The Reverend Todd Eklof is an amateur ventriloquist, a social justice activist, a father and an atheist. He is also at the heart of a struggle for the future of America’s most liberal church.

At around lunchtime on Friday 21 June 2019, the third day of the annual general assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) in Spokane, Washington state, Eklof began handing out a book of three essays he’d spent the previous 10 months working on: The Gadfly Papers.

Unitarian Universalism, a religious movement with some 150,000 members across the US, has long been considered a beacon of progressivism, pluralism and tolerance. But in these essays, Eklof launched a stinging attack on its leadership, arguing that the UUA was driving the church in an illiberal, dogmatic, intolerant and “identitarian” direction and that it had become a “self-perpetuating echo chamber” that prioritised “emotional thinking” over logic and reason.

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I'm in East Anglia. We've had a light sprinkling overnight - and did last night too, which hadn't entirely gone by the evening. Foggy otherwise this morning.

The world's biggest iceberg is on the move after more than 30 years being stuck to the ocean floor.

A23a, as it's called, calved from the Antarctic coastline in 1986, but almost immediately grounded in the Weddell Sea to become, essentially, an ice island.

At almost 4,000 sq km (1,500 sq miles) in area, it's more than twice the size of Greater London.

The past year has seen it drifting at speed, and the berg is now about to spill beyond Antarctic waters.

A Jersey-based oil-refining company is suing the EU, Germany and Denmark for at least €95m over a windfall tax introduced during the Ukraine war that it sees as a “pretext” for undermining fossil fuel firms, leaked documents show.

Klesch Group Holdings Limited is taking action under a controversial secret court system enabled by the energy charter treaty (ECT), an agreement officials fear will stymie climate action and divert hundreds of billions of euros into the coffers of fossil fuel investors.

Flooding, wildfires and extreme weather threaten the future of nearly three-quarters of sites managed by the National Trust, a new report says.

The charity says climate change is "the single biggest threat" facing its 28,500 historic homes, 250,000 hectares of land and 780 miles of coastline.

In Monday's report, the trust called on the UK government to do more to help organisations adapt to climate change.

The EU has struck a deal to stop ships of waste plastic landing in ports of poor countries.

European lawmakers and member states agreed on Friday to ban exports of plastic rubbish to countries outside the OECD group of mostly rich countries from the middle of 2026. The deal comes as diplomats meet in Nairobi, Kenya, to hammer out a global treaty on plastic pollution.

“The EU will finally assume responsibility for its plastic waste by banning its export to non-OECD countries,” said Pernille Weiss, a Danish member of the European parliament with the centre-right EPP group, who was in charge of the proposal. “Once again, we follow our vision that waste is a resource when it is properly managed, but should not in any case be causing harm to the environment or human health.”

The European Union has become the first international body to criminalise widescale environmental damage “comparable to ecocide”.

Late on Thursday, lawmakers agreed an update to the bloc’s environmental crime directive punishing the most serious cases of ecosystem destruction, including habitat loss and illegal logging, with tougher penalties.

Marie Toussaint, a French lawyer and MEP spearheading EU efforts to criminalise ecocide, said the move “marks the end of impunity for environmental criminals” and could usher in a new age of environmental litigation in Europe.

The environmental crime directive will be formally passed in the spring, and member states will then have two years to put it into national law.

Officials in Iceland are preparing for an imminent volcanic eruption from a submerged tunnel of magma, which could unleash superhot lava flows on nearby towns, a vital power plant and an iconic tourist destination.

The tunnel of molten rock, known as a magma dike, stretches for around 9.3 miles (15 kilometers) between Grindavík and Sundhnúk in Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula. The underground dike has triggered thousands of earthquakes and caused significant ground deformation that has opened up sinkholes in the surface and cracks in nearby buildings and roads. As a result, local residents have been evacuated.

But this is likely just the beginning.

The Icelandic Meteorological Association (IMO) has warned that a full-blown eruption is almost certainly on its way. And other experts have suggested that the eruption could be part of a more explosive, centuries-long eruption phase for the region.

Icelandic authorities have declared a state of emergency after a series of powerful earthquakes rocked the country’s southwestern Reykjanes peninsula, signalling the increased likelihood of a volcanic eruption in the region.

“The National police chief … declares a state of emergency for civil defence due to the intense earthquake (activity) at Sundhnjukagigar, north of Grindavik,” the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management said in a statement.

“Earthquakes can become larger than those that have occurred and this series of events could lead to an eruption,” the administration warned.

The Icelandic Met Office (IMO) said an eruption could take place “in several days”.

The rise of right-wing populist parties in Europe leads some mainstream political parties to attempt to regain the support of voters by adopting far-right pro-nationalist and anti-immigrant stances. However, new research coming out of Germany and Israel suggests that this strategy primarily benefits far-right parties and not the political mainstream.

Antonia C. May of the GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and Christian S. Czymara of Tel Aviv University and Goethe University in Frankfurt combined survey data from native-born residents in 26 European countries between 1995 and 2017 with party manifesto data.

Their analysis shows that, although 53% of European respondents held narrow conceptions of national identity over the studied period, only 7% of them reported preferring a far-right party. However, when political leaders across parties adopt exclusionary rhetoric, the likelihood of voters shifting towards far-right parties increases significantly, especially among those who uphold narrow conceptions of national identity. In other words, such exclusionary political elite discourses activate individuals with nativist images of the nation.

A fashion industry push to reduce the environmental impact of the clothing it sells is being undermined by an ongoing addiction to buying new clothes, with the average Briton buying 28 items every year.

Asos and Primark are among the big names signed up to Wrap’s voluntary environmental pact, Textiles 2030.

While the companies involved have managed to reduce both the carbon intensity and volume of water per tonne used in their clothing manufacture, in its annual progress report, published today, the climate action NGO warns of hard-won gains being “cancelled out” because clothing production is “spiralling upwards”.

Avian flu has reached the Antarctic, raising concerns for isolated populations of penguins and seals that have never been exposed to the deadly H5N1 virus before. The full impact of the virus’s arrival is not yet known, but scientists are raising concerns about possible “catastrophic breeding failure” of the region’s fragile wildlife populations.

The virus was found in populations of a scavenging bird called brown skua on Bird Island, which is part of the British overseas territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. These migratory birds probably brought it with them from South America where bird flu is widespread and has already killed an estimated 500,000 seabirds and 20,000 sea lions in Chile and Peru alone.