Children love it when someone reads a book to them. They love funny sounds, rhyming words and silly pictures. They love the sound of their mom or dad’s voice. Sometimes, however, their mom or dad can’t read to them, because that parent is in prison.

Aunt Mary’s Storybook Project, started in 1993, is now a national program that promotes incarcerated（被监禁的）parents reading to their children. Church or service groups donate books and postage. Incarcerated parents pick out books, read them and either volunteers or prison workers mail the books and tapes out to the children. Last May, we distributed 191 books, meaning that 191 children received a book and a tape.

The incarcerated readers record their books, followed by a personal message to the child. Sometimes it is amusing listening to strong, tattooed（纹身）muscle men making animal sounds or funny voices of different characters. Sometimes all I hear is silence, and then sounds that confirm my guess that they are calming themselves after an unexpected wave of feelings.

Seventy percent of children of incarcerated parents eventually end up facing the justice system themselves at some point in their lives. Many of these children end up doing hard time in state institutions.

In reality, though, they are doing hard time now as 12-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and even as babies. They grow up thinking that their parent is “bad” and doesn’t care. They are often teased and feel they have to defend themselves or their parent, sometimes in a violent way.

When they receive in the mail a book and a tape of their parent reading to them, they hear another message, “Daddy/Mommy loves me; he/she has a happy voice; he/she thinks reading is cool.”

Aunt Mary’s Storybook Project is just a small pill for one huge social illness. But when we think we are merely scratching the surface, at least 191 kids are feeling a little bit better!

While most 4-year-olds are making mud pies or selling lemonade, Austin Perine of Birmingham, Alabama decided to go one step further. With his red cape (披肩) covering his shoulders, Austin Perine feeds the hungry and the homeless population throughout the city in an effort to "show love" to those who need "food and smiles." "Show love", according to Austin, has become his superhero motto. His superhero name? President Austin, of course.

Austin's father, TJ Perine, told CNN that Austin has always been compassionate (有同情心的)，as he acts like a "little dad" for his brother, Taylor. However, it wasn't until Austin learned that people are experiencing homelessness that he decided to share what he has with the rest of his community. TJ noted that Austin's first knowledge about homelessness came after watching a nature documentary about a baby panda on television.

"Austin and I were watching an animal show and there was a mother panda that was leaving her baby," TJ said. "Austin began to get concerned, and I told him that the baby panda would be homeless."

To better teach his son about homelessness, TJ took the young boy to the city shelter, at which point Austin asked, "Can we feed them?" In response, TJ took Austin to Burger King where he enthusiastically volunteered to pay for the chicken sandwiches using his weekly pocket money,

Austin and his father have plans to expand their community outreach (延伸) efforts so they can also fight homelessness at its roots. They have also started a GoFundMe as part of their Show Love Foundation.

"We've gotten a lot of support from the country, and what we want to do is expand and do from more than just giving out sandwiches," TJ told CNN, saying that, finally, he and Austin hope to build a service center that deals with the many causes and symptoms of homelessness. "Mental illness, drug abuse, addiction, and things like that," he said. "Austin and I want to build a service center and get some specialists in there that can actually help these people get back into the workforce (劳动力)."

Songs of Disappearance is a 24-minute album of endangered birdcalls recorded by Australia’s best wildlife sound recordist, David Stewart. It sold over 2,000 copies and shows the love of Australians who want to help their native species — with all proceeds (收益) going to conservation of our feathered friends.

Its genesis came when Stephen Garnett, a conservation professor at Charles Darwin University, finished the2020 Action Plan for Australian Birds, a set of recommendations that found 1 in 6 native species are threatened with extinction. He had a conversation with his Ph.D. student Anthony Albrecht, a classical cellist (大提琴手) and one-half of a two-person multimedia company called the Bowerbird Collective.

Albrecht asked his advisor if there was anything Bowerbird Collective could do to make people aware of the action plan. That was when they discussed the idea of an album. “I knew it was an ambitious thing to suggest and — I don’t know — Stephen’s a little bit crazy like me, and he said, let's do this,” Albrecht tells NPR. The other half of Bowerbird, the violinist Simone Slattery, arranged a musical collage (拼贴) of all 53 birds on the record, while the remaining tracks are each bird’s individual songs recorded by Stewart.

“We did it! Thanks to your incredible support we reached Number 3 in the ARIA charts, ahead of Taylor Swift, ABBA, Mariah Carey and Michael Buble,” the organizers wrote on their website, noting the Christmas-time bump given to the latter.

All proceeds of the album were donated to BirdLife Australia, which helped in production.

Some of the singing comes from birds that are Critically-Endangered, and one bird, the Night Parrot, wasn’t even known to science until 2013. “The golden bowerbird sounds like a death ray from some cheesy 70s sci-fi series,” says Sean Dooley, the national public affairs manager at BirdLife Australia.