Judge dismisses lawsuit seeking reparations for 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

An Oklahoma judge has thrown out a lawsuit seeking reparations for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, dashing an effort to obtain some measure of legal justice by survivors of the deadly racist rampage.

Judge Caroline Wall on Friday dismissed with prejudice the lawsuit trying to force the city and others to make recompense for the destruction of the once-thriving Black district known as Greenwood.

The order comes in a case initiated by three survivors of the attack, who are all now over 100 years old and who sued in 2020 with the hope of seeing what their attorney called “justice in their lifetime.”

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said in a statement that the city has yet to receive the full court order. “The city remains committed to finding the graves of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre victims, fostering economic investment in the Greenwood District, educating future generations about the worst event in our community’s history, and building a city where every person has an equal opportunity for a great life,” he said.

A lawyer for the survivors — Lessie Benningfield Randle, Viola Fletcher and Hughes Van Ellis — did not say Sunday whether they plan to appeal. But a group supporting the lawsuit suggested they are likely to challenge Wall’s decision.

“Judge Wall effectively condemned the three living Tulsa Race Massacre Survivors to languish — genuinely to death — on Oklahoma’s appellate docket,” the group, Justice for Greenwood, said in a statement. “There is no semblance of justice or access to justice here.”

Wall, a Tulsa County District Court judge, wrote in a brief order that she was tossing the case based on arguments from the city, regional chamber of commerce and other state and local government agencies. She had ruled against the defendants’ motions to dismiss and allowed the case to proceed last year.

Local judicial elections in Oklahoma are technically nonpartisan, but Wall has described herself as a “Constitutional Conservative” in past campaign questionnaires.

The lawsuit was brought under Oklahoma’s public nuisance law, saying the actions of the white mob that killed hundreds of Black residents and destroyed what had been the nation’s most prosperous Black business district continue to affect the city today.

It contended that Tulsa’s long history of racial division and tension stemmed from the massacre, during which an angry white mob descended on a 35-block area, looting, killing and burning it to the ground. Beyond those killed, thousands more were left homeless and living in a hastily constructed internment camp.

The city and insurance companies never compensated victims for their losses, and the massacre ultimately resulted in racial and economic disparities that still exist today, the lawsuit argued. It sought a detailed accounting of the property and wealth lost or stolen in the massacre, the construction of a hospital in north Tulsa and the creation of a victims compensation fund, among other things.

A Chamber of Commerce attorney previously said that the massacre was horrible, but the nuisance it caused was not ongoing.

Fletcher, who is 109 and the oldest living survivor, released a memoir last week about the life she lived in the shadow of the massacre. It will become widely available for purchase in August.

In 2019, Oklahoma’s attorney general used the public nuisance law to force opioid drug maker Johnson & Johnson to pay the state $465 million in damages. The Oklahoma Supreme Court overturned that decision two years later.

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Sweden still not ready for NATO Turkey's Erdoğan tells Biden

This leaders also discussed the sale of American F-16 fighter jets to Turkey in the phone call ahead of NATO summit this week.

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Social media companies beware: Governor says lawsuits coming in Utah

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said Sunday he is getting ready to sue social media companies for the harm caused to his state's young people.

“In the coming months, you will see lawsuits being filed by the state of Utah to hold them accountable,” Cox, a Republican, said during an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“We believe they’ve known about the dangers, some of this has been leaked out, Meta and others, very clear evidence that they knew the harms that their products were causing to kids, and that they intentionally tried to hide that information.”

Cox signed legislation earlier this year that sets limits on the ways minors are able to use social media. The laws, which will take effect next year, set a digital curfew on social media users younger than 18, require minors to get parental consent to sign up for accounts and demand social media companies verify the ages of users in Utah.

The laws are the first of their kind in the U.S., though Cox has acknowledged that they will be difficult to enforce — and could face legal challenges.

“I suspect that at some point, the Supreme Court will weigh in on this decision when it comes to restricting youth access,” he said Sunday.

"What we're trying to do is give families more control over what is happening on social media. When you when you look at the new research that's coming out, there's not just a correlation between social media use and an increase in suicide, anxiety, depression, self-harm, there is a causal link there.”

The goal, he added, is to give parents and kids more control over their experiences with social media, by “making these social media companies turn off the algorithms that we know are driving so much of this harmful addiction.”

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Zelenskyy brings home 5 Azov battalion commanders from Turkey

Russia accused Turkey and Ukraine of violating a prisoner-exchange agreement signed last year.

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Yellen says China talks productive at end of Beijing trip

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen signaled at a Sunday morning press conference in Beijing that her talks with Chinese officials this week made progress in shoring up the frayed relationship between the U.S. and China.

Yellen, the second Biden administration official to visit the country in the last few weeks, said conversations with her counterparts were “direct, substantive and productive.” The talks covered the U.S.-China economic relationship, national security, climate change and global debt challenges.

The big takeaway as Yellen prepared to leave Beijing: The U.S. believes the world’s two largest economies can have a constructive relationship despite their geopolitical tensions, which have included export controls for high-tech goods.

While she said the U.S. will continue to take actions to protect its national security interests, Yellen and President Joe Biden believe there can be “healthy economic competition” between the U.S. and China — “an economic relationship that is mutually beneficial in the long term.”

“I do believe that it’s possible for both countries to be attentive to and to take actions to protect their national security interests,” she said.

The major win from Yellen’s visit appeared to be a willingness on the part of both sides to keep talking after years of escalating tensions over trade and security. Yellen said the trip was an opportunity for U.S. officials and a new economic team in Beijing to “establish a desire and willingness to work together to discuss issues where we have disagreements and see deeper engagement on the part of our staffs.”

