Tonight on PBS at 9 p.m. EST, Bill Moyers Journal “travels to China to find the voices that are speaking out– and being silenced–in China during the Olympics.” Check your local listings for other airtimes.
The Agence France-Presse is reporting that U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari will extend his five-day visit to Burma until Saturday. He hopes to meet with Nobel Peace laureate and Prime Minister-elect Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi, who has met with Gambari a few times in the past, did not appear at a scheduled meeting Wednesday “amid speculation that she may be dissatisfied with the United Nations’ hitherto fruitless efforts to affect change in the military-ruled nation.”
The great Buddhoblogger, Zen teacher, and author Brad Warner mentions today at his blog Hardcore Zen that he will appear on CNN Sunday Morning‘s “Faces of Faith” segment this coming Sunday August 24, 2008 at 7AM EST. (Check your local listings for more information.)
In the same post, Brad also mentions that his third book, titled Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate, will be published in February 2009. In addition, he links to a recent post of mine.
There’s a good editorial in today’s New York Times that details issues of “waste, fraud [and] complacency” with Medicare. With “expenditures soaring,” there is “no room for any more,” they rightly say. It’s more required reading for healthcare chaplains.
Back in July, I posted about a draft regulation “aimed at protecting health-care workers who object to abortion, and to birth-control methods they consider tantamount to abortion” that was being reviewed by the Department of Health and Human Services. This just in: The Washington Post is reporting that the Bush Administration is preparing to implement their regulation in as soon as thirty days. As I mentioned back in July, there is no small amount of controversy about the rule. For some healthcare workers, it offers a way for employees to opt out of participating in procedures they “find repugnant” and might be pressured to perform anyway. For others, though, the rule makes things that much hard for women to exercise their full range of reproductive rights. As it stands now, the regulation makes things even more contentious: it allows federal health officials to pull funding from nearly 600,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors’ offices and other entities nationwide if they “do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral or religious grounds.” Again, healthcare chaplains would do well to take note of all this.
