The Thornton sisters from Louisiana must be doing something right.

Maggie Mae Thornton Renfro, 114, Carrie Lee Thornton Miller, 107 and “little sister” Rosie Lee Thornton Warren, 103, are in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the oldest African-American siblings in the nation. They have lived a combined 324 years!

Mrs. Maggie also holds the distinction of being the oldest African-American in the world.

Just days after former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson was convicted in a lengthy trial of selling his influence, his brother, Mose Jefferson, must convince a Louisiana jury that he did not accept bribes as a former Orleans Parish School Board president. His attorneys, who head to court today, are asking U.S. District Judge Mary Ann Vial Lemmon to either delay the trial or move it from New Orleans because of the publicity generated in the conviction of William Jefferson. In that case, the jury handed down 11 convictions against the ex-congressman, who was discovered with $90,000 dollars in his apartment freezer. Lemmon previously denied the request to move the trial, saying that potential bias would come out during the jury questioning period. Earlier, nearly a third of the jury pool were dismissed after bias was revealed in their written questionnaires, defense attorney Michael Fawer told The Times Picayune.

Judge Delays Jefferson Trial

Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), who is on trial on charges of corruption and influence peddling, will get a few days to find an expert witness to testify on his behalf.  The prosecution alleges that Jefferson tried to charge money for securing legislation. However, Jefferson’s attorneys argue that if the government had such juicy evidence of bribery against their client they should have introduced it from the outset. Read more.

The shooting death of a 73-year-old Black husband and father of five by a northern Louisiana police officer has ignited outrage among a Black community that’s demanding an external investigation into the circumstances surrounding the killing. The shooting of Bernard Monroe in front of his home in February is drawing attention from way beyond the tiny town of Homer, which is about 45 miles north or Shreveport, La. On Friday, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who led some 20,000 demonstrators through the town of Jena, La., in 2007 to protest the seemingly harsh prosecution of six Black youths accused of beating a White classmate, was back in the state. Read the rest.

When it comes to health, education and economics, Blacks in Louisiana are doing poorly, says a new study. Blacks face higher cancer mortality rates than their White counterparts, and are four times more likely to contract AIDS. And despite the poor  health outlook, Black people are twice as likely to be uninsured, according to the report.  “The prognosis for overall health of African Americans is grim,” the report says. Rep. Regina Barrow (D-Baton Rouge) said that the fact that a third of her state is African American, the glum statistics are even more alarming.  “If African Americans aren’t doing well, the state of Louisiana is not doing well. …The root cause (of the disparities) is poverty,” Barrow said. “It’s probably something dating back before slavery.” Sadly, she said, poverty is the root of most of the problems facing Blacks in Louisiana. “Lack of education leads to low-paying jobs, often without access to health care, thus the cycle of poverty begins and continues,” Advocacy.com reports. “Black people are three times more likely to experience poverty than their [W]hite counterparts. …Black people bring home only half the median income and per capita income of [W]hites. “Disparities in income … play huge roles in accounting for large gaps in wealth building (between the two races).”

Eight are arrested in Klan initiation murder.  An Oklahoma woman invited to a rural Louisiana campsite for a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual wound up shot to death when she asked to be taken back to town, the sheriff of a New Orleans suburb said Tuesday. Eight people were arrested after authorities found the woman’s body hidden under some brush, on the side of a road several miles from the remote campsite where the initiation reportedly took place, FOX News reports. Read the rest here.

A New Orleans murderer is snuffed out in a drive-by. A 24-year-old New Orleans man with a mile-long rap sheet – including a conviction for plotting to murder an 11-year-old witness to a murder – was gunned down in broad daylight Sunday, police said. Kenel K. Schneckenburg was cruising the 7th Ward in the afternoon when two men riddled his car with bullets, The Times Picayune reported, citing the New Orleans Police incident log. One of the bullets hit Schneckenburg in the chest, according to the coroner. Paramedics transported him to University Hospital, where he died during emergency surgery, police said. Schneckenburg spent two years in prison on a crack cocaine rap and six months on a different occasion for “improper language [and] harassment “during his role in a jailhouse plot to kill an 11-year-old, who was the only living eyewitness to a 2003 street killing in which the victim’s sister was gunned down in a daytime ambush,” the Picayune reports. Other legal run-ins include arrests for murder that never resulted in charges, according to the newspaper. He was booked for two counts of first-degree murder in 2001 and indicted in 2007 for allegedly murdering a woman in her home during a burglary. The prosecutor declined to prosecute that murder.

Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority members are arrested

Eight members of the now-defunct Southeast Louisiana University chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority were arrested this month for charges related to an alleged hazing incident in January, campus officials announced Friday. In June, the university ordered the 15-member sorority chapter in Hammond into inactive status for three years, after which they may reapply for reinstatement. While officials with the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Department said the eight AKA sisters were booked on counts of hazing, false imprisonment or other violations, it declined to specify the incident that triggered the arrests, which occurred between Aug. 11 and 19. Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Dawn Panepinto said that it describing the incident would be inappropriate since an investigation is ongoing. Three students have been suspended for a year; two were suspended for a semester; and three were given disciplinary probation, which allows them to go to classes under certain conditions.

BET News Quiz – Louisiana teen is sentenced for showing off nooses, Diddy is set to come out with new fragrances and the Williams sisters shine in Beijing. Take the quiz here!

He hung nooses from his truck and drove past a crowd of “ Jena Six” protestors

Jeremiah Munsen, a 19-year-old from Colfax, La., thought he’d send a powerful message to the protestors who showed up in his state last September to march against the prosecution of the six Black teens from the town of Jena accused of beating a White classmate. So he slung two nooses from his pickup truck and made sure the protestors got a glimpse. A judge has now sent a powerful message to Munsen, sentencing him to four months in prison for that single act of ultra-insensitivity. He could’ve been slapped with a one-year term, but Munsen bargained for the lesser sentence in April by fessing up to a misdemeanor charge of interfering with the protestor’s federally protected right to travel, The Associated Press reports. A group of African-American protestors were in Alexandria, La., waiting for their bus back home to Tennessee when Munsen repeatedly drove past them, displaying the nooses.

Gov. Bobby Jindal shot down a plan to create another African-American judgeship
Two Louisiana state lawmakers are accusing Bobby Jindal, the nation’s first governor of east Indian descent, of an African-American problem. State Sen. Derrick Shepherd and state Rep. Girod Jackson, both African Americans and Democrats, are angry that Jindal has vetoed a plan that would have created another minority judgeship in Jefferson Parish, a jurisdiction with a history of racial strife. “We got knifed in the back,” Shepherd said Wednesday on the steps of the Jefferson Parish Courthouse. “It just begs the question, ‘What does the governor have against the African-American community – in particular, the African-American community in Jefferson Parish.’” Of the 16 judges in the 24th Judicial Court in Jefferson Parish, two of them are African Americans who were elected from a majority-Black district. The state legislature passed a bill, introduced by Shepherd, that would have created a third minority judgeship, but Jindal shot it down, saying, “I have received several veto requests from officials representing voters in the impacted area. For instance, Speaker Tucker, Representative Templet and Representative Wooten describe the bill as ‘patently unfair.’” The governor and lawmakers critical of the bill say the matter should be shelved until after the 2010 census. “This bill, in the form that it reached the governor, is an agreement that we made in between all legislators,” said Jackson. “Maybe some now feel that it was unfair, but that’s part of the process.” Shepherd now wants the NAACP and civil rights attorneys sue the state, forcing it to establish another minority judgeship. “We have 31-percent minority population (in Jefferson Parish) and it’s growing,” he told Louisiana station WWLTV. “In an attempt to get us all together to come in one accord, we tried to do the right thing, but it was blocked in the end.”