Category Archives: Oklahoma

Oklahoma tornadoes kill at least four people and leave dozens injured

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Governor issues state of emergency for 12 counties as authorities confirm a four-month-old baby was among the dead in Holdenville

At least four people, including a baby, were killed after a series of tornadoes struck Oklahoma on Saturday, amid a weekend of extreme weather that left dozens injured and a trail of destruction across the midwest.

Local authorities confirmed that a four-month-old infant was among the two people dead in Holdenville – one of the hardest hit towns in Oklahoma, located 80 miles south-east of Oklahoma City – where about 20 tornadoes hit late Saturday, leveling buildings and ripping off roofs. The victims have not been named, but at least four others were injured as the tornado left a path of devastation through the town of around 6,000 people.

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Politician who attended Charlottesville white-supremacist rally faces recall

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Pushback against Oklahoma’s Judd Blevins transcending partisanship, says organizer: ‘It’s a Nazi and not-Nazi thing’

Voters in the north-west Oklahoma city of Enid are being asked to decide whether a councilmember who attended the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 should be removed from his post.

Iraq war veteran Judd Blevins, 42, was elected to Enid’s city council to be the commissioner of its first ward last year. He soon faced an effort by the Enid social justice committee, which claimed Blevins “embraces the same Nazi ideology [the US] defeated almost 80 years ago” during the second world war.

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Oklahoma medical examiner rules death of teen Nex Benedict as a suicide

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The death of a nonbinary teenager followed a fight in a bathroom at Owasso high school in February

The death of a nonbinary teenager following a fight in a bathroom at Owasso high school in Oklahoma has been ruled a suicide, according to the state’s medical examiner.

In a summary report released on Wednesday, the state’s medical examiner listed 16-year-old Nex Benedict’s probable cause of death as combined toxicity from an antihistamine and an antidepressant.

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. A list of prevention resources can be found here. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org

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Super Tuesday 2024 live: millions of voters head to polls in the US as Haley suggests she could stay in the race

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Donald Trump looks all but certain of Republican presidential nomination as Nikki Haley rejects suggestions of third-party bid and says she may keep fighting

Over at CNN, Ronald Brownstein has an analysis piece which looks a little at the potential weakness of Donald Trump support away from his core base. Brownstein writes:

[Trump’s] performance so far reflects his success at transforming the Republican Party in his image. He’s reshaped the Republicans into a more blue-collar, populist and pugnacious party, focused more on his volatile blend of resentments against elites and cultural and racial change than the Ronald Reagan-era priorities of smaller government and active global leadership that former South Carolina Gov Nikki Haley has stressed.

But while the primaries have underscored Trump’s grip on the GOP, they have also demonstrated continued vulnerability for him in the areas where he has labored since he first announced his candidacy in 2015 – particularly among the white-collar suburban voters who mostly leaned toward the GOP before his emergence. The early 2024 nominating contests have shown that a substantial minority of Republican-leaning voters remain resistant to Trump’s vision.

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Goose is at center of deadly medical helicopter crash

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All three people on board, including the pilot, a flight nurse and a paramedic, were killed on 20 January in western Oklahoma

A dead goose was found in part of the flight control system of a medical helicopter that crashed in western Oklahoma, killing all three people on board, according to a preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

While it highlights the goose’s presence on board, the report stops short of specifying a suspected cause of the deadly crash. The report notes that other geese were found in the debris field left by the wreck.

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Oklahoma rattled by 5.1 magnitude earthquake

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Initial earthquake followed by at least eight smaller ones as residents across state reported feeling shaking

A 5.1 magnitude earthquake shook an area near Oklahoma’s capital late Friday night, followed by smaller quakes during the next several hours, the US Geological Survey (USGS) reported.

The agency said the earthquake struck at 11.24pm and was centered 8kms (5 miles) north-west of Prague, Oklahoma, about 57 miles(92km) east of Oklahoma City.

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Outrage as Oklahoma Republican’s bill labels Hispanic people ‘terrorists’

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Lawmaker JJ Humphrey seeks punishments for ‘acts of terrorism’ and defines terrorist as ‘any person who is of Hispanic descent’

An Oklahoma lawmaker is facing backlash for proposing a discriminatory bill that deems people of Hispanic descent as “terrorists”.

The Republican state representative JJ Humphrey introduced the bill, HB 3133, which seeks to combat problems in the state, such as drug and human trafficking, and lay out punishments to those who have committed these “acts of terrorism”.

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Man who spent 48 years in prison for murder formally declared innocent

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Glynn Simmons, who served US’s longest wrongful imprisonment for a 1974 murder, wins rare ruling

The man who served the US’s longest wrongful imprisonment for a 1974 murder he has always denied committing has now won a rare ruling declaring him to be actually innocent of the crime.

Glynn Simmons’s murder conviction was dismissed in July after a judge in Oklahoma determined that prosecutors withheld some evidence in the case, including a police report that documented how a witness may have identified alternate suspects. The 71-year-old was freed from prison, and state prosecutors later said they would not retry him in the case because there was no longer any physical evidence.

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Florida’s revival of death penalty fuels rise in US executions in 2023

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Governor Ron DeSantis scheduled six of the country’s 25 executions this year amid his presidential election bid

The US saw a rise in executions in 2023 as a result of Florida’s revival of the death penalty, amid Ron DeSantis’s “tough on crime” campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

DeSantis scheduled six executions this year – the first time the state has judicially killed people since 2019 and the largest number in almost a decade. Florida also handed down five new death sentences this year, more than any other state.

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Oklahoma executes man who claimed he killed two in self-defense

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Phillip Dean Hancock killed by lethal injection after Republican governor declines to commute sentence despite recommendation

Oklahoma executed a man on Thursday who claimed he acted in self-defense when he shot and killed two men in Oklahoma City in 2001.

