It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm David Greene.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
Again and again, President Obama's administration tries to pivot attention toward East Asia. Administration officials believe China and its neighbors are where the economic future lies.
GREENE: And yet it's the Middle East that keeps demanding the president's attention. It brings to mind that line from F. Scott Fitzgerald's: So we beat on boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Credit Daniel Casarez/Vida en el Valle/Reporting on Health Collaborative
Emily Gorospe, 8, loves to dance and usually can't sit still, so her parents started to worry when she became very tired two years ago. Emily was eventually diagnosed with valley fever, a fungal disease that 150,000 people contract each year.
Credit Laura Dickinson / Reporting on Health Collaborative
Winemaker Todd Schaefer will take anti-fungal medication for the rest of his life. Not only does it cause nausea and vomiting, but it means he can't drink his own wine.
Credit Daniel Casarez/Vida en el Valle/Reporting on Health Collaborative
Valley fever is caused by tiny spores that live in California and Arizona soil. When the spores are disturbed, they can be inhaled into the lungs, so people who work outside are at higher risk of contracting it.
Credit Laura Dickinson / Reporting on Health Collaborative
Todd and Tammy Schaefer walk through a neighbor's vineyard with their Old English mastiff, Daisy Ray. Todd was working in a vineyard when he contracted valley fever about 10 years ago and has since struggled with his health.
When she was just 6, Emily Gorospe became very tired and sick. The spunky girl, now 8, developed a fever that wouldn't go away, and red blotches appeared across her body.
"She's got so much energy usually," says Emily's mother, Valerie Gorospe. "Just walking from one part of the house ... she was drained." The little girl was also very pale. "She just didn't look like herself," Valerie recalls.
A Republican from Maine, Olympia Snowe served as a U.S. Senator from 1995 to 2013. Above, she speaks at a news conference in South Portland, Maine, in March 2012.
As a Republican senator from Maine, Olympia Snowe was known for her willingness to stand alone. A moderate with independent views, she had substantial influence in the health care debate as both sides vied for her vote. Earlier this year she left the Senate, out of frustration, she says, with the inability to get anything done.
Researchers use the 120-foot tower atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii to collect air samples and measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Mauna Kea looms in the distance.
Credit Joe Palca / NPR
Aidan Colton is a research scientist at the Mauna Loa Observatory. Here in the "carbon cycle room," he measures the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and carbon monoxide in air from intake ports at the top of a 120-foot tower outside the lab.
Climate scientists have a good reason to want to get away from it all. To get an accurate picture of the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, you have to find places where the numbers won't be distorted by cities or factories or even lots of vegetation that can have a major local impact on CO2 concentrations.