YOUR FRIENDS' ACTIVITY

    • Fighting Gun Violence with Style

      "I grew up in a family that embodied the spirit that you had a responsibility to repair the world. And so I jumped, I walked, I ran to every 5K, everything, and that was how we grew up. And Jewelry for a Cause is an extension of that."

      Jewelry for a Cause is a company that creates innovative fundraising tools in the form of jewelry for not-for-profit organizations. Jessica Mindich, a mother of two, started the company five years ago in her Connecticut home. "I was a mom that had been a lawyer looking to go back to work and looking around at a community that was still doing the same fundraising methods and people were bored of them."

      Mindich creates affordable jewelry for different causes, with a portion of the proceeds going to charities around the world to help promote awareness for issues such as breast cancer, Alzheimer's and drinking water. "There isn't anything that we do that doesn't give back to a cause," Mindich says of her creations. "People were excited to wear what they

      Read More »from Fighting Gun Violence with Style
    • Ingrid Loyau-Kennett confronts one of the suspected killers (photo via Twitter)Ingrid Loyau-Kennett confronts one of the suspected killers. (photo via Twitter)

      The horrific attack that left a U.K. soldier dead on the streets of London could have been worse, were it not for the actions of a 48-year-old single mom, the U.K.'s Telegraph reports.

      Ingrid Loyau-Kennett spoke with the Telegraph about speaking directly with the suspected killers in the attack's immediate aftermath. In a photograph, Loyau-Kennett can be seen speaking with one of the attackers while a crowd of onlookers watches from a safe distance.

      Via the Telegraph:

      "And then when I went up there was this black guy with a revolver and a kitchen knife, he had what looked like butcher’s tools and he had a little axe, to cut the bones, and two large knives and he said 'move off the body," she said.

      "So I thought 'OK, I don’t know what is going on here’ and he was covered with blood. I thought I had better start talking to him before he starts attacking somebody else. I thought these people usually have a message so I said, 'what do you want?'

      "I asked him if he did it and he said yes and I

      Read More »from Woman being praised for calming suspected attackers in London
    • Defibrillator sign (file photo via Thinkstock)Defibrillator sign (file photo via Thinkstock)

      Talk about the miracle of birth.

      After Erica Nigrelli's heart stopped beating, the pregnant teacher's co-workers used CPR and a defibrillator to get the heart pumping again, Click2Houston.com reports.

      Nigrelli was rushed to the hospital where doctors performed an emergency delivery of baby girl Elayna.

      Via Click2Houston.com:

      The school nurse, her assistant and the athletic trainer started CPR and used a defibrillator to get her heart beating again. They kept the 32-year-old teacher alive until paramedics arrived and rushed her to the hospital. Doctors delivered the baby by emergency C-section one month early. Technically, it was a postmortem delivery because Erica's heart was not beating.

      Elayna is now three months old and weighs nine pounds. Doctors told Click2Houston.com that she may go off oxygen as early as next week. Erica was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a heart condition in which the heart muscle becomes abnormally thick, according to Mayo Clinic.

      Erica told

      Read More »from Baby delivered after pregnant woman’s heart temporarily stopped
    • Nancy Davis, a 94-year-old resident of Moore, Oklahoma, lost her house during Monday's tornado. It was the second time a tornado had destroyed her home, CBS News reports.

      In 1999, Davis lost another home to another massive tornado that killed 36 people. Following that deadly twister, Davis rebuilt her home on the same land, according to CBS News. Fortunately, she also built a small storm shelter.

      During Monday's storm, Davis helped several neighbors, including a pregnant woman and a two-year-old boy, by letting them stay in her 5-by-7-foot shelter as the tornado raged.

      Speaking with CBS News, Davis said the storm was incredibly loud. "We couldn't hear ourselves it was so loud," she told CBS News. "It was like the world was falling on us completely. I never heard of such terrible, terrible noises, it was horrible."

      The shelter proved invaluable, but Davis now finds herself without a home for the second time. Speaking to CBS News, Davis said, "What am I going to do? Am I going to go in

      Read More »from 94-year-old woman lost home for second time in tornado, helped neighbors survive in shelter
    • Elena Marquez, center, and others at a rally to call on Congress to pass immigration reform. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

      It's been a good week for proponents of immigration reform. The sweeping bill that seeks to legalize most of the country's 11 million unauthorized immigrants was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday night, after five full days of debate and amendments that did little to significantly change the original compromise.

      So, what's next for the bill?

      It is likely to be introduced on the Senate floor as early as June 3, and lawmakers will be able to propose more changes to the legislation there. Meanwhile, a secretive bipartisan group in the House also may release a competing immigration bill, though members are divulging few details about what their proposal will look like.

      Immigrant advocates are worried the Senate reform bill may face a tougher crowd in the Republican-led House than it has so far in the Senate.

      Ben Monterroso of the Service Employees International Union said advocates worry that GOP House members, all already in election mode for 2014,"are going to play to the base."

      "I'm not sure that the extremists [in the House] are going to allow this process to go without a fight," Monterroso said.

      Overall, the bill moved slightly to the right during its trip through the Senate committee. Republicans on the 18-member Senate Judiciary Committee were able to push through a few modest amendments that beefed up some of the border security provisions of the original bill, as well as loosening restrictions on and increasing the amount of visas for the high-tech industry to hire foreign workers.

      Unions were unhappy with the high-tech visas amendment but willing to live with it. "We appreciate the work done by the Gang of Eight, as well as all those senators—both Democrats and Republicans—who engaged in good faith in the arduous job of advancing this bill," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a statement. "We applaud the progress by the Judiciary Committee, but we will still work to make a good bill even better."

      Meanwhile, liberal groups expressed disappointment that the bill does not yet include a provision to allow people in same-sex marriages to be able to sponsor their spouses for green cards. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, withdrew the amendment this week after being warned it could disrupt the fragile bipartisan coalition that supports immigration reform.

      Though the bill remained largely unchanged in the Senate committee, three main issues have emerged as major potential sticking points that could derail the bill in the coming months:

      Read More »from What’s next for the immigration reform bill?
    • Anwar al-Awlaki, shown in Yemen in October 2008, was killed in a U.S. drone strike. (Muhammad ud-Deen/AP file)Attorney General Eric Holder informed Congress on Wednesday that the U.S. has killed four Americans in drone strikes since 2009: radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and three others who were “not specifically targeted.”

      Holder’s disclosure, first reported by the New York Times, came a day before President Barack Obama was to defend his counterterrorism strategy in an afternoon speech at National Defense University. Obama was slated to focus on drone strikes—which have sparked anger across the Muslim world and increasingly tough questions in Congress—and on his broken promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for suspected extremists.

      Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama planned to lift a ban on sending prisoners from Guantanamo to Yemen. The administration prohibited transfers to Yemen out of concern that, once there, they might carry out attacks or radicalize other Yemenis.

      The administration will also resume transferring detainees to their home countries that the Pentagon has cleared for release, the paper reported.

      Eighty-six of the 166 Guantanamo detainees have been cleared. Of those, 56 are from Yemen. But the first transfers will likely be of prisoners not from Yemen, the Journal reported, citing U.S. officials.

      There is little appetite in Congress for closing the brig. Republicans and some Democrats have opposed doing so. And lawmakers of both parties were sure to scrutinize the attorney general's letter on drones.

      "The President has directed me to disclose certain information that until now has been properly classified," Holder said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., that was made public by the administration.

      "Since 2009, the United States, in the conduct of U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qa'ida and its associated forces outside of areas of active hostilities, has specifically targeted and killed one U.S. citizen," Awlaki, Holder wrote.

      "The United States is further aware of three other U.S. citizens who have been killed in such U.S. counterterrorism operations over that same time period," he wrote. "These individuals were not specifically targeted by the United States."

      Awlaki was killed in a drone strike in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011. His 16-year-old-son, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in another strike two weeks later. Obama was "surprised and upset and demanded an explanation" for the second attack, according to a new book about the president's counterterrorism strategy.

      Two other Americans, Samir Khan and Jude Kenan Mohammed, were also killed in drone attacks, Holder wrote.

