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From breakfast to bedtime, college sophomore Julia-Scott Dawson and her mother, Robin Dawson, exchange a flurry of texts that include I love you's, inside jokes and casual chitchat.

"We talk every day," Dawson says.

"Every day," echoes her mother.

Julia-Scott Dawson is a sophomore at the University of North Carolina, which is just a 15-minute drive from where her parents live. Every week, she shares a Sunday meal with her family and grabs morning coffee with her parents when they can.

"I just love the time I spend with them," Dawson says.

In recent years, China's status — like its economy — has continued to rise as the economies in America and Europe have struggled.

That shift isn't just reflected in economic numbers, and some American business people in China say they don't feel as respected or as valued as before.

Not long after Michael Fagle arrived in Shanghai in 2005 with DuPont, he went to visit a Chinese customer. Back then, Fagle says, he was treated as a sage from the West.

Sara Terry's first clue that something was wrong with her son, Christian, came just three weeks after he was born.

"We went to check on him, just like any parents go and check on their kids just to make sure they're breathing," says Terry, 34, of Spring, Texas. "And we found him in his crib, and he wasn't breathing. He was blue."

She and her husband were horrified. They rushed Christian to the hospital and learned he had several medical problems.

By now, everyone's heard of Kickstarter, the website that lets people with an idea or project ask other people to contribute toward realizing it. It's called crowd funding, and this summer's big success story was musician Amanda Palmer. She raised more than $1 million to produce her new album. But crowd funding doesn't work for every musician every time.

It's taken as a given that American voters in 2012 aren't as concerned about foreign policy as they are the domestic economy.

It's also accepted as true that on matters of foreign policy, President Obama has an advantage over his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who lacks significant firsthand foreign policy experience.

But Romney has made it a point lately to show that he's not ceding foreign policy and national security to Obama.

The NFL announced fines against Denver Broncos coach John Fox and the team's defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio after they challenged replacement officials in an aggressive manner last Monday.

The new international peace envoy to Syria gave a bleak assessment of the situation in the country and the prospects for peace.

The Los Angeles Times reports that in comments to reporter Lakhdar Brahimi, special envoy for the United Nations and the Arab League, said the situation in Syria was "very, very grim."

The Times added:

Scientists have known for a while that breast cancer is really four different diseases, with subtypes among them, an insight that has helped improve treatment for some women.

But experts haven't understood much about how these four types differ. A new report, published online in the journal Nature, provides a big leap in that understanding.

A mysterious virus has put a Qatari man in critical condition at a U.K. hospital, the World Health Organization said Sunday.

His illness is due to a new type of coronavirus, the family of viruses that causes common colds and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

Cecilia Bartoli has a passion for musical archaeology: "I am the Indiana Jones of classical," she says jokingly to All Things Considered host Robert Siegel.

Bartoli rummages through music history to uncover forgotten opera composers deserving of her detailed and dramatic performances. Her new album, Mission, introduces her most recent "find," the late-17th-century Italian Agostino Steffani.

Starting today, New York commuters are passing controversial new ads equating radical Muslims with "savages."

New York's Metro Transit Authority posted the ads in 10 subway stations today after a losing a legal battle with the pro-Israel group the American Freedom Defense Initiative.

You know that ad campaign for pork, the one that called it "the other white meat?" There's a fascinating behind-the-scenes story about that slogan, revealed in a new lawsuit that was just filed this morning by the Humane Society of the United States.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

So six weeks to go before Election Day, but in-person early voting has already started in a handful of states. Many others will begin soon, and more and more of us are choosing to vote early. In Colorado, for example, where we just heard from Ari Shapiro, nearly 80 percent of votes were cast early in the 2008 presidential election.

Michael McDonald tracks these trends with the U.S. Elections Project at George Mason University and he joins me now. Welcome to the program.

MICHAEL MCDONALD: Oh, thank you for having me.

Second of a two-part series

Last year, after the Atlanta rock band Black Lips released the album Arabia Mountain, its members planned a trip to tour the Middle East, but the wave of Arab Spring protests forced them to change plans. Yet even with simmering anti-Americanism persisting throughout the region, singer-guitarist Ian St. Pe was determined to see this through. Cairo, where I spoke with them on Friday, was the band's second stop.

Starting a new car company from scratch isn't tried often in the United States. The last time one was truly successful was about 100 years ago. And Tesla Motors, a startup from Silicon Valley, faces some unusual hurdles.

Still, despite the challenges Tesla faces, the electric car company and its CEO, Elon Musk, have gotten further than most automotive entrepreneurs.

The Marine Corps said it will court-martial two servicemen for allegedly urinating on the bodies of Taliban militants in Afghanistan.

The incident became public after a video surfaced in January that showed four Marines urinating on three bodies.

The AP reports:

Researchers have found the first drug to treat progeria, an extremely rare genetic disease that causes children to age so rapidly that many die in their teens.

The drug, called lonafarnib, is not a cure. But in a study published Monday of 28 children, it reversed changes in blood vessels that usually lead to heart attacks and strokes.

BuzzFeed says an email exchange between a journalist and one of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's top aides grew quite heated and profane on Sunday — marking at least the second time in recent months that a spokesman for a major political figure used an obscenity to get across his point.

This time it was the journalist who fired off the first word we can't repeat. But the Clinton aide deploys more verbal bombs.

John F. Kennedy once said there was no experience that could have adequately prepared him for the presidency.

That presumably included a hard-fought campaign for the job against sitting Vice President Richard Nixon — one of the closest-ever contests.

So, why should we assume that presiding over a well-oiled campaign has anything to do with running the White House?

Parents, have you somehow missed the YouTube videos of trampoline accidents?

There's the one of the kid who knocks his front teeth out trying a trampoline-assisted slam dunk. A whole bunch that show knuckleheads jumping from roofs then bouncing every which way and hitting the ground. And then there are the videos of a big kid bouncing a small kid into oblivion.

NPR's Claudio Sanchez brings us this bit of bad academic news: The class of 2012 scored the lowest average SAT reading score since 1972. A bit of good news is that math scores were up.

Claudio filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"Writing, too, is down nine points since the SAT introduced a writing section in 2006. The average score in math was 514 out of 800, five points higher than it was 40 years ago.

Apple sold more than 5 million iPhones this weekend, the company said in a press release. That surpasses the initial sales of the previous version.

As Bloomberg news reports, demand for the new phone quickly exceeded the initial supply, but some analysts expected bigger sales.

They report:

Ad Age just unveiled its "top 10 female ad icons of all time" list:

-- Morton Salt's 'umbrella girl"

-- Betty Crocker

-- Miss Chiquita

-- Rosie the Riveter

-- Josephine the Plumber (Comet cleanser)

-- Mrs. Olson (for Folgers coffee)

-- Madge the manicurist (Palmolive soap)

-- Rosie the waitress (Bounty paper towels)

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CELESTE HEADLEE, HOST:

I'm Celeste Headlee and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Michel Martin is away. Coming up, we'll take a look at the big winners from last night's Emmy Awards, but first, we want to turn to a much more serious topic and this would be a good time to say this conversation may not be appropriate for some listeners.