CN Morning Rundown: Violence Mounts in Eswatini, Missionaries Release Urgent Prayer Call

Here’s a quick summary of the top stories featured on cn.mycharisma.com:

Missionaries Release Urgent Call for Prayer in Eswatini as Violence Mounts

Missionaries to a kingdom bordered by South Africa and Mozambique are pleading for prayer on behalf of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, where death, violence, looting and martial law have forced nearly all missionaries to evacuate the country. Nonessential employees of the U.S. Embassy there have also fled.

“Of course the big thing is access to food and gas,” said Becky Spencer, who canceled a planned six-week summer mission trip to Eswatini due to upheaval in the nation. There, she and her husband, Tracy, established a Christian preschool (Little Lambs), care home (Shepherd’s Care) and church.

The Spencers’ nonprofit, Grand Staff Ministries, also offers a sponsorship program that provides 22 children with school fees, uniforms, backpacks and school supplies. Most of those children and their families also depend on the ministry for food and blankets, as do several families from the church.

How Modern America Has Gone Morally and Religiously Rogue

When President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was sworn in on Wednesday, March 4, 1801, most of the U.S. population lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Prior to 1801, the huge parcel of land in North America lying between the nearly three-quarters of a million-plus square miles of land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains was up for grabs.

Following a land deal in 1803 between France and the United States known as the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson acquired approximately 827,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million.

In 1804, Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) were commissioned to explore and map the newly acquired territory, find a practical route across the western half of the continent, establish trade with—and sovereignty over—the natives near the Missouri River, and establish American presence before European powers made claims for the region.

Fauci, Paul Clash on Virus Origins, Trade Charges of Lying

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, angrily confronted Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul on Tuesday in testimony on Capitol Hill, rejecting Paul’s insinuation that the U.S. helped fund research at a Chinese lab that could have sparked the COVID-19 outbreak.

Paul suggested that Fauci had lied before Congress when in May he denied that the National Institutes of Health funded so-called “gain of function” research—the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world—at a Wuhan virology lab. U.S. intelligence agencies are currently exploring theories that an accidental leak from that lab could have led to the global pandemic.

“I have not lied before Congress. I have never lied. Certainly not before Congress. Case closed,” Fauci told Paul before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, saying a study the senator mentioned referenced a different sort of virus entirely from the one responsible for the coronavirus outbreak. {eoa}

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