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We're catching up with a harrowing story out of Syria about a Polish photographer who was kidnapped last week and is possibly being held for ransom. NPR's Rima Marrouch sent this report.

Photographer Marcin Suder was staying at a media center in the rebel-held town of Saraqeb in Idlib province when a group of masked men reportedly stormed in Wednesday morning. They beat a Syrian media activist, stole equipment and abducted Suder.

It's unclear who might be responsible for the kidnapping. According to The Associated Press, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Friday that it's likely Suder was taken by radicals seeking ransom and that the abduction "probably has the character of a robbery."

I spoke with Mohamad al-Khaled, an activist from Saraqeb who says he was at the media center when Suder was kidnapped. He says Suder had spent the previous day taking pictures of a woman and her daughter, who survived a cluster-bomb attack.

The Saraqeb media center is a small apartment where foreign journalists and activists from across Syria often stay during their assignments and visits. Like other Syrian media centers, it has a generator to produce electricity and is usually equipped with satellite Internet to send out stories and photographs.

These places sometimes give an illusion of comfort, with the Internet connection making it possible to have contact with friends and family. But there are no safe places in Syria. Three days before Suder's kidnapping, Saraqeb was hit by several airstrikes.

But Suder "felt he needs to be there," Khalid al-Issa, a photographer from the nearby town of Kafranbel, told me. He says Suder was staying in Kafranbel for a few days before heading to Saraqeb.

"I told him that Saraqeb is dangerous, but he said he is a war correspondent and he needs to be there," al-Issa said.

Syrian filmmaker Obeida Zyton told me: "We all used this network before. We stayed at the media center and we felt safe. Now, not any more."

Situated between Aleppo and Damascus, Saraqeb used to be a sleepy town of 40,000 people. Seventy percent of residents have fled because of airstrikes and fighting, according to Ahmad Kadour, a former law student turned activist from Saraqeb. He says the regular army lost control over the town last year and that it has become known for its colorful graffiti and wall writings such as this one: "The more death surrounds us, the more we know how to live."

According to Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based press freedom group, Syria is the deadliest country for journalists. The center estimates that 28 journalists were killed in Syria last year and 21 were kidnapped.

Overall, the Syrian conflict has claimed more than 100,000 lives, according to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Birds do it. Bats do it. Now even educated people do it. We are talking about echolocation; the process whereby certain animals emit sounds that bounce off objects, helping identify what lies ahead.

Now a team of researchers has created an algorithm that could give the rest of us a chance to see with sound.

Lead study author Ivan Dokmanic of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Switzerland says the project started with a question.

"Is it possible to just produce a sound and be like Batman or just hear the shape of the room?"

Dokmanic and his team made it happen.

First, they set up a few microphones around a room. Then, "hook these microphones up to an amplifier and a computer, produce some sound, and then just calculate the shape of the room based on the echoes that you receive from the walls in the room," Dokmanic explains.

So what's it good for?

For starters, it could be used in architectural acoustics. Say you're building a concert hall and you know just how you want it to sound, says Dokmanic. "Just plug this into our algorithm. And then this algorithm will produce the room that produces these echoes."

Or the technology could be used as an aid for blind people. Dokmanic says it could, "give some kind of optic feedback maybe to the user saying, okay, the general form of the room is like this or there are obstacles here and there."

It could also be used in audio forensics. A recording that captured the sound of a crime being committed could then be used to reconstruct the room, providing evidence to investigators.

But these applications are not available just yet. Dokmanic says he and his team are in the process of raising funds to expand the technology, and hope to turn it into a smart phone app.

"I hope not too long—but the realistic horizon is two years to get something that's really usable by everyone," says Dokmanic.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew says the debt ceiling needs to be raised, but without another economically damaging partisan fight.

In a series of interviews on the Sunday morning political talk shows, Lew said Congress needs to lift the "cloud of uncertainty" over the nation's finances and raise the limit before it fully expires on Sept. 30.

"The fight over the debt limit in 2011 hurt the economy, even though, in the end, we saw an extension of the debt limit," the secretary said on NBC's Meet The Press.

"We saw confidence fall, and it hurt the economy. Congress needs to do its job. It needs to finish its work on appropriation bills. It needs to pass a debt limit," he said.

Republicans have demanded deep cuts in non-defense-related spending in exchange for an appropriations deal. Some Democrats, however, don't want to agree to funding at levels set by across-the-board spending cuts that went into effect in March.

Lew's remarks echo a message that President Obama has taken up in recent days.

Speaking in Florida on Thursday, Obama said that if Republicans want to continue their "My way or the highway attitude," dire consequences and deadlock were likely to result. "It could plunge us back into financial crisis," he said.

"Threatening that you won't pay the bills in this country, when we've already racked up those bills, that's not an economic plan — that's just being a deadbeat," he said.

Artist Faith Ringgold is best known for what she calls her story quilts — large canvases made in the 1980s, on which she painted scenes of African-American life: sunbathing on a tar roof, a mother and her children, a quilting bee. She frames the canvases in strips of quilted fabric, carrying out an old African, and African-American quilt-making tradition.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington is showing an earlier aspect of Ringgold's art: big, strong, vivid paintings from the 1960s that reflect the violence and social upheaval of that time.

Faith Ringgold is now 83 — and still stunning with her long braids and colorful beads. "[It] was important to be determined," she says of her time developing as an artist in the 1960s. The stop signs that appeared in the pop art movement spoke to her: "There were a lot of stop signs in my life. ... People telling you what to do, when to do it, and so on," she says.

In the '60s, those days of civil rights struffles and conflicts over equality of ther aces, Ringgold was making traditional art — painting landscapes primarily.

She showed her work to Ruth White, the owner of the popular Ruth White Gallery, who said Ringgold couldn't be black and simply paint landscapes during such a tumultuous time. "Some people might have been upset or hurt by it," she says. "But I was happy that she had the courage to tell me that. "