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.

"They [the electorate] haven’t been told the truth about the ultimate objective of the federalists. The project is to create the United States of Europe. And the people of Europe haven’t been asked whether they want to have a United States of Europe, and watched that happen while they have never been told truth about it."

His remarks come amid increasing disenchantment in the European Union as a politico-economic alliance and speculations on possible exits from the bloc by several member states. Eurosceptic parties including Britain’s UKIP, Spain’s Podemos and the French Front National have gained support during local and general elections.

In a firebrand speech to his parliament, Mr Tsipras said the IMF bore "criminal responsibility" for his country’s cash crisis. "The fixation on cuts...is most likely part of a political plan...to humiliate an entire people that has suffered in the past five years through no fault of its own,” said Mr Tsipras.

This is the first time the Greek premier has targeted his government’s ire at the Fund in such a public manner. The IMF, which holds the position of senior creditor in the country's €240 million rescue, is demanding Syriza cross its sacred red line on pensions, which they calculate as amounting to 16.2 percent of GDP.

The combative speech came after the prime minister had met with his parliamentarians and leader of opposition centrist To Potami party. According to reports, Mr Tsipras told his counterparts the country would not fulfil its latest IMF repayment on June 30 if no deal was reached. His defiant address further exposes the rift between Greece’s troika of lenders, whose competing demands on the country have led to a five-month negotiating stalemate.

Despite these disheartening numbers for those who support the sanctity of human life, not all recent news has been bad. The Associated Press reported earlier this month that the abortion rate has declined nationwide. The decrease is seen not only in states that have restricted the practice through legislation requiring waiting periods, informed consent, parental notification, and bans on late-term abortion, but also in those states that have no restrictions. The survey found that abortions have dropped 12 percent since 2010.

Americans United for Life’s president, Charmaine Yoest, believes the drop reflects changing attitudes among pregnant women. “There’s an entire generation of women who saw a sonogram as their first baby picture,” she said. “There’s an increased awareness of the humanity of the baby before it is born.”

While the main responsibility of Sunni Caliphs was to maintain law and order in the Muslim realm, as descendants of the Prophet, Shia Imams (spiritual leaders) also provided religious guidance and were considered infallible.

Recent tensions in the Middle East and Asia have been interpreted in some sections of the media as religious conflict between Sunnis and Shias. Although Muslims in the UK have been part of a united community with a shared experience of immigration, the relationship between these groups has recently been in the spotlight in Britain too.

The school district wrote, in its new recommendation for its revamped sex education classes, that: “Students will be provided definitions for sexual orientation terms heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality; and the gender identity term transgender… Emphasis will be placed on recognizing that everyone is experiencing changes and the role of respectful, inclusive language in promoting an environment free of bias and discrimination.”

The big lesson, according to Fox News’s Todd Starnes, is “the idea that there’s no such thing as 100 percent boys or 100 percent girls.” The new rules also come with increased protections against discrimination for transgender students – namely, permitting them to use the bathroom of their choosing.

Parents are, predictably, outraged at the impact this will have on their children. Rather than teach children the basics about their changing bodies, the liberal Left is using it as another excuse to indoctrinate America’s children – by teaching them about something that only a tiny minority of American adults feel is morally acceptable.