented below:

“All the evidence we present in this report shows that Greece not only does not have the ability to pay this debt, but also should not pay this debt first and foremost because the debt emerging from the Troika’s arrangements is a direct infringement on the fundamental human rights of the residents of Greece. Hence, we came to the conclusion that Greece should not pay this debt because it is illegal, illegitimate, and odious.”

As we predicted over four years ago, Greece has effectively just declared that it will no longer have to default on its IMF (or any other debt - note that the dreaded "Troika" word finally makes an appearance after it was officially banned) simply because that debt was not legal to begin with, ie it was "odious."

If so, this has just thrown a very unique wrench in the spokes of not only the Greek debt negotiations, but all other peripheral European nations' negotiations, who will promptly demand that their debt be, likewise, declared odious, and made null and void, thus washing their hands of servicing it again.

Opposition parties have criticised the move saying it was a political tactic by the cash strapped government. However the evidence marshalled by the debt truth committee could be used in a potential court case by the Greek government, should it seek a legal route out of its massive debts.

The concept of odious debt is established in international law where dictatorships or illegitimate governments have borrowed money and later been succeeded by democratic regimes.

With Greece set to default on a €1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) debt repayment, Mr Schaeuble said that Angela Merkel's government was making emergency plans for the country's exit from the eurozone. The Left-wing Syriza government, led by Alexis Tsipras, has confirmed that Greece would run out of money by the end of the month unless its creditors agreed to release €7.2 billion (£5.1 billion) in bail-out funds.

Senior German politicians have accused Mr Tsipras's government of not having grasped the seriousness of the situation, describing Greek politicians as "clowns". Downing Street also disclosed that ministers were "stepping up" plans for "Grexit". George Osborne, the Chancellor, has been chairing a meeting of ministers this week amid fears that British holidaymakers will be stranded abroad if Greece defaults on its debt repayment.

Lew cited political uncertainty in Greece that has added to concerns about stability in the 19-nation eurozone. Greece's negotiations with its creditors, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, have bogged down as payment deadlines loom and the risks grow of a debt default and exit from the currency bloc.

"Although there has been some progress during Greece's ongoing discussions with Europe and the IMF, the negotiations and the path to securing agreement are challenging and complex," Lew told lawmakers.

"We continue to urge a timely resolution so that Greece is able to continue to meet its obligations," he said.

With just 13 days before the country’s bail-out programme officially expires, finance ministers will gather in Luxembourg on Thursday to discuss whether to finally give their assent to release bail-out cash and stave off an unprecedented default.

Before the 11th hour attempt to secure a deal, Athens’ chief negotiator said his government had run out of cash to make a €1.6 billion payment to the IMF, also on June 30. Greece has been without any aid from its creditors since August 2014. Mr Tsipras braced himself for the fall-out of his government’s negotiating stance, saying he was ready to "assume the responsibility to say ‘the big no’ to a continuation of the catastrophic policies for Greece". He later held a brief phone conversation with Mr Juncker, where the pair agreed to talk again at a later date.

Fenner, who is emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, said homo sapiens will not be able to survive the population explosion and “unbridled consumption,” and will become extinct, perhaps within a century, along with many other species. United Nations official figures from last year estimate the human population is 6.8 billion, and is predicted to pass seven billion next year.

Fenner told The Australian he tries not to express his pessimism because people are trying to do something, but keep putting it off. He said he believes the situation is irreversible, and it is too late because the effects we have had on Earth since industrialization (a period now known to scientists unofficially as the Anthropocene) rivals any effects of ice ages or comet impacts.

The Pope, after all, is the highly influential leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics around the world and a man who can bend the ear of any president or prime minister he wants at any time. Getting him on board the green bandwagon is an undoubted coup for the eco-lobby.

First, like pretty much all political leaders who put their tuppence worth in on this issue, the Pope knows next to nothing about climate science, which makes his opinion worth as little as mine. Secondly, popes don’t have a particularly strong track record when it comes to tackling matters of fact and science over the years.

It did, after all, take until 1992 for the Roman Catholic Church to formally acknowledge that it was wrong to persecute Galileo for proving in the 17th century that the Earth moves around the Sun rather than the other way round. And as recently as 2009, Pope Benedict XVI was busy telling Africans facing the deadly threat of AIDS that condoms would not protect them from HIV, despite all the clear medical evidence to the contrary.

But it’s not just matters of science on which Popes have time and again been wrong. It’s on matters of basic morality too. When it comes to all of the great moral debates of our time, the Catholic Church has been on the wrong side on every one.

Israeli police claimed that an investigation will be opened into the arson attack. The Israeli police usually say that they will carry out investigations when these attacks take place. To date, however, not a single settler has ever been prosecuted for such serious crimes. The attack targeted the Church of the Multiplication which is believed by Christians to be the site of Jesus' miracle of multiplying two fish and five loaves to feed 5,000 people.

This is not the first time that Israeli right-wingers have destroyed churches and church property. Numerous arson and graffiti attacks were carried out in the past against Christian sites, as well as against Arab property in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem under the “price tag” slogan. The term “price tag” is used by Jewish extremists to describe vandalism or attacks typically carried out against non-Jews or their property.

But parts of the document, leaked earlier this week, have already been criticised by some US conservatives. It has been dismissed by two Republican presidential candidates. Jeb Bush said he did not get his economic policy from his bishops, cardinals or pope - so why his policy on the environment? Meanwhile Rick Santorum questioned whether the Pope was credible on the issue of climate science.

However, many academics have welcomed the pontiff's input. Professor Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at the University of Oxford in the UK, said: "If Pope Francis can't speak up for our unborn grandchildren, then God help us all." The encyclical, named "Laudato Si (Be Praised), On the Care of Our Common Home", aims to inspire everyone - not just Roman Catholics - to protect the Earth.

The 192-page letter, which is the highest level teaching document a pope can issue, lays much of the blame for global warming on human activities. Pope Francis writes that: "We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life." He criticises what he calls a "collective selfishness", but says that there is still time to stop the damage, calling for an end to consumerism and greed.

Developing countries are demanding firmer promises of financial help from rich countries so they can adapt to inevitable changes in the climate and get clean energy to avoid contributing to further warming. The UN's climate change chief Christiana Figueres said their position would be strengthened by the Pope's insistence that this was the clear moral responsibility of the rich. The encyclical will be welcomed by poor countries in Africa and Latin America.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi launched the pontiff's second encyclical at a news conference on Thursday. The teaching is more evidence of a pontiff determined to act as a catalyst for change, and a powerful diplomatic player on the world stage, says the BBC's religious affairs correspondent Caroline Wyatt. The release comes six months before international leaders gather in Paris to try to seal a deal to reduce carbon emissions. Ms Figueres says the Pope's message will influence talks in Paris this year on a deal to tackle global warming.

Grexit would be horrible for the union. Brexit would be worse. The two possibilities are linked by an overarching crisis, both less dramatic and far more serious. Looming in the background, meet - EUex. Not "ex" for exit, but for existential crisis - in both the philosophical sense of purpose and meaning, and the more literal definition - that its very existence is at stake. These triple challenges might lead to fracture and fragmentation - or Eurofrag, if you prefer. You might think that is good or bad. It is certainly important.

In my years as the BBC's Europe editor, from 2005 to 2009, there was plenty of debate about the future of the European Union, but I never took seriously the idea that it might one day cease to exist. That no longer seems so fanciful. The founding father of the European Union, Jean Monnet, used to say: "Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises." The equation these days rather points towards subtraction, and the crisis could drive Mr Monnet's project backwards.

If the National Front's leader, Marine Le Pen, wins the French presidential elections in 2016, she will take France out of the European Union. If British exit would leave the foundations a little shaky, removing the French cornerstone would surely lead to collapse. But the electoral politics is just an expression of a public mood, a lack of even a little love for the EU. It has failed to persuade people it has a positive purpose that makes their lives better. Inertia and an unloved status quo is a shaky foundation for any political organisation.

The US-born former diplomat, who is now a Knesset member for the Kulanu party, notes in his foreword that the Hebrew term for “ally” is ben brit — literally “the son of the covenant.” And what he documents is actually the breaching of a covenant, the collapse of an alliance — an accumulated arc of abandonment by the Obama administration, and most especially the president himself, of Israel.

It’s a charge, unsurprisingly, that the administration has rushed to deny, and, rather more surprisingly, that Oren’s own party chief Moshe Kahlon has hurried to dissociate Kulanu from. Oren’s style is not excitable or melodramatic. In fact, he writes in generally understated tone, with the measured sense of perspective you’d expect from a best-selling historian. So when he notes, as he does near the very end of the book, that last summer’s Israel-Hamas war left “aspects of the US-Israeli alliance in tatters,” you take him seriously, and you worry.

And when you read that Washington worked relentlessly to quash any military option for Israel, most especially in 2012 — arguably the last moment at which Israel could have intervened effectively to thwart Iran’s drive to the bomb (though Oren does not confirm this) — you sense that he has exposed the emptiness of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endless assertions that Israel will stand alone if necessary to stop a nuclear Iran. And you register, with all its grim repercussions, the realpolitik of a broken relationship with our key defender — the rupture that now leaves Israel vulnerable to an increasingly bold Islamist regime that avowedly seeks our annihilation.