The US Department of the Interior has developed a reasonable process to account for billions of dollars owed to American Indian landholders, a top department official told the US District Court on Wednesday.
Associate Deputy Interior Secretary James Cason defended the government's accounting of the Indian trust lands in the opening day of the latest arguments in an 11-year-old lawsuit. Judge James Robertson is presiding over the trial after Judge Royce Lamberth was removed last year by an appeals court.
The lawsuit by Indians claims that the government mismanaged more than US$100 billion in oil, gas, timber and other royalties held in trust from their lands dating back to 1887.
The litigation, filed in 1996 by Blackfeet Indian Elouise Cobell, deals with individual Indians' lands. Several tribes have sued separately, claiming mismanagement of their lands.
Lawyers for the Indian plaintiffs argued on Wednesday that the department is accounting improperly for the money owed to thousands of trustees.
"Hopefully, your honor, after 120 years some of our clients are going to see justice,'' said Dennis Gingold, the plaintiffs' lead attorney.
The department says it has spent more than US$127 million on historical accounting of the trust lands since 2003. Lawyers for the government said the department is not delaying the accounting or acting to limit its liability, as the plaintiffs have suggested.
At the same time, Cason said the department has a difficult job when Congress is appropriating limited funds for the accounting.
The government proposed paying US$7 billion partly to settle the Cobell lawsuit in March, but that was immediately rejected by the plaintiffs. They have estimated the government's liability could exceed US$100 billion, although they have considered in the past settling for much less.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency