NPR News

If you passed Raphael Saadiq on the street, you might wonder whether you'd stepped back in time. He wears tightly fitted suits, skinny black ties and thick, black-framed glasses. He makes music that almost seems like it's from another era, so it's no surprise that he's increasingly seen as the standard-bearer of old-school American R&B.

The Army Corps of Engineers began opening Louisiana's Morganza spillway on Saturday in an attempt to spare New Orleans and Baton Rouge from massive flooding. That move will send almost a third of the water in the Mississippi River spilling out into massive swaths of Cajun country in the next few days. Host Guy Raz gets the latest from NPR's Greg Allen, who's at the spillway.

President Obama switched gears on the issue of domestic oil drilling Saturday, announcing that he will extend leases for oil companies to drill in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, joins host Guy Raz to discuss this and the week's other top stories.

A South Florida imam and two of his sons have been charged with providing roughly $50,000 to the Pakistani Taliban, which the State Department has designated as a terrorist organization. Three others have been charged in Pakistan.

The U.S. Attorney's office in Miami said Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan and sons Irfan Khan and Izhar Khan were arrested Saturday morning. A four-count indictment accuses the men of sending money to the Pakistani Taliban to buy guns.

According to a recent study, noise pollution could be costing lives. A World Health Organization report finds western Europeans lose years to death or disability from excessive sound. Though European countries have taken steps to turn the volume down, the U.S. backed off the effort decades ago.

Across an estimated population of 340 million people, at least one million years of healthy living are lost each year due to noise pollution in Western Europe, WHO researcher Rok Ho Kim says.

A Dangerous Response To Noise