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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Now, Greg mentioned Plaquemines Parish. Look at a map of Louisiana and you'll see that parish, a finger of land sticking far out into the Gulf of Mexico. Jennifer Hale of WVUE Television is in the parish, spent the night there. And Ms. Hale, where are you now?

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

And I'm David Greene. Hurricane Isaac made landfall last night in Louisiana and it is battering the Gulf Coast with high winds and a lot of rain. For the latest we turn to NPR's Greg Allen. He's in New Orleans and we have reached him by telephone. And Greg, give us a sense of this storm. It sounds like, you know, Category 1, which, you know, makes you not worry so much, but a lot of people fearing that it could just stay in one place for a good while.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

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.

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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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

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.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

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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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

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.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm David Greene.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep.

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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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

OK, we've heard from Greg that if this storm overwhelms the pumping system in New Orleans, there could be significant flooding in the city.

And let's go now to NPR's Christopher Joyce, who is in the heart of New Orleans along Canal Street. Chris, good morning.

CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: Hello, David. How are you?

GREENE: Very good. So tell me what you're seeing and what the mood is in a city that is both marking a Katrina anniversary and dealing with, you know, another big storm.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And today's last word in business is a home run for Major League Baseball.

ESPN agreed yesterday to pay the baseball association $5.6 billion over the next eight years for broadcast and digital rights to games. That is a record, we're told, for baseball broadcasting rights. It is also about double what ESPN currently pays to broadcast Major League Baseball games, although the sports network will be getting a lot more for its money this time around - more international rights, radio rights, rights to more games.