“Do you want to kill ex-Muslims?” to which the reply came “Islam is clear that apostates do attract capital punishment, we don’t shy away from that.” The location was not Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, but a public library in Sydney, Australia where Hezb ut Tahrir were holding a public meeting.

Iraqi Christians may never be able to return to Mosul by Barnabas Fund

Indian Christians target of hate crime every other day in 2017, local officials in Egypt refuse Christians permission to meet, and more.

It would be hard to imagine the BBC mocking a Muslim MP for keeping Ramadan. Yet last week the actions of a Christian MP were questioned and even mocked on television because she came straight to parliament from a Church service marking the start of the Christian fasting period of Lent.

In 2008 the UK was saved from having a new blasphemy law imposed when former Home Secretary David Waddington successfully persuaded the House of Lords to include a clause in the Criminal Justice Act that was to become known as the Waddington amendment.

The battle for western Mosul, the last major stronghold of Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, is now happening. The question that should be asked in the West is not “Can we defeat IS?” but, “Will the Middle East ever be the same again?” In particular, will cities like Mosul - where for centuries Sunni Muslims, Shi‘a Muslims and Christians lived alongside each other - ever exist again? Or are we now seeing the virtual disappearance of ancient Christian communities from the Middle-East along with the diversity and tolerance their existence at least demanded, if not always achieved?

In a little-noticed move the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC), which regulates pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, has quietly slipped a proposal into a consultation document that would require Christian pharmacists to prescribe abortion drugs. If this were to be included in the new professional code of conduct, any pharmacists who objected could be barred from the profession. The proposal illustrates the increasing attempt to impose partisan socially liberal values on Christians that is effectively imposing a test of secular liberal humanist belief on some professions.

In the USA a terrible tragedy is happening. A nation that was founded by Christians fleeing religious persecution is tearing itself apart over its new president ordering the US refugee system to prioritise religious minorities fleeing persecution. Yet perhaps the greatest tragedy faces Christian refugees fleeing genocide in the Middle East. They now face the painful discovery that many they might have assumed would support them in their hour of need - their fellow Christians - are in fact those most vehemently opposed to this policy. Can you imagine how they feel?

Suddenly the world has woken up to the fact that not everything out there on the internet is true. The latest buzz word is “fake news”. Yet the sad truth is that even in the Christian world we frequently see news reports about persecuted Christians that either refer to events long ago as if they have just happened, or are greatly exaggerated, or in some cases simply untrue.

The freedom to report both incidents of anti-Christian persecution and the ideology motivating such attacks is central to what Barnabas Fund and other organisations have done for many years. Yet those freedoms are now under threat, particularly in the UK, but also in other Western countries.