Mose Jefferson Tries To Pull A Fast One

Mose Jefferson, the corrupt brother of corrupt William Jefferson, appears to have been trying to influence his sister who pleaded guilty in her part to the corrupt family's schemes:

Mose Jefferson called his sister, Brenda Foster, in hopes of arranging a meeting after learning that she had agreed to possibly testify against him and other relatives accused of ripping off three charities they founded, prosecutors said during an arraignment hearing Friday.

Though Mose Jefferson's call to his sister earlier in the week clearly displeased prosecutors, he did nothing wrong in making the call, provided he did not try to intimidate Foster, said Dane Ciolino, a professor at Loyola Law School.

National Guard Duty In New Orleans

Lack of police manpower forces guards to stay:

National Guard troops will remain in New Orleans until the end of the year to help police officers patrol the less populated areas of the city, Gov. Bobby Jindal announced Thursday.

Sometimes You Have To Read Carefully

When I first noticed the following story, I said--oh no gangster pamp and his thug crew are at it again. Upon further reading, I was able to determine that the convicted burglar, gangster pamp, was not involved:

The body of a 26-year-old Seattle man who was in New Orleans for a recording conference washed up near a wharf eight days after he jumped into the Mississippi River from a ferry.

John Gagliano, chief investigator for the New Orleans coroner's office, says the body of Mark Mercer IV was spotted by a longshoreman at 2:30 a.m. today. Gagliano ruled the cause of death was drowning.

Family and friends say Mercer was a musician and producer who was in New Orleans to attend the Pot Luck Audio Conference, a series of panels and workshops about the recording industry.

New Orleans' Hurricane Risk

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Despite a massive effort to repair and upgrade flood defenses since Hurricane Katrina, storm surge could pour over levees in New Orleans if a strong Category 2 or higher hurricane strikes the city, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday.

While the forecast uses what officials say is the most accurate and complete picture yet of the region's levee heights, they said they weren't surprised by findings that reaffirm the area surrounding New Orleans is among the nation's most hurricane-vulnerable. The forecast released Monday represents the first time the yearly storm surge predictions have used levee heights based on global positioning system technology.

A team led by Roy Dokka, the director of the Center for Geoinformatics at Louisiana State University, traveled 1,000 miles of levees, flood walls and other coastal features since Katrina with GPS technology mounted on vehicles to obtain the new measurements.

"They are more correct than they have ever been before," Wilson Shaffer, a hurricane modeling expert with NOAA's National Weather Service, said of the levee-height measurements.

To predict how strong a storm would be to overpower a levee, researchers factor in variables including topography and a storm's wind speeds, size and intensity. The projections on storm surge are used by emergency planners, builders, residents and the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Corps of Engineers is determining how high to build levees under a congressional mandate to complete by 2011 a hurricane protection system capable of handling a storm likely to hit over the next century. A strong Category 2 likely would fall under that definition.

On Monday, the corps was unable to provide a breakdown on how much has been spent so far on work to repel storm surge. Since Katrina, Congress has given the corps about $7.1 billion to work with and it is considering giving the corps $5.7 billion more.