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Grizzly bears to be restored to Washington’s North Cascades, where “direct killing by humans” largely wiped out population
The federal government plans to restore grizzly bears to an area of northwest and north-central Washington, where they were largely wiped out “primarily due to direct killing by humans,” officials said Thursday.
Plans announced this week by the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service call for releasing three to seven bears a year for five to 10 years to achieve an initial population of 25. The aim is to eventually restore the population in the region to 200 bears within 60 to 100 years.
Grizzlies are considered threatened in the Lower 48 and currently occupy four of six established recovery areas in parts of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and northeast Washington. The bears for the restoration project would come from areas with healthy populations.
There has been no confirmed evidence of a grizzly within the North Cascades Ecosystem in the U.S. since 1996, according to the National Park Service, which said “populations declined primarily due to direct killing by humans.” The greater North Cascades Ecosystem extends into Canada but the plan focuses on the U.S. side.
“We are going to once again see grizzly bears on the landscape, restoring an important thread in the fabric of the North Cascades,” said Don Striker, superintendent of North Cascades National Park Service Complex.
It’s not clear when the restoration effort will begin, the Seattle Times reported.
Fragmented habitat due to rivers, highways and human influences make it unlikely that grizzlies would repopulate the region naturally.
Elaine Thompson / AP
According to the park service, killing by trappers, miners and bounty hunters during the 1800s removed most of the population in the North Cascades by 1860. The remaining population was further challenged by factors including difficulty finding mates and slow reproductive rates, the agency said.
The federal agencies plan to designate the bears as a “nonessential experimental population” to provide “greater management flexibility should conflict situations arise.” That means some rules under the Endangered Species Act could be relaxed and allow people to harm or kill bears in self-defense or for agencies to relocate bears involved in conflict. Landowners could call on the federal government to remove bears if they posed a threat to livestock.
The U.S. portion of the North Cascades ecosystem is similar in size to the state of Vermont and includes habitat for dens and animal and plant life that would provide food for bears. Much of the region is federally managed.
The plan to reintroduce the grizzlies to the region “will be actively managed to address concerns about human safety, property and livestock, and grizzly bear recovery,” said Brad Thompson, state supervisor for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
Earlier this week, the National Park Service announced it was launching a campaign to capture grizzly bears in Yellowstone Park for research purposes. The agency urged the public to steer clear of areas with traps, which would be clearly marked.
Last year, officials said a grizzly bear fatally mauled a woman on a forest trail west of Yellowstone National Park and attacked a person in Idaho three years ago was killed after it broke into a house near West Yellowstone.
CBS News
France’s President Emmanuel Macron tours cyclone-battered Mayotte, meets survivors pleading for help
Mamoudzou, Mayotte — France’s President Emmanuel Macron traveled Thursday to the Indian Ocean archipelago of Mayotte to survey the devastation that Cyclone Chido wrought across the French territory as thousands of people tried to cope without bare essentials such as water or electricity.
“Mayotte is demolished,” an airport security agent told Macron as soon as he stepped off the plane.
The security agent, Assane Haloi, said her family members, including small children, are without water or electricity and have nowhere to go after the strongest cyclone in nearly a century ripped through the French territory of Mayotte off the coast of Africa on Saturday.
KWEZI/AFP/Getty
“There’s no roof, there’s nothing. No water, no food, no electricity. We can’t even shelter, we are all wet with our children covering ourselves with whatever we have so that we can sleep,” she said, asking for emergency aid.
Macron got a helicopter tour of the damage and was to spend Thursday night on the far-flung French territory. After flying over the destruction, he headed to the hospital in Mamoudzou, Mayotte’s capital, to meet medical staff and patients.
Wearing a traditional Mayotte scarf on his white shirt and tie, sleeves rolled to the elbows, the French president listened to people asking for help. A member of the medical staff told him some people hadn’t had a drink of water for 48 hours.
Some residents also expressed agony at not knowing about those who have died or are still missing, partly because of the Muslim practice of burying the dead within 24 hours.
LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL/AFP/Getty
“We’re dealing with open-air mass graves,” Mayotte lawmaker Estelle Youssoufa told reporters. “There are no rescuers, no one has come to recover the buried bodies.”
Some survivors and aid groups have described hasty burials and the stench of bodies.
Macron acknowledged that many who died hadn’t been reported. He said phone services will be repaired “in the coming days” so that people can report their missing loved ones.
French authorities have said at least 31 people died and more than 1,500 people were injured, more than 200 critically. But it’s feared hundreds or even thousands of people have died in total.
Abdou Houmadou, 27, said emergency aid was needed immediately, not Macron’s presence.
