NPR News

Alex Hernandez was born in Oaxaca, Mexico. By age 4, he had immigrated to the United States with his family. By age 12, he had asked his mother if he could sew. She refused, he recalls, saying sewing was for girls.

So he chose a different creative route. By high school, Hernandez was painting; in college, embroidering.

When Wisconsin State Sen. Dale Schultz goes to the polls Tuesday, he will vote for GOP Gov. Scott Walker in the gubernatorial recall election.

"I'm a Republican," Schultz said during an interview in his Capitol office in Madison, on the eve of the state's historically acrimonious and expensive recall election.

But if the Democratic candidate, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, succeeds in ousting Walker, Schultz, 58, says, "I'm going to do everything I can to make him successful, too."

A group of Air Force moms photographed breast-feeding their children in uniform and in public have sparked a heated debate among parents and service members. The photos, taken at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Wash., were intended to be part of a campaign to empower service members to breast-feed.

Terran Echegoyen-McCabe, who was photographed with her 10-month-old twins, told Michel Martin of NPR's Tell Me More that she didn't intend for the photos to be provocative.

All U.S. presidential elections "are unique in some fashion," says John G. Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University.

Sure, but what about 2012? What exactly will make the 2012 election between President Obama and Mitt Romney truly unique?

In an age when the size of the observable universe is known to a few decimal places, today's Transit of Venus offers a good opportunity to reflect on just how far we've come.

(For viewing information, click here.)

Less than 250 years ago, the brightest minds of the Enlightenment were stumped over how far the Earth is from the sun. The transits of the 1760s helped answer that question, providing a virtual yardstick for the universe.