RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/boris-johnson-is-being-prosecuted-over-a-campaign-slogan/

Britain’s censors have found yet another silencing tool.

Britain is a country where tweeting, preaching, or posting the wrong thing can get someone in trouble with the police. Under the circumstances, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Boris Johnson, one of the most prominent of those who campaigned for the U.K. to leave the EU — and now a possible leader of the Conservative party — is facing prosecution for the official Leave campaign’s claim that the U.K. sent “the EU £350 million a week.” This was money, Vote Leave asserted, that could be used to help fund the perpetually needy National Health Service, a claim that was plastered along the side of its big red campaign bus.

It was also a claim that — like many others made by both sides in the course of the referendum campaign — was not quite as accurate as, shall we say, it might have been. Although it is true that Britain’s notional EU bill was then about £350 million a week (in fact a little more), that figure was quoted before taking account of the annual deduction that Mrs. Thatcher had first secured for the U.K. back in the 1980s and, for that matter, other payments channeled to Britain via Brussels. After adjusting for all that, Britain’s real weekly contribution was probably a little more than half the infamous £350 million.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-chinas-war-on-christians-11559256446

June 4, 1989, was a seminal day for China’s faithful, as the Chinese government massacred thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The same day, Communist Party leaders watched as pro-democracy candidates in Poland supplanted Communist rule—with Pope John Paul II’s indispensable support. Together the events jolted Beijing into tightening its control over religion.

Post-Tiananmen, Christian groups were made to register with state “patriotic” associations or risk punishment as “evil cults.” Anxious to maintain access to Western markets, Beijing selectively enforced these rules in large cities. The rural Christian underground bore the brunt of church closings and mass internment of their members in labor camps.

Chinese Christianity still experienced spectacular growth in the next 30 years. Today there could be well over 100 million Chinese Christians. All but 36 million practice their faith outside government control. Purdue sociologist Fenggang Yang has projected that China could have nearly 250 million Christians by 2030. The Communist Party numbers 90 million.

President Xi Jinping last year began enforcing religious regulations to rein in church growth and bend Christian belief to party dictates. Mr. Xi gave direct control of churches to the officially atheistic Communist Party. Some urban underground megachurches were shut down. Thousands of congregants were arrested and several prominent Protestant pastors received lengthy prison sentences. Earlier this month, the regime launched a nationwide campaign to eradicate unregistered churches.

Mr. Xi calls this policy “sinicization.” The goal is to make religions “instruments of the Party,” the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions asserts. The government confirmed this when it inadvertently posted internal documents—downloaded by ChinaAid, a nonprofit Christian human-rights organization—revealing that it intended to “contain the overheated growth of Christianity.”

Last year in Henan province, 10,000 Protestant churches were ordered shut, even though most were registered with the state. During 2018, more than one million Christians were threatened or persecuted and 5,000 arrested. Among them is an American permanent resident, Pastor John Sanqiang Cao, 60, who is serving seven years for “organizing illegal border crossings” to deliver aid in Myanmar. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/29/investigation-reveals-doubling-nhs-rationing-cataract-surgery/

NHS rationing of cataract operations has doubled in just two years, with patients increasingly denied cases until they are at risk of blindness, an investigation reveals.

Charities warned of “shocking” restrictions, which are in defiance of national guidance.

The figures from across the country show a sharp increase in the number of areas where the NHS is refusing to fund the operations until vision is badly compromised.

It comes despite warnings from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence that the NHS must not rely on sight tests to decide whether surgery is warranted.

Experts say the rise of rationing is leaving vulnerable pensioners in misery and isolation, and increasing their risk of suffering falls.

The research, published in the BMJ, found that in 2018/19, 22 per cent patients in England referred for cataract surgery were forced to go through tests to establish how poor their vision first. This is a rise from 6 per cent in 2016/17.

And almost 2,900 cases were rejected – a rise from 1,301 refusals two years earlier.