The Week April 28-May 4

28.Bright and early this morning, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. will go before the Washington press corps and guarantee Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama a new wave of publicity linking their names.

Wright has been on a tour of stops -- appearing on PBS on Friday, preaching in Dallas yesterday, going before Detroit's NAACP chapter last night -- to clear his name after a month of controversy stirred by video excerpts from his sermons over the past decade.

He will come to the National Press Club today for a breakfast address on "The African American Religious Experience: Theology & Practice." He will also "put into perspective . . . his ministry and public service that has been so widely discussed in the media," the press club advised.

The former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has been Obama's friend and clergyman for 20 years, and the association prompted, in the midst of the presidential race, an examination of Wright's pronouncements from the pulpit. That turned up his assessment after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that "America's chickens are coming home to roost" and his telling parishioners two years later, "God damn America."

Obama repudiated Wright's statements but said he could not repudiate the man himself.

In a sermon in Dallas yesterday, Wright referred to the past month as "his public crucifixion," and he told public television's Bill Moyers that the media had been unfair, unjust and untrue in their reporting on him and the Chicago church.

The Miami Beach-based Jewish group Shalom International plans to demonstrate against Wright outside the press club. Bob Kunst, the group's president, called Wright a "racist" and warned, "There's going to be a major, major breakaway in the Democratic Party if Obama is nominated." Kunst also runs the HillaryNow.com Web site and is a staunch supporter of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama's rival for the party nomination.

30.Moving from public name-clearing to secret documents: Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) will preside Wednesday over a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on "Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government."

Witnesses scheduled to appear include Bradford Berenson, a former Justice Department associate counsel now with the law firm Sidley Austin; Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy; and J. William Leonard, the former director of the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees policies for the government-wide security classification system.

29-30These days, the phrase "health-care policy" often seems to be code for federal proposals to finance health care, but outside the glare of the political arena, doctors and hospitals are just as focused on the quality of care and the structures for delivering medical services. On Tuesday and Wednesday, at the Keck Center downtown, the Institute of Medicine will hold a public forum on "Engineering a Learning Healthcare System," part of a roundtable series on evidence-based medicine. In this instance, the aim is to apply systems-engineering thinking to the medical arena.

Just as "striking transformations have occurred through systems and process engineering in service and manufacturing sectors -- e.g. banking, airline safety, and automobile manufacturing," so too must the health-care sector rethink "the organization, structure, and function of the delivery and monitoring processes in health care," says the IOM.

Reform efforts will need to "go far beyond financing, to foster significant changes in the culture, practice, and delivery of health care."

Joining in the discussion will be representatives from the Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, MIT and a variety of leading university-based medical centers.

By Garance Franke-Ruta