Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River is spilling over its banks, leaving serious flooding in its wake. The city of Wilkes-Barre's levies have held up, sparing it from a worst-case scenario flood. But small towns throughout south-central Pennsylvania are covered in water.

Washington, D.C., and New York are on heightened alert Friday. That's because of a new terrorism warning that comes just ahead of the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. NPR's Dina Temple-Raston has been looking into the details of the new threat — and tells Melissa Block the latest.

While President Obama's speech Thursday night focused on jobs, the president also touched on homeownership. The president talked about helping people refinance mortgages, in turn putting more money in families' pockets. Robert Siegel speaks with Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan about what the president has in mind.

Summer is just about over. That usually means Major League Baseball fans are feverishly checking the standings as the playoff races tighten up in the last weeks of the season. But this year, virtually every division title and wild card slot have been sewn up. Could an unexciting September lead to a dramatic October? Robert Siegel talks to sportswriter Stefan Fatsis.

Scientists analyze patterns in all areas of life, from weather to health, to help predict outcomes. Journalist Sasha Issenberg examines how political scientists employed by the Texas gubernatorial campaign of Rick Perry in 2006 helped him strategize through testing random samples of voters. Robert Siegel talks with Issenberg about this approach — and how it shaped Perry's subsequent campaigns.

Australian Owen Wright won the first pro-surfing competition held in New York. Wright beat out Kelly Slater, a ten-time world champion surfer, for the $300,000 prize.

San Diego's power company has restored power to all of its customers. Thursday afternoon, more than 4 million people in the Southwestern U.S. and parts of Mexico lost electricity. Arizona Public Service Company says the outage occurred after an electrical worker mistakenly removed a piece of monitoring equipment at a substation in southwest Arizona.

President Obama and two of his GOP opponents in next year's election have laid out their ideas to turn the economy around. NPR's Scott Horsley joins Robert Siegel to compare and contrast the plans.

Zach Condon says he was half-joking when he named his band Beirut: "I was kind of poking fun at myself," he says with a chuckle, "and some of my more exotic tastes in music at the time."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission handed down a long awaited decision today that allows the Obama administration to continue its plans to close Yucca Mountain, the nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

The AP reports: