Cats in the NBA -- Story Corps' animated short -- Inforgaphic of Jack White -- Stephen Colbert on cyberwar and monkeys -- and more nonsense from Conan O'Brien. See these in today's Links of Awesomeness...
In the second attack in two days, AFP reports that a U.S. drone strike killed at least three people early today in a building in the central market of Miranshah, the main 
town in North Waziristan near the Afghan border.
"A US drone fired two missiles on the first floor of a shop in the main market and at least three militants were killed," a senior official told AFP. … "When the first missile hit the building, I heard cries for help and ran towards it, but militants stopped me at a distance. When they started rescue work, another missile hit," a local tribesman said about Thursday's strike. "I eventually saw them removing three burnt bodies in a really bad shape. They were put in wooden boxes and taken away."
I was thirteen years old, a freshman in high school. This was my first mission trip – a week of working in an elementary school in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
Inner-city urban experience, meet private-school-raised girl.
School grounds within the walls of my church, meet bars and constant police surveillance.
The students we were going to serve looked a lot like me, but I could not feel further from their experience
A year after publically admitting his status as an undocumented immigrant, journalist Jose Antonio Vargas writes for Time Magazine:
"There are an estimated 11.5 million people like me in this country, human beings with stories as varied as America itself, yet lacking a legal claim to exist here. It’s an issue that touches people of all ethnicities and backgrounds: Latinos and Asians, blacks and whites. (And, yes, undocumented immigrants come from all sorts of countries like Israel, Nigeria and Germany.) It’s an issue that goes beyond election-year politics and transcends the limitations of our broken immigration system and the policies being written to address them."
Read more and follow Time's coverage here
Salon's Editor-at-Large, Joan Walsh writes:
"Thanks to OWS and the work of writers like Stiglitz, 2012 was supposed to be the year America rediscovered and tackled economic inequality. Time magazine closed 2011 by naming OWS its top story of the year, a pretty big honor for a movement that only revved up in the year’s final quarter. But that’s how much its “We are the 99 percent” framing seemed to change the political debate."
Read her full article here
The Hill reports:
"A Senate panel on Tuesday will move human-rights legislation that lawmakers of both parties say is critical to gaining their support for establishing normal trade ties with Russia.
Stories like this one remind me that listening to women’s voices can be a matter of life and death, and not in the whole “Adam-listened-to-Eve” type of way.
Impassioned women of all ages are petitioning Uganda’s highest court to declare that “when women die in childbirth it is a violation of their rights.” So far, their bids in the lower courts have been unsuccessful, but they’re pressing on.
$60 million.
That’s what it would take to hire enough medical workers to meet Uganda’s needs—specifically, to staff village health clinics that lack people and supplies to the degree that an estimated 16 pregnant women die needlessly each day.
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer." - Zora Neale Hurston
"Just as you do not know how the breath comes to the bones in the mother’s womb, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything." - Ecclesiastes 11:5
Please take a moment of silence for the country of Syria and the estimated 10,000-plus victims of violence.