Phillip Dean Hancock, 59, received a three-drug lethal injection at the Oklahoma state penitentiary and was declared dead at 11.29am. His execution went forward once the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, declined to commute his sentence, despite a clemency recommendation from the state’s pardon and parole board.

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Muscogee Nation sues Tulsa, Oklahoma, for ticketing drivers within reservation

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Tribe says city has been breaking federal law by continuing to ticket Native Americans within sovereign boundaries

The Muscogee (Creek) Nation filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, arguing that police are continuing to ticket Native American drivers within the tribe’s reservation boundaries, despite a recent federal appeals court ruling they lacked jurisdiction to do so.

The tribe filed the lawsuit in federal court in Tulsa against the city; the mayor, GT Bynum; the chief of police, Wendell Franklin; and the city attorney, Jack Blair.

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Women challenge abortion bans in three states after emergency care denied

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The Center for Reproductive Rights has taken legal action on behalf of women denied care in Idaho, Oklahoma and Tennessee

Women who say they were denied abortions in medical emergencies have taken legal action in Idaho, Oklahoma and Tennessee, in the latest attempt to challenge abortion bans that, abortion patients and doctors say, prevent people from getting care even when their health is in danger.

The lawsuits in Idaho and Tennessee, along with a federal complaint against a hospital in Oklahoma, were filed on Tuesday by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed a similar lawsuit on behalf of women in Texas earlier this year. Tuesday’s filings were first reported by the Washington Post.

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‘Astonishingly cruel’: Alabama seeks to test execution method on death row ‘guinea pig’

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Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen

Kenneth Smith is one of two living Americans who can describe what it is like to survive an execution, having endured an aborted lethal injection last November during which he was subjected to excruciating pain tantamount, his lawyers claim, to torture.

Nine months later Smith has been singled out for another undesirable distinction. If the state of Alabama has its way, he will become the test dummy for an execution method that has never before been used in judicial killings and which veterinarians consider unacceptable as a form of euthanasia for animals – death by nitrogen gas.

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‘Inhumane’: judge hears arguments about anti-migrant buoys in Rio Grande

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Court to decide whether to remove them as Greg Abbott and other Republican governors defend militarization of border with Mexico

A federal judge heard arguments on Tuesday about whether state authorities should remove huge buoys installed to stop migrants crossing the river that divides Texas from Mexico.

The court hearing in Austin came a day after Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, and a group of hardline Republican governors gathered on the riverbank to defend local militarization of the US-Mexico border – while also acknowledging that the 1,000ft (305-meter) floating barrier had been adjusted after complaints that it had mostly drifted into Mexican territory.

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Highway to healing: can removing a road restore America’s Black Wall Street?

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Decades after a chilling racist massacre, Tulsa’s Greenwood district was bulldozed for I-244 – but a new plan aims to reverse its punishing effects

Twenty-five years before Don Shaw was born in Greenwood, a white mob invaded the Tulsa neighborhood and killed more than 300 people. Much of the tight-knit community was burned to the ground, including his grandfather’s pharmacy.

But when Shaw was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, few people wanted to talk about the massacre – perhaps in part because much of the damage was no longer visible.

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Floods, tornadoes, heat: more extreme weather predicted across US

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Over a third of Americans under extreme heat warnings as Vermont, still recovering from historic flooding, prepares for more storms

The US is bracing for more extreme weather from coast to coast, with a heatwave hitting California, tornados in the midwest and the east expecting more rain as it continues to reel from historic flooding.

Residents of Vermont, still suffering from an onslaught of dangerous weather in recent days, are preparing for another round of severe storms in the area beginning as early as Thursday night.

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Judge rejects reparations for Tulsa race massacre in ‘sad miscarriage of justice’

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Civil rights lawyer laments dismissal of suit which attempted to force city to make recompense for the destruction of Black area

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 for elderly survivors.

The judge, Caroline Wall, on Friday dismissed with prejudice the lawsuit which attempted to force the city and others to make recompense for the destruction of Greenwood, a once-thriving Black district.

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Outrage as Republican says 1921 Tulsa massacre not motivated by race

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Oklahoma superintendent Ryan Walters decried for comments on 1921 massacre in which hundreds were killed by white mobs

The state official in charge of Oklahoma’s schools is facing calls for impeachment, after he said teachers should tell students that the Tulsa race massacre was not racially motivated.

In a public forum on Thursday, Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, said teachers could cover the 1921 massacre, in which white Tulsans murdered an estimated 300 Black people, but teachers should not “say that the skin color determined it”.

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Millions swelter under extreme heat as climate crisis tightens grip on US – live

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Heat dome of high pressure hovers over Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma as thousands remain without power in Chicago with heavy rains knocking down trees and power lines

The heating of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans by the burning of fossil fuels made the current extreme heatwave across the us at least five times more likely, according to a recent analysis by Climate Central, a climate science non-profit.

The rolling heatwave marks the latest in a series of recent extreme “heat dome” events that have scorched various parts of the world.

If you have this sort of high-pressure system sitting stationary over a region, you can have these really impressive heatwaves.

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US girl who graduated from college at 15: ‘We are the invisible Black scholars’

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Shania Muhammad earned bachelor of arts degree from Langston University in Oklahoma and plans career in public speaking

Among the millions who are celebrating having received their university diplomas in the US this spring is a 15-year-old girl from Oklahoma, one of the youngest ever American college graduates.

Shania Muhammad graduated from Oklahoma’s Langston University with a bachelor of arts degree as well as a 4.0 grade-point average that was the highest in her class, according to a recent report from the local news media outlet KOCO-TV. She said she plans to pursue a career in public speaking and publish a book about her experience in school titled Read, Write, Listen: 13 in College.

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