Continuing the media’s fixation with our head of state’s health and longevity (see News Update of 1 January 2017), there is intense media speculation in Britain, picked up in the colonies, that a very\u00a0big announcement\u00a0was about to\u00a0be made\u00a0– the Queen was to hand over all of her duties to Charles; Phillip was dead (hurriedly retracted by one newspaper);\u00a0British PM called to Buckingham Palace etc. All it was in the end – and\u00a0not unexpected – was that Prince Phillip, Queen consort and Australian knight, was to effectively retire at the age of 96 “in the autumn”\u00a0this year. As it’s autumn here,\u00a0WfaAR had to work out when that was:\u00a0around September\/October in the northern hemisphere. As reported on ABC online: “After the day’s events, and a sleepless night for many in other parts of the world, the news brought on a sense of relief, sadness and even amusement at the global fuss, with one twitter user suggesting the Queen had just ‘trolled the whole world’.” In other non-news, the Queen and Prince Phillip were both reported to be in good health “on Wednesday” and in good health in the last few months. Prince Phillip carried out 184 official engagements in the year to March 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Continuing the media’s fixation with our head of state’s health and longevity (see News Update of 1 January 2017), there is intense media speculation in Britain, picked up in the colonies, that a very\u00a0big announcement\u00a0was about to\u00a0be made\u00a0– the Queen…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-15","wpcat-15-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1069,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions\/1069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}