Christian opens first café in Syrian suburb
Iain Taylor / Open Doors
Cities are full of cafés and restaurants. In
Ibrin, a suburb of Damascus in Syria, there
wasn’t one – until a local Christian recently
returned to open the town’s sole café.
The Syria conflict began in 2011. A year
later Joseph Hakimeh, his wife and three
children were forced to flee Irbin, just a few
of the thousands of Syrian Christians then
internally displaced.
India: rape
and violence
Iain Taylor / Open Doors
Christians across India are living in constant
fear as a systematic campaign of violent
harassment, rape and murder
is waged
against them.
This is the finding of a disturbing new
report
‘Destructive Lies’ by
the London
School of Economics, commissioned by
Christian charity Open Doors and presented
to Parliament in July.
China monitors Christians via 415 million cameras
Iain Taylor / Open Doors
The camera lens homes in and maps the man’s face – measuring the space between his eyes, the distance between the nose and mouth, the angle of his cheekbones, the shape of his chin. Instantly, that data is converted into a string of numbers called a ‘faceprint’. His face is recognised and compared instantly with millions of other images on a database. His identity is confirmed, without him even knowing it.
Open Doors was one of the first to alert the world to the implications of this mass Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that China has developed. It is now one of the most powerful surveillance tools – and potential Christian persecution tactics – ever devised. 415 million high-tech surveillance cameras, linked to China’s police database and eventually its new ‘social credit system’ which monitors the political loyalty of its citizens, have already been installed on streets and in public venues. A recent BBC News report revealed that the authorities now place QR codes outside the doors of people’s homes, so they can easily know who’s supposed to be there – and who isn’t.
