Inspiring News Articles
Excerpts of Highly Inspiring News Articles in Major Media
Below are one-paragraph excerpts of highly inspiring news articles from the major media. Links are provided to the original inspiring news articles on their media websites. If any link fails, read this webpage. The most inspiring news articles are listed first. You can also explore the news articles listed by order of the date posted. For an abundance of other highly inspiring material, see our Inspiring Resources page. May these inspiring news articles inspire us to find ever more ways to love and support each other and all around us to be the very best we can be.
If we look back over the past quarter century since the end of the Cold War in 1989, we can see how quickly confidence about the future can bloom and wither. A short-lived sense of a peace died in the Gulf, the western Balkans and Rwanda. Waves of prosperity came and went with the dotcom boom and bust, and the bursting of our western credit-based bubble of prosperity in 2008. The five big challenges we face as a global community [are] wealth and poverty, war and peace, rights and respect, and the health of people and the planet. The indices of inequality keep worsening and while there are many excellent initiatives on curbing waste, meaningful reductions in carbon output still seem out of political reach. But a look at the other three big issues shows that it need not be thus. This is not a peaceful world and yet it is more peaceful today than at any time since before the first world war and, some argue, ever. Military spending remains high and armed conflict remains a major cause of death, yet by comparison with earlier times, there are markedly fewer wars and they are less lethal. There has been an avalanche of peace agreements in the two decades since the end of the Cold War and a major sustained, if quiet, effort not only to make peace, but then to lay the foundations for long term peace in conflict-affected countries. It would be wrong to look at the issues of war and peace and declare ‘job done’. If the United Nations and the peace-funding governments can stay focused, there is every reason to expect a reasonably successful record of building peace to continue.
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Seventeen years ago today, in the Boston Globe Magazine, a dying man issued a plea for greater compassion in medicine. He worried that medical professionals faced increasing work demands that prioritized efficiency over empathy. Kenneth Schwartz died of lung cancer two months later, but not before founding an organization that would bring increased attention to the importance of human interactions in medicine. Research suggests that without intervention, physicians may risk becoming less empathetic over time. A recent survey of 18 studies found that medical students and residents tended to report declining feelings of empathy over the course of their training. Another study found that self-perceived empathy dropped sharply after the third year of medical school, when students start working with patients in the hospital. The Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare’s flagship program, which started at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1997, encourages doctors, nurses, and other health professionals to share the complex and often distressing feelings that arise from patient care. In recent years, the Schwartz Center Rounds have expanded rapidly, spreading to more than 260 institutions in the country and 14 hospitals in the United Kingdom. The program’s growth reflects an increasing recognition that traditional ideals of the stoic, superhuman medical professional may not be healthy — for either the patient or the caregiver. Schwartz Center Rounds highlight feelings — guilt, fear, anger, or sadness — that might lead caregivers to withdraw emotionally from their work.
