Pakistan's lower house of parliament has chosen a lawmaker from the Pakistan Tehrik-e Insaf (PTI) party to be the parliament speaker following general elections in July that were marred by allegations of fraud.

AsadQaiser on August 15 secured 176 votes in the legislature to defeat Khusheed Shah, a joint candidate backed by opposition parties who received 146 votes.

PTI leader Imran Khan, a former cricket star turned politician, appears set to become prime minister when the 342-seat National Assembly votes on August 17. A swearing-in ceremony is scheduled for August 18.

The July 25 elections were won by the PTI, knocking former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) from power.

But the PTI must ally with independents to form a majority coalition….

Supporters of the opposition parties have protested alleged fraud and voting irregularities in the elections, directly blaming the country's powerful military.

The army denies it intervened to help Kahn take power. Khan has vowed to investigate the allegations once he takes office.

A monitoring team from the European Union has said the election results "overall" were "credible," although they criticized the campaign -- saying it was marred by the intimidation of some candidates, an effort to undermine the former ruling party, and media self-censorship.

Violence leading to at least 31 deaths also was reported on election day.

With reporting by AP, Reuters, and Dawn

Pray for the new speaker of the Parliament and Prime Minister of Pakistan that they and other government leaders will take the nation off its destructive course.
Pray that the influence of radical Islamists and occult practitioners called “pirs” will be broken over the nation and the way it is ruled.
May the Gospel speed on throughout Pakistan’s many unreached people groups so they can be set free from the awful spiritual darkness and violence that engulfs this land.
May the Christians be strengthened, emboldened and protected to play their crucial role in prayer and action.

As you know, on August 15th, an anti-conversion law went into effect, putting Nepali Christians at risk for arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.

TTI's National Director in Nepal informed us that, according to the law,

"anyone responsible for encouraging conversion, propagating one's beliefs, or converting another, is an offender according to the law and will be punished with up to five years imprisonment and fined up to 50,000 Nepalese Rupees (about $500 USD - almost a year's salary for some)."

Thankfully, we have yet to hear news of any arrest or persecution from our church planters. 

We will be sure to keep you updated. 

Thank you again for standing with our brothers and sisters in Nepal. 

Keep those prayers coming!

Michael Brown calls on believers to ignore 'Must Stay Gay' mandate soon-to-be law

https://www.wnd.com/2018/08/california-christians-its-time-for-civil-disobedience/

Let’s pray that believers in this important state will unite and rise up in both prayer and action to oppose and protest this evil ruling by the government.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and large scale killing of farmers,” prompting Pretoria to accuse Trump of stoking racial divisions.

The tweet appeared to be a response to a Fox News report that focused on South Africa’s land issue and murders of white farmers.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokeswoman said Trump was “misinformed” and the foreign ministry would seek clarification from the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria. A tweet from South Africa’s official government account said, “South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past.”

Ramaphosa announced on Aug. 1 that the ruling African National Congress plans to change the constitution to allow the expropriation of land without compensation, as whites still own most of South Africa’s territory. No land has been “seized” since the reform plans were announced, the ANC says.

Ben Carson News

Two million South Africans will be coming together in several days for a massive prayer gathering. Angus Buchan, a white farmer, is the leader of this amazing new movement.

Please pray for this beautiful nation for the overthrow of government corruption and the awful violence and crime that has plagued South Africa in recent years in spite of the Truth and Reconciliation effort of the past.

Pray for this mega-prayer gathering to be anointed and guided by the Holy Spirit and for the breakthrough the Christians, both black and white, want to see in their country.

“300,000 Troops and 900 Tanks: Russia’s Biggest Military Drills Since Cold War

Aug. 28, 2018

Pic: A Russian soldier patrolling near military vehicles in Moscow in April.Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

According to the New York Times, “Russia is mobilizing for its biggest military exercise since the height of the Cold War, the Kremlin says, citing a tense international climate that is “frequently aggressive and unfriendly toward us.”

The exercises, which are set to involve nearly 300,000 Russian troops, 1,000 aircraft and 900 tanks, will also include units from China for the first time. They will start on Sept. 11.

In a separate display of military power, Russia was reported on Tuesday to have assembled a large flotilla of warships off the coast of Syria. Russian news media outlets, citing unnamed defense ministry officials, described it is as Russia’s largest naval deployment in the area since Moscow first intervened in Syria’s civil war in September 2015.

