A former Miss Ireland has spoken of her divine healing after being angered by the treatment of schoolboy Joshua Martin who spoke publicly about his faith that God was going to heal him. Rachelle Liggett told the Belfast Telegraph how she had been diagnosed with an acute form of leukemia at the age of ten. ‘I was then sent to the haematology ward of the Children's Hospital in Belfast, where I was to live for the next few months. However, during prayer, when the hand of a Christian was laid on my head, I could feel my fingertips and legs and toes tingle with pins and needles. I believe this was the cancer exiting my body. After this, everything in my life changed. My appetite returned and I started to put on weight. The doctors never again found a cancerous cell in my body.’

Sister Hayat, an Iraqi nun, lived a quiet life of devotion in a Dominican monastery near Mosul. She worked in an orphanage and taught anthropology at a local university. Then IS overran the city and the nuns packed their bags, prayed, kissed the floor one last time and fled to Erbil, where they care for elderly nuns. Later an IS commander called the nun to taunt her: ‘I’m sitting in your chair now and am running things here.’ Then he demanded to know where they kept their weapons; he couldn’t conceive that such an important building in the community would be without an armoury. She directed him to the library. He called her back, noticeably upset. ‘There are no weapons here, just books’, he shouted. She explained that the Bible is the sword of the Spirit and is able to change a person from the inside. ‘The Bible is the only weapon we use; I encourage you to start reading it.’

Satellite photos show images dating from October and early November of the addition of a fourth tunnel at test site Punggye-ri, on North Korea’s east coast. The new tunnel is under mountains where North Korea conducts nuclear tests, and the images showed significant construction since April. While there are no indications that a nuclear test is imminent, the new tunnel adds to North Korea’s ability to conduct additional detonations at Punggye-ri over the coming years if it chooses to do so. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency quoted a South Korean government source as saying there was active movement of workers and vehicles working on a new tunnel at the site; this indicated an intention to conduct a nuclear test ‘at some point’, though this did not appear to be imminent. North Korea is under United Nations sanctions that ban trade which could fund its arms programme.

It has been over two years since president Hugo Chavez died, giving way to an ‘economic war’ on the Venezuelan people. Violence from the opposition has led to Venezuela looking more and more like a powder keg. Demonstrations have wracked the country. A government prosecutor fled Venezuela in October, claiming that the state had pressured him to falsify evidence against the top opposition leader. Last week the secretary of the opposition Democratic Action Party was gunned down. Sunday’s elections of new national assembly legislators are critical for the people. President Nicolás Maduro said that whatever the outcome, he will not stand down and will continue to govern in a civil-military union. There is public anger with an economic crisis caused by dysfunctional controls, plunging oil prices, high inflation, and widespread product shortages of everything from shampoo to rice. The government campaign has warned that the opposition will dismantle popular Chavez-era welfare policies, while the opposition has been lambasting the government’s economic incompetence and corruption. See also http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/30/venezuela-on-edge-ahead-of-parliamentary-elections.html