Yeah, maybe we should include her as well.
"In financially ailing Britain, even queen is cutting back" by Anthony Faiola, Washington Post | July 18, 2010
LONDON — With historic budget cuts about to change the way the British live — slashing children’s benefits, freezing public salaries, and trimming welfare roles — one must do one’s part: Even the queen is cutting back.
Financially ailing Britain is dramatically shifting away from an era of big government, entering a new age of austerity to fend off the same kind of fiscal crisis now gripping Greece.
All so LOOTING and LYING BANKERS can GET PAID!
With her subjects facing a barebones budget and a bevy of higher taxes, Queen Elizabeth II has launched what some here describe as a preemptive strike against those who say that this deeply indebted nation can no longer afford the gilded trappings of its monarchy.
Kind of has that Charles the First feel, huh?
The queen is freezing salaries for royal servants and aides earning more than $73,500, and reviewing all vacant slots with an eye to reducing her staff of 1,400 — which includes a royal piper who plays under her window in the mornings as well as an official counter of swans.
WHO is PAYING for THAT?
For the first time in her 58-year reign, the queen has also agreed to regular audits of royal expenditures by the same national agency that reviews education, defense, and other types of government spending.
The queen’s household is reportedly preparing to cut back on official engagements and reduce spending by 25 percent or more in the coming years as government financing of the monarchy is potentially scaled back....
Yes, that is right, the SET-UPON OVERTAXED, UNDER-SERVED British taxpayers must PICK up the TAB!
And WHAT is the BILL, pray tell?
After a fit of public outrage at the cost of providing security to minor royals, the queen’s granddaughters, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, are also set to lose their 24-hour bodyguards, which have reportedly cost taxpayers upwards of $700,000 a year....
It's a job creation program.
Overall, the queen spent $56 million in government funds in 2009-2010 — or 91 cents per British citizen — down from $61 million a year earlier.
I still think it's too much.
That figure, however, does not include the massive and jealously guarded cost of providing security to the major royals, including the 84-year-old queen and her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, 89.
“The royal household is acutely aware of the difficult economic climate and took early action to reduce its expenditures in 2009,’’ Sir Alan Reid, the Keeper of the Privy Purse — the Queen’s top accountant — said in a statement. He agreed to a $20,000 cut in pay, to $264,000 a year.
What a sacrifice, huh?
--more--"
"Cash payments cut maternal mortality in India" by Emily Wax, Washington Post | July 18, 2010
One reason my Sunday paper stinks: It's usually a lot of NYT and WaPo.
BRAMHA DASPUR, India — Urmila Rawat gave birth to her first two children in her thatched-roof home, as Indian village women have always done. Now eight months pregnant, Rawat assumed she would deliver her third baby at home as well.
Indian government officials see that traditional mind-set as an obstacle to the prosperity and health of a rising economic powerhouse that still has one of the world’s worst rates of maternal mortality.
Gandhi would be so embarrassed and ashamed -- and here the paper is mentioning him in the same breath as Hilter today.
So the government decided to persuade Rawat — and millions of other village women — to give birth in the cleaner, safer environment of a hospital with the most effective enticement it can think of: a cash payment of $30, or several weeks’ wages for her farming family. And it seems to be working....
India’s high maternal mortality rate, while reduced by half in the past 20 years, remains a national embarrassment. Mothers dying in childbirth also create broken families that are an economic impediment.
India’s rate of 254 deaths per 100,000 live births puts it in grim company. According to a recent report in the Lancet medical journal, more than half of all maternal deaths in 2008 were in just six countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Related: Are Africa's Kids All Right?
And NEITHER are the MOMMIES?
Lump in the throat, water in the eyes!
India’s rate is about 10 times that of China, which has focused for decades on improving rural health care, according to the World Health Organization....
Government statistics show that a woman dies in childbirth every hour....
That's 24 a day, 168 a week, 720 a month, over 8500 per year!
Such dismal statistics, in a nation striving to be known more for technological innovation than for mothers dying preventable deaths on dirt floors, have spurred Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to promote the cash giveaway to mothers who deliver in hospitals.
It is just one aspect of a gargantuan effort to overhaul India’s drastically uneven and overburdened health system and bring basic services to the most vulnerable of its 1.2 billion people....
I swear Gandhi would be rolling in his grave had they not dumped his ashes in the Ganges.
Five years ago, Singh launched the National Rural Health Mission to revamp a rural health care system lacking in equipment and trained health professionals....
Yeah, they train in the West and then stay, take up residencies, and start practices.
Adding to the maternal mortality problem is a lack of properly trained midwives in rural areas. Skilled midwives who are based in villages have been one of the most important factors in dramatically decreasing maternal mortality in countries such as Sri Lanka and Thailand. India has several national programs underway to train more midwives.
The payment program seems to be working, according to Indian health workers and researchers who conducted the study for the Lancet.
Ever notice the only time Lancet's credibility was called into question was when they said over a million Iraqis have been killed since the invasion?
“The cash payments mean that India is really starting to invest in women. That trickles out to the rest of the family and the rest of society,’’ said Marie-Claire Mutanda, a health specialist with UNICEF, which is supporting the program....
Yeah, a whole $30 trickling down.
Hasn't that economic model been discredited yet?
The government said it has no firm figures about the total number of women who have received cash or the total amount spent on the program, because it is administered by individual states. Under the plan, women receive a payment about two weeks after they deliver, and they are encouraged but not required to seek postnatal care.
In the wheat farming village of Bramha Daspur, there hasn’t been a pregnancy-related death reported in two years.
Along with paying mothers to give birth in a clinic, India’s government has hired an army of women, armed them with cellphones and notebooks, and given them training to become local health assistants, called Ashas, which means “hope’’ in Hindi.
Could we get off the militaristic language for just one article, please?
The Ashas must have at least an eighth-grade education, an honest reputation in their village, and a confident and assertive personality....
And smile!