The move follows a flurry of claims by Russia, unsupported by evidence, that the West is preparing to stage a fake chemical weapons attack inside Syria as a pretext for an assault on the forces of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Known as Vostok-2018 or East-2018, the September military exercises, involving land and air units, will begin near Russia’s eastern border with China and Mongolia. Both have agreed to join a series of regular exercises that used to be restricted to Russia and countries that were either once part of the Soviet Union or Soviet allies.

The participation of China, which will send helicopters and about 3,200 troops from the People’s Liberation Army, signals a significant reshaping of military exercises that began in the Soviet era. For decades they were aimed primarily at preparing the Red Army for a possible attack by or on China.

The Soviet Union and China clashed repeatedly along their long border in the late 1960s, nearly tumbling into all-out war. They remained bitter foes until the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev normalized relations with a visit to Beijing in 1989.

President Vladimir V. Putin, his ties with the West severely strained by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and military incursions into eastern Ukraine, has put a premium on developing ever closer ties with China as a counterweight and insurance policy against the United States.

Asked on Tuesday at a regular briefing with reporters why Vostok-2018 would be so big, a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said, “The country’s ability to defend itself in the current international situation, which is frequently quite aggressive and unfriendly toward us, is absolutely justified and has no alternative.”

Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying that the exercises in Russia’s far east would be the “biggest drill to take place in Russia since 1981.” That was the year large exercises known as Zapad, or West, were held by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.

The last iteration of the Zapad drills was held in September 2017 in conjunction with Belarus, the former Soviet republic and close Russian ally. That action unnerved the Baltic States and Poland, which feared that the fictional nations invented by Russian military planners as targets for a simulated attack were thinly disguised proxies for their own countries.

In the West, Russia faces off against NATO, but on its eastern flank, it has no obvious enemy or rival. The area has instead become a zone where Russia is keen to demonstrate its close ties to China, despite the risk that Russia’s weak economy and vast expanses of sparsely populated territory make it a vulnerable junior partner.

Alexander Gabuev, a China expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research group, said that while the scale of the exercises was significant, “what is most significant is that China is taking part in drills that Russia only used to do with its allies.”(italics ours)

“China was seen as the potential threat or target in exercises like Vostok,” Mr. Gabuev said, “but it is now being invited to join as a friend and even a quasi-ally. This is really unprecedented.”

All the same, he said, Chinese troops taking part in Vostok-2018 may well be restricted to a military training ground in Tsugol, near where the borders of China, Russia and Mongolia meet. That could allow a far bigger Russian contingent elsewhere to prepare for clashes with China.

Russia’s military, Mr. Gabuev said, “is not so naïve that it is not preparing a contingency plan” in case relations with China take a sudden turn for the worse, as has happened many times in the past.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/world/europe/russia-military-drills.html

Pray that Russia and China will not form a military alliance to threaten the West or other regions and nations.

Pray for 5:5:5

• 5 lost family, neighbors or friends
• 5 minutes of scripture-based prayer/day using the scriptures I prayed for you, listed below
• 5 days/week

Unite with 3 or 4 others once a week, ignite your home/office as a house of prayer, asking God how He wants you to reach/love on and serve the lost  ones for whom you are praying.

www.zumeproject.com is an excellent on line in life discipleship training tool that God can use to turn your HOP into a church planting movement of disciples worth multiplying.

Colin Millar, a “prayer igniter” living in Houston, Texas- This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Iran’s mullah-led Islamic regime has sentenced four Christians to harsh prison terms for practicing their faith.

Pastor Victor Bet-Tamraz and his wife ShamiramIssavi, who are ethnic Assyrian Christians, and Amin Afshar Naderi and HadiAsgari, who are Christian converts from Islam, were sentenced to a combined total of 45 years in prison, reported CBN News.

The charges were conducting “illegal church activities” and spreading propaganda that “threaten national security.”

“These Christians were solely arrested for practicing their Christian faith, including attending Christmas gatherings and organizing house churches,” Mike Ansari of the group Heart4Iran told CBN News.

Bet-Tamraz was arrested in 2014 when plain-clothed security forces raided his home during a Christmas party.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2017 by an Iranian Revolutionary Court along with Asgari for “forming a group,” meaning their church activity, “composed of more than two people with the purpose of disrupting national security.”