Yellen's trip included meetings with Vice Premier He Lifeng and People’s Bank of China Head Pan Gongsheng.

“Certainly, I expect our staffs to be in much more regular communication about the full range of issues that we discussed that require greater work,” she said.

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Low-key Trump bets on Vegas volunteers with promise of more to come

Donald Trump's 2024 Nevada debut in Las Vegas came with little of the former president's trademark showmanship.

Trump’s return to the city that boasts a gleaming Trump hotel comes exactly one year after he held a campaign rally for then-GOP Senate candidate Alex Laxalt, who went on to lose to Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto in the 2022 midterms.

Now, a year later, as Trump vies for a nonconsecutive return to the White House and to maintain his stronghold on the Silver State’s GOP, he spoke for a mere 40 minutes at the Clark County volunteer recruitment drive in a church 15 miles from the city’s famous strip.

It’s no secret that the former president’s relationship with the state is a complicated one.

While he has a firm grip on the state’s Republican Party, he lost Nevada in two consecutive presidential campaigns — by almost 3 percentage points in 2020. As the Trump campaign turns its attention to the battleground state, the former president on Saturday hinted at this challenge.

“We have a big job to do. This has been a hard state. I really believe it’s a Republican state,” Trump said. “This is the most important election in the history of our country.”

There were a few theatrics from Trump, who from the outset stressed the purpose of the relatively small event. As usual when speaking at smaller gatherings, he made note of a “large crowd” outside, and pointed to media coverage of crowd sizes at recent rallies.

But Trump also kept the red meat coming, delivering some lines with gusto as he repeated familiar falsehoods about the 2020 election he lost and harped on how he would fix the country’s elections, including in Nevada. The winding speech also hit on the border, China, critical race theory, transgender people and a medley of the former president’s greatest hits.

Trump drew cheers when he rattled off names of Nevada GOP power brokers, including state party chair Michael McDonald, who served as a so-called "fake elector" in 2020. McDonald testified last month before a Washington federal grand jury investigating Jan. 6 and the former president’s efforts to stay in office.

“Michael McDonald has been my friend for a long time,” Trump said.

The Nevada GOP, under McDonald’s leadership, is suing the state government for moving away from the caucus format that relies heavily on grassroots support and benefitted Trump eight years ago. The 2024 primary, likely to fall sometime in February, is set to move to a traditional, state-run primary.

Trump took multiple opportunities to knock Ron DeSantis, a few weeks after the Florida governor campaigned at the Basque Fry barbecue fundraiser in the state. DeSantis’ message during that event, without naming Trump, was that if Republicans want to beat a Democrat in 2024, they need to move beyond the former president.

“I’m not a big fan of his, and he’s highly overrated,” Trump said. "He’s getting killed. … He also has no personality. That helps, right? As a politician, you have to have personality.”

Trump again went after DeSantis for his 2018 vote as a House Republican for a bill that would have authorized the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain — a key issue in the swing state. DeSantis' campaign fired back Saturday night, calling Trump “hypocritical” as three of his budgets as president had called for the licensing process of Yucca to restart. But in 2020, Trump reversed his position, announcing that he opposed the long-delayed nuclear waste project.

Polling in the state has been more scarce than some of the other early primary states, but in early polls, Trump has a hefty lead on DeSantis by upward of 30 percentage points, while the other GOP contenders lag in the single digits.

As he wrapped his short address, Trump hinted at bigger things to come as campaign season progresses.

“I just want to thank you all for volunteering and being with us, and we love you,” Trump said. “And we’ll be back many times, and we’ve got a couple of really big rallies scheduled over the next couple of months, and we’ll have 60, 70,000 people at these rallies.”

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Yellen nudges China on climate finance cooperation during Beijing visit

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged global financial cooperation on climate change Saturday, calling on China to contribute to international development funds during her visit to Beijing.

In her remarks at a climate finance roundtable, Yellen emphasized the leading role China and the U.S. must play in climate efforts. She also drew parallels between the U.S. and China as the two largest economies, greenhouse gas emitters and investors in renewable energy globally.

“Climate finance should be targeted efficiently and effectively,” Yellen said. “I believe that if China were to support existing multilateral climate institutions like the Green Climate Fund and the Climate Investment Funds alongside us and other donor governments, we could have a greater impact than we do today.”

Both funds listed by Yellen are geared toward countering climate change in developing nations. China has been reluctant to contribute to these funds in the past, claiming that it is also a developing nation.

Yellen also discussed the importance of broad transitions toward the goal of net-zero carbon emissions, including in the private sector. She suggested that the U.S. and China increase and improve their investments in reducing climate change “in ways that are interoperable to our different systems.”

Yellen’s trip to China comes as the United States tries to ease tensions between the two countries and follows a visit from Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month.

Following her remarks, Yellen met with Vice Premier He Lifeng, her counterpart in the Chinese government. Climate finance remained a focus of Yellen’s in this meeting, according to a statement from the Treasury Department.

During her meeting with He, Yellen also called on China to contribute to “debt distress in low-income and emerging economies,” restructuring the debt that it is owed by developing nations as the U.S. and the EU routinely do. China has also resisted this course of action in the past.

On Saturday afternoon in Delaware, President Joe Biden told journalists that he had not yet spoken to Yellen about her trip to China. Yellen is scheduled to speak at a Beijing press conference at 9 p.m. ET Saturday.

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