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With the start of hurricane season about three months away, many people are asking whether repairs to New Orleans' flood-protection system will be ready in time. NPR Science Correspondent David Kestenbaum provides an update on efforts to restore the city's levees.

Don Knotts, the skinny, lovable nerd who kept generations of television audiences laughing as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, dies at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills.

President Yoweri Museveni prevails in Uganda's first multi-party elections in a quarter-century, winning 60 percent of the vote. EU observers say the elections were problematic; Museveni has been criticized of late as an autocrat.

Sectarian violence subsides somewhat in Iraq on the third day of a curfew, but the threat of civil war persists. Twenty-nine people -- including three U.S. soldiers -- die in attacks across the country Sunday. Iraqi leaders are hoping that containment on the ground and political reconciliation will appease Sunnis and Shia.

Susan Tedeschi is considered one of the best up-and-coming blues singers and guitarists. Her newest CD is called Hope and Desire. Music journalist Ashley Kahn spoke with Tedeschi about her career and her music.

The American poet Wallace Stevens died 50 years ago this year. Commentator Jay Keyser says Stevens wrote the best short poem in the English language, "The Snow Man." Stevens marries what the poem is about with the way that it is built.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been distributing checks to families whose homes were destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Cheryl Corley reports on one family's decisions on how to use the money they've received from the federal government.

As a chemical spill in the Songhua River heads toward Russia's Far East, the nearly 4 million people of Harbin, China, do without running water for a fourth day. The BBC's Louisa Lim tells Scott Simon that Chinese newspapers are criticizing the central government's slow response to the disaster.

Forty years ago, Arlo Guthrie dumped a pile of trash. The minor crime made him ineligible for the draft. In 1967, he immortalized the saga in "Alice's Restaurant." Debbie Elliott hears the story behind the song.

Many of the men and women who returned from Iraq with traumatic brain injuries may never fully recover. As part of our Span of War series, we continue our story of one soldier's attempt to grasp his new limitations and ultimately head home to his wife and family in West Virginia.