The court also sentenced Naderi to five years in prison for allegedly insulting Islam.

Issavi was sentenced this year to five years in prison for “membership of a group with the purpose of disrupting national security” and another five years for “gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security.”

Amnesty International, CBN noted, says Christians in Iran “have been a target of harassment, arbitrary arrest and detention, unfair trials, and imprisonment on national security-related charges solely because of their faith.”The human-rights group said that in the past year alone, “dozens of Christians, mostly Christian converts, have been targeted.”

The four Christians, currently free on bail, are awaiting the verdict of their appeal.“If they are imprisoned, they will be prisoners of conscience,” Ansari told CBN News. “We ask you to continue to pray for the Iranian Christians that are highly persecuted.”

Amnesty International has launched an “urgent action” appeal urging supporters to write to Iranian authorities, asking them to “stop harassment, arbitrary arrest and detention, and imprisonment of Christians, including converts, in Iran.”

Human Rights Watch also blasted the Iranian regime for the crackdown on Christians, the Jerusalem Post reported.

“Since May 2018, revolutionary courts have sentenced at least 208 members of the religious minority to prison terms and other punishments in trials that violate their basic rights,” the group said in a statement.

“The authorities detained more than 300 community members in the notorious Fashafuyeh and Qarchack prisons after late February protests that included violent clashes between protesters and security forces in Tehran.”

The Post said the European Union, according to Iran experts, appears to be prioritizing the preservation of the Iran nuclear deal over human rights abuses.

The EU is seeking to retain the deal after the U.S. withdrew from it in May.

Tzvi Kahn, a senior Iran analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote a policy article titled “The EU’s Passivity on Iran’s Human Rights Abuses,” the Post reported.

“Whereas the Trump administration has issued fresh sanctions against 17 [Iranian] human rights abusers to date, the EU has imposed no new human rights sanctions since the 2015 nuclear deal,” Kahn wrote.

wnd.com

Let's pray for these brave followers of the Lord in Iran and for the fast-growing movement to Christ that they represent. Pray for a new government that will uphold religious freedom and that the Christian movement will explode even more throughout the nation.

An Australian Christian Lobby blogger states ‘The cultural climate of our day often makes the politically engaged Christian in Australia feel isolated. So many issues are beyond us. Safe schools, the rights of parents, conversion therapy, abortion, euthanasia, religious freedom, moral decay, children’s innocence, political apathy, weakened churches. The voices seeking to redefine truth, justice and morality are very loud and increasingly effective.’ He went on to say, ‘Elijah faced an infinitely more desperate set of political and cultural circumstances. He was overwhelmed and desperately cried out to God, ‘Lord, they have killed your prophets, demolished your altars, I alone am left, and they seek my life.’ God’s astonishing answer was, ‘I have kept for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.’ God has preserved a great many in Australia who have not bowed the knee.’ We can pray for our Australian brothers and sisters to engage more vigorously, and confidently to make an enormous impact on Australian society.

Farmers are struggling to afford to feed their animals in Australia's most populous state, New South Wales, which is now officially declared 100% in drought. The area produces a quarter of Australia's agricultural output and farmers tell harrowing tales of failing crops, severe water shortages and inability to feed livestock; having to spend the equivalent of £5,768 per truckload of hay to feed animals, and the threat of large cullings.  Cattle farmer David Graham said he was resigned to waiting for rain, adding ‘In our community you support each other through the tough times.’ Mental health group Sane Australia has said that suicide rates in rural regions are 40% higher than urban areas.

The National Christian Elders Forum (NCEF) commented on a press release by the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA). Their opening comments were, ‘On 5 July, 2018, the NSCIA published an article titled LET THE TRUTH BE TOLD. In our candid estimation, rather than tell the truth, the article is the exact opposite of the truth. It might have been more proper to have titled it ‘Let the Taqiyya  be told.’ Taqiyya is religious deception and the article they refer to said that Muslims were the targeted victims of herdsmen. NCEF stated categorically that this statement is untrue and Muslims were not victimised, Christians are the victims while the government consents to ongoing genocide and ethno-religious cleansing of communities. NCEF said that the government deliberately obscures the truth as the targets of the Fulani herdsmen are natives of Middle Belt who are mainly Christians. See also next article - Five Christian youths to be hanged.