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Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. Finally, Larry Bird looms larger than Magic Johnson. The two players fought a famous rivalry in the '80s. Bird's Celtics and Johnson's Lakers battled for NBA titles again and again. But one thing could never change. In the college championship game in 1979, Johnson's Michigan State beat Bird's Indiana State. Now, Indiana State plans a 15-foot tall statue of Larry Bird, larger than any existing statue of Magic Johnson. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

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People naturally focus on New Orleans, a great American city that is below sea level in many places, but you cannot understand the full effect of the storm without moving along the Gulf Coast. Mississippi, for example, has faced high water, tropical storm-force winds and pounding rain. NPR's Debbie Elliott reports.

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DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: As Isaac moves ashore near the mouth of Mississippi River in neighboring Louisiana, outer bands of the hurricane swept into Gulfport, Mississippi.

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Hurricane Isaac has produced what TV writers might call a spin off - a second storm detached itself from the hurricane and its effects are being felt far from the Gulf Coast.

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This mass of moist air detached itself from Isaac and moved up the Atlantic Coast, and yesterday dumped nearly eight inches of rain over South Carolina. The rain caused flooding in Charleston, including the city's historic downtown market. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

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The water rose so quickly along the coast of Louisiana, that it trapped two men whose job it was to keep it down.

INSKEEP: Two water pump operators were on the job in Plaquemines Parish near the mouth of the Mississippi River. The ocean spilled over a levee and surrounded them with water before they could get away.

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Water has been slopping over at least one levee in Louisiana this morning. The levee is down the Mississippi River from New Orleans, near the place where Hurricane Isaac came ashore. So far, the storm has caused street flooding along much of the Gulf Coast and left hundreds of thousands of people without power. But the full-scale of its effects will depend in part on just how long Isaac sticks around.

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NPR's business news starts with upping the oil output.

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GREENE: The group of seven most industrialized nations are urging oil producing countries to ramp up production. In a statement yesterday, the so-called G-7 nations warned of the risks, quote, "posed by elevated oil prices." Demand for gasoline usually starts to wane at the end of the summer but right now gasoline prices are hitting new highs. Oil prices are surging because of tensions with Iran and the ongoing concern about Hurricane Isaac.

When the Yangmingtan bridge opened in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin in November, local officials hailed it as a grand achievement.

The bridge stretched more than nine miles and cost nearly $300 million. Construction was supposed to take three years, but workers finished in half that time.

"A lot of comrades didn't go home for more than a year, never took a holiday, never took off a weekend," Yang Qingwei, the party secretary of a bridge construction company, proudly told Heilongjiang provincial TV.

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The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates says he noticed something about one of this year's major news stories. When Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, was killed by a white man in Florida, there was widespread dismay. And then President Obama spoke.

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