South Africa’s president says that arresting Vladimir Putin if he attends Johannesburg’s economic summit would be a declaration of war by his country. The August summit brings together Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - developing economies known as BRICS. Putin wants to attend the gathering, but officials are trying to persuade him to stay away to avoid legal and diplomatic fallout because of an international arrest warrant for his alleged war crimes while invading Ukraine. As a signatory to the Rome statute which established the arrest warrant, South Africa would be obligated to arrest Putin if he visits the African nation. President Ramaphosa recently joined a peace mission to Kyiv and Moscow to negotiate ending the war. He does not want to start another war. In an action before the High Court in Pretoria, South Africa’s opposition party has tried to compel the government to pledge to arrest Putin.

Concerns about the inhumane treatment of migrants along the border with Mexico were made in an email from an unnamed Texas trooper to the state department of public safety. In the email the trooper said they were given orders by Border Security agents to push the Mexicans back into the Rio Grande River and ordered not to give them water despite the extreme heat. Officials in the Lone Star State have been criticised for deploying barrels wrapped in razor wire on the river, which the trooper described as traps, because the wire has increased the risk of drowning by forcing migrants into deeper parts of the river. The email detailed several incidents on the border in Eagle Pass last month, including a pregnant woman being trapped in wire and having a miscarriage and a four-year-old girl fainting from heat exhaustion after soldiers pushed the group she was in back towards Mexico.

The southern United States is in its third week of an extreme, stubborn heat wave that refuses to budge. 100 million Americans remain under heat alerts from South Florida to northern Nevada as record breaking temperatures hit 128°F (53° C) in Death Valley. Above-normal temperatures and sauna-like humidity have made things intolerable, with triple-digit temperatures continuing for days.  Sardinia has approached 117° (47° C), and Rome 108° (42° C) - which would eclipse the all-time record by 3°. Iran’s international airport posted a suffocating heat of 152° (67° C). Pray for the people who have problems regulating their body temperature, such as the elderly, pregnant, babies, children, and those with chronic or mental health conditions. Pray for those without air-conditioning to recognise symptoms of heat stroke or heat exhaustion and go to a place which is air-conditioned. The heat is also worsening wildfires. Pray for the safety of firefighters, and the protection of homes and businesses.

On 3 May deadly riots broke out  between the Muslim Meitei tribe and the Christian Kuki-Zo tribes in Manipur. Since then over 130 Kuki-Zo have been killed and over 50,000 displaced. Now that the internet ban has been lifted, a 26-second video has emerged after two months showing dozens of men parading and assaulting two naked Christian women. Elsewhere, a Christian woman’s husband was killed by a mob who then surrounded and sexually assaulted her daughter. Her son was killed trying to stop them. ‘How can the police say they aren’t aware of what happened when they were present while we were assaulted? The bodies of my husband and son were taken by them to the government morgue in Imphal’, she told Al-Jazeera. These are just two of the ongoing violent attacks on Christian women and brutal killings of Christian families, with homes being burned down and communities being terrorised.