Most Recent Posts

By the loading dock of Seattle's downtown library, librarian Jared Mills checks his tire pressure, secures his iPads and locks down about 100 books to an aluminum trailer the size of a steamer trunk. The scene is reminiscent of something you'd see in an action movie, when the hero is gearing up for a big fight, but Mills is gearing up for something very different.

"If you're not prepared and don't have a lot of experience hauling a trailer, it can be kind of dangerous," Mills says, especially when you're going downhill. "The trailer can hold up to 500 pounds."

Mills is part of Seattle Public Library's "Books on Bikes" program, which aims to keep the library nimble and relevant by sending librarians and their bicycles to popular community events around Seattle.

Sports

Randonneurs Are In It For The Ride, Not The Race

D-Day soldiers landing on Omaha Beach. A naked Vietnamese girl running from napalm. A Spanish loyalist, collapsing to the ground in death. These images of war, and some 300 others, are on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in an exhibition called WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath. Pictures from the mid-19th century to today, taken by commercial photographers, military photographers, amateurs and artists capture 165 years of conflict.

One of the best-known war pictures of all time was taken by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal in 1945. Five Marines and a Navy corpsman, raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima.

"It's such an important and historic photograph, but I don't know who any of those guys are," says documentary photographer Louie Palu — who found inspiration in the iconic Rosenthal image. "I wanted to meet the guys in that photograph. I wanted to know the name, the age, how young or how old they looked. I didn't want it to be an anonymous set of people raising a flag."

So when Palu was embedded with troops in Afghanistan's Helmand province in 2008, he made close-up portraits of the men. One of Palu's portraits became the signature image of this war photography show:

Enlarge image i

A leap of faith that sent an Arizona family bound for the South Pacific in a sailboat has returned them in an airplane after a harrowing ordeal at sea that saw them adrift and nearly out of food in one of the remotest stretches of ocean on the planet.

Hannah Gastonguay, 26, and her husband, Sean, 30, were fed up with abortion, homosexuality, taxes and the "state-controlled church" and so "decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us", she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. With them were Sean's father and the couple's two daughters, one 3 years old and the other an infant.

A few weeks into their ultimately 91 days at sea, the Gastonguays encountered "squall after squall after squall" that damaged their boat. Originally on a heading for the archipelago nation of Kirabati near the international dateline, they changed course to the nearer Marquesas Islands, but were unable to reach them either.

Along the way, they apparently suffered damage to their mast and, unable to set a foresail, made little westward progress.

Down to "some juice and some honey," and whatever fish they could catch, a passing Canadian cargo ship tried to help out with supplies, but when it came alongside, it did even more damage to the tiny sailboat.

Eventually, the family was picked up by a Venezuelan fishing vessel.

"The captain said, 'Do you know where you're at? You're in the middle of nowhere,'" Ms. Gastonguay told the AP.

From there, the five were transferred to a Japanese cargo ship and, three weeks, dropped off in Chile.

Gastonguay told the AP that she never thought the family was going to die: "We believed God would see us through."

In Chile, police prefect Jose Luis Lopez told the newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias:

"They were looking for a kind of adventure; they wanted to live on a Polynesian island but they didn't have sufficient expertise to navigate adequately," he said.

Activists around the world are trumpeting a call to "Dump Russian Vodka" — Stolichnaya, in particular — a protest against the implementation of several anti-gay laws in Russia, the latest in a marked surge in anti-gay sentiment and violence in the country.

But as NPR and other media have reported, the Stoli boycott may be misguided: the vodka that everyone in the world outside Russia drinks isn't made in Russia at all, but in Latvia.

And that got us wondering: What other beloved national products have pulled the old switcheroo and are made somewhere else?

Here are a few we came up with: