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Early March is when Yosemite National Park officials would normally be gearing up for the busy tourist season. Instead, they're figuring out how to cut $1.5 million from their budget because of the recent sequestration that forced across-the-board cuts. The National Park Service must now cut $134 million from sites around the country.

Next year, just over 200,000 Native Americans will become eligible for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The change translates to more money for the Indian Health Service. The expansion will also force Native American health providers to deal with something they've never faced before — competition from non-tribal health programs.

Bananas are the most popular fruit in America, and demand is growing worldwide, too. But growing bananas requires a lot of pesticides. And a new study shows that some of those chemicals are ending up in caimans living downstream from banana plantations in Costa Rica, where many of the bananas that Americans eat are grown.

Portions of Bellview, Colo., are entirely cut off by flooding. Resident Mark Benjamin has been helping neighbors by rigging a zipline across floodwaters to transport supplies. He talks with Steve Inskeep about the condition of Bellview's roads — and what it will take to rebuild them.

The federal government's top climate scientists announced Tuesday that 2012 was really hot — among the top 10 hottest years on record and the hottest ever in the U.S., with rising sea levels, less Arctic sea ice and warmer oceans. And the American Geophysical Union called humanity "the major influence" on global climate change.

Can you ever be rich enough or famous enough or beautiful enough to not be racially profiled while shopping?

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo faced off in a rafting race Monday on a whitewater river high in the Adirondack Mountains. It was one part summer camp and one part House of Cards as two of the country's most influential big-city politicians shut off their smart phones and headed into the wild.

Wednesday, on the same stretch of the National Mall where the Civil Rights Marchers of 1963 listened to the Reverend Martin Luther King, a far smaller crowd assembled to celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of that landmark moment in the struggle for civil rights.

The 19 firefighters who died in Arizona were part of an elite "Hotshot" group. Kyle Dickman, an editor at Outside Magazine who embedded with one of those units, tells Audie Cornish about how the Hotshots operate and the type of people drawn to this line of work.

So far during the 2013 wildfire season, more than 800 homes and businesses have burned to the ground, nearly 1.6 million acres were scorched and over 23,000 blazes have required suppression. And two dozen firefighters have died. But as dramatic as it's been, the season has yet to kick into high gear.