      The letter also went to the heads of the armed services, intelligence, foreign relations, and judiciary committees of the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as the

      Read More »from Holder: U.S. killed four Americans overseas in drone strikes since 2009
    • Action Comics No. 1, featuring Superman (Wikipedia/Joe Shuster)Action Comics No. 1, featuring Superman (Wikipedia/Joe Shuster)

      While remodeling his newly purchased home in Elbow Lake, Minn., David Gonzalez noticed something unusual amid the old newspapers that had been used as wall insulation.

      It was a copy of Action Comics No. 1 from 1938, the very first comic to feature the granddaddy of all superheroes, Superman.

      StarTribune.com spoke with Gonzalez about his amazing find as well as a subsequent family accident that knocked down the value of his windfall.

      "I knew it was worth money," Gonzales told the Star Tribune. "But I had no idea how much."

      So far, the answer is, well, a lot. With roughly three weeks left on the auction block, the high bid is around $113,000.

      Not bad, considering Gonzalez bought the house for $10,100. But, still, the comic could be worth a lot more were it not for an argument among family members.

      From StarTribune.com:

      When his wife’s aunt grabbed the comic book amid all the excitement of the discovery, he grabbed it back and tore the back cover. Experts downgraded the comic book’s

      Read More »from Man finds comic book worth $100,000 being used as wall insulation
    • Think of it as a sort of reverse birthday gift.

      After a tense few days in the White House Brady Press Briefing Room as the Internal Revenue Service scandal, Benghazi emails and the Justice Department's secret seizure of journalists' phone records put White House press secretary Jay Carney on defense, he decided to strike a much lighter note and offer effusive praise for the 50 or so journalists gathered for the daily briefing on Wednesday (which happened to be Carney's birthday).

      Carney defended his handling of the recent scandals, in part by suggesting that the journalists covering the White House are just too good at their jobs.

      From Carney:

      We have a team here that works really hard trying to anticipate the questions you're going to ask. The problem is, there's a lot of you and you're good at your jobs and you're smart. And we almost invariably do not anticipate every question that you ask. So sometimes we don’t have the answers, and sometimes we need to go back and get them.

      The

      Read More »from Carney to press: ‘You’re good at your jobs and you’re smart’
    • Right place, right time, right truck.

      A truck driver with incredible timing and quick thinking helped save the life of a man whose pickup had flipped into a roadside pond, WCCO.com reports.

      Scott Rosenberg stopped his semitrailer when he saw the smashed pickup in the pond on the morning of May 9 near Stillwater, Minn. The truck Rosenberg was driving happened to have a boom used to unload heavy cargo such as concrete pipes.

      Rosenberg quickly surmised that anyone in the pickup needed immediate help. "The horn was honking, the lights were still on. There was a little bit of steam coming off it," said Rosenberg, describing the scene of the accident to WCCO.com.

      Rosenberg told WCCO.com that his truck's boom is capable of moving 10,000 pounds, more than enough power to right an upside-down pickup. With the help of other good Samaritans, Rosenberg got the smashed pickup upright.

      Rosenberg saw the driver, Nate Anderson, wasn't moving at first. "My heart just sank," Rosenberg told WCCO.com.

      Read More »from Truck driver with great timing saves man’s life
    • The new BBQ map might seem like propaganda to some and truth to others (Texas Monthly)

      There’s a new map and website on the Internet showing the best 50 BBQ joints. And they’re all in Texas.

      Of course, the list—compiled annually since 2008—was done by a Lone Star state publication, Texas Monthly.

      Editor Jake Silverstein told Yahoo News by phone that he’s ready to "declare war" on all famous BBQ regions, including Kansas City, North Carolina and Memphis. "It's a declaration of supremacy. Our level of authority on BBQ is completely unmatched," he said, noting they were partly having fun with the map, "but [we] also believe what we’re saying."

      Causing job envy elsewhere, Texas Monthly has a BBQ editor. "The only BBQ editor in the country," Silverstein claimed. That’s right. Someone is basically paid to eat BBQ. The questionable list claiming newspaper reporter was the “worst job in 2013” may just have been flipped on its head.

      “Our guy eats BBQ several times a day,” Silverstein said. And while he might not be as healthy as Texas native Lance Armstrong, he added, "he’s

      Read More »from Texas BBQ map latest salvo in state’s savory meat ‘declaration of supremacy’

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