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Park Slope is where Jim and Bob Burgess, the titular brothers in Strout's new novel, also found refuge when they came to New York. Down a quiet side street is a bar that Strout says is the kind of place where Bob Burgess might often be found. "It's a place where you come in, you can be friendly or you can just sit quietly. I could actually kind of see him sitting over there right now at that bar."

Just like Strout, Bob and Jim moved to New York from a small town in Maine. Their family had a certain notoriety in town — when they were children, their father was killed in an accident that everyone believes was Bob's fault. Even as adults, that event still haunts their lives.

"New York has provided them with a sense of being able to shake off the family tragedy that occurred when they were such young siblings and essentially have fled from," Strout says.

Jim is now a famous lawyer, married with three kids, and he and his wife live in one of the elegant townhouses that line the side streets of Park Slope. Bob lives nearby in a small shabby apartment on a busy street. He's divorced, drinks too much and likes to peek into his neighbors' lives as he sneaks a cigarette out his window.

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Spaniards wary of trusting their life savings to their country's shaky banking system can now buy a mattress that has an armored safe equipped with a keypad combination lock hidden in one end.

The new product, Caja de ahorros Micolchon — Spanish for "My Mattress Safe" — went on sale three weeks ago, several months after the European Union approved loans of up to $130 billion to bail out troubled Spanish banks.

It's the brainchild of Paco Santos, who was laid off from Spain's biggest mattress manufacturer three years ago and has since started his own company, Descanso Santos Suenos, or DeSS. Reached by telephone at his offices in Salamanca, the 57-year-old salesman assured NPR that My Mattress Safe is no April Fool's Day joke.

"We're completely serious! And we've sold many, many of these mattresses," Santos said, declining to give specific sales figures.

But customers will need some savings up front. My Mattress Safe retails for about $1,120. The company also sells bed frames, conventional mattresses and bed coverings.

"I had a hunch that this new product would sell," Santos said. "You see, we've got big economic problems in Spain, and people have really lost confidence in the banks."

With the help of a son who works in public relations, Santos has launched a website and produced several YouTube videos in Spanish to market his special mattresses.

The plot gets going with a surprise phone call from the Burgess boys' sister, Susan, the sibling who stayed behind in Maine. She's divorced, works in an eyeglass store and lives in a dilapidated house that she barely can afford to heat in winter. Susan breaks the news that her teenage son, Zach, is being arrested and charged with a hate crime. It turns out Shirley Falls has become a resettlement area for Somali refugees, and Zach was caught rolling a frozen, bloody pig's head through the door of a storefront mosque. The "Somalians," as Susan and many of the other townspeople call them, are especially outraged because this violation occurred during Ramadan. Zach, a lonely boy who seems scared of his own shadow, says he doesn't even know what Ramadan is.

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From Berlin, NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson tells us that:

An unexploded bomb from World War II was successfully diffused Wednesday. Its discovery Tuesday night near the city's main railway station forced trains to divert and snarled traffic in the German capital.

Weighing about 220 pounds, the aerial bomb was found at a construction site near railway tracks north of the station. Police evacuated more than 800 people from nearby apartment buildings and homes Wednesday morning as experts worked.

The main railway station is walking distance from the German parliament and chancellor's building, although those buildings were not affected. But some 50 trains had to be re-routed or cancelled, causing massive delays. Flights were grounded for 45 minutes at Berlin's Tegel airport while the bomb was diffused.

Thousands of unexploded WWII-era bombs are believed to be buried in Germany. In 2010, three people were killed when one accidentally exploded.

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