“Mr. President, what I’d like to tell you… is I think the spending you made from Paris to Mayotte would have been better spent to help the people,” he said.
Another resident, Ahamadi Mohammed, said Macron’s visit “is a good thing because he’ll be able to see by himself the damage.”
“I think that we’ll then get significant aid to try and get the island back on its feet,” the 58-year-old said.
LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL/AFP/Getty
Macron’s office said four tons of food and medical aid, as well as additional rescuers, were aboard the president’s flight. A navy ship was due to arrive in Mayotte on Thursday with another 180 tons of aid and equipment, according to the French military.
People living in a large slum on the outskirts of Mamoudzou were some of the hardest hit by the cyclone. Many lost their houses, some lost friends.
Nassirou Hamidouni sheltered in his house when the cyclone hit.
His neighbor was killed when his house collapsed on him and his six children. Hamidouni and others dug through the rubble to reach them.
The 28-year-old father of five is now trying to rebuild his own house, which was also destroyed.
He believes the death toll is much higher than what’s officially being reported, given the severity of what he lived through.
“It was very hard,” he said.
Mayotte, located in the Indian Ocean between mainland Africa’s east coast and northern Madagascar, is France’s poorest territory.
The cyclone devastated entire neighborhoods and many people ignored the warnings, thinking the storm wouldn’t be so extreme.
Mayotte has more than 320,000 residents according to the French government. Most are Muslim and French authorities have estimated another 100,000 migrants live there.
Mayotte is the only part of the Comoros archipelago that voted to remain a part of France in a 1974 referendum.
Over the last decade, the French territory has seen a massive influx of migrants from the neighboring islands – the independent nation of Comoros, which is one of the world’s poorest countries.
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Google Maps helps solve murder mystery by capturing moment a person put suspected corpse into car in Spain
Google Maps has guided Spanish investigators to resolve a year-long murder mystery by capturing the moment a person stowed a suspected corpse into a car.
Police in the northern region of Castile and Leon began their probe in November 2023 when someone reported the disappearance of a male relative.
Officers arrested a woman who was the missing male’s partner and another man who was her ex-partner in Soria province on November 12, police said in a statement on Wednesday.
Investigators then raided the suspects’ homes and inspected their vehicles but also stumbled on an unexpected lead in the search for further clues.
These were “images in a location application” where they “detected a vehicle that may have been used during the course of the crime,” the statement said.
Spanish media circulated pictures of a screenshot of Google Maps’ Street View from October 2024 showing a person dumping an object covered in a white shroud into a car trunk in the village of Tajueco. It was the first time in 15 years that the car had been to the town of Tajueco, the BBC reported.
The images contributed to resolving the case, though they were not “decisive,” police said.
Officials said another photo sequence shows the blurred silhouette of someone transporting a large white bundle in a wheelbarrow, the BBC reported.
The central government’s representative in Soria, Miguel Latorre, told public broadcaster RTVE the person “can presumably be” considered the culprit.
Police said a severely decomposed human torso believed to belong to the victim had been found this month in a cemetery in Soria province. El Pais daily reported that he was a 33-year-old Cuban.
A judge has ordered the suspects into custody and the investigation remains open.
This marks at least the second time that Google technology has helped crack a cold case. In 2019, the remains of a man missing for 22 years were finally found thanks to someone who zoomed in on his former Florida neighborhood with Google satellite images and noticed a car submerged in a lake.
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2 soldiers killed by landmine blast in Mexico day after 2 troops killed by booby trap in same region
A blast killed two Mexican soldiers in the second deadly incident this week involving an improvised landmine in a crime-plagued western state, authorities said Wednesday.
According to the El Universal newspaper, the soldiers were trying to deactivate the device when it exploded.
The blast happened late on Tuesday in Buenavista in Michoacan, the state prosecutor’s office said.
A military source who did not want to be named said that troops were looking for similar devices believed to have been planted in the area.
On Monday, a blast caused by another improvised landmine killed two Mexican soldiers and wounded five others in the same region. Before the explosion, the soldiers had discovered the dismembered bodies of three people, officials said.
The device was suspected to have been planted by members of a local criminal group waging a turf war with a bigger drug cartel, Defense Minister Ricardo Trevilla said Tuesday.
Six other soldiers had been killed by similar improvised devices since late 2018, he said.
Mexico is plagued by widespread drug-related violence that has seen more than 450,000 people killed since the government deployed the army to combat trafficking in 2006, according to official figures.
In the only previous detailed report on cartel bomb attacks in August 2023, the defense department said at that time that a total of 42 soldiers, police and suspects were wounded by IEDs in the first seven and a half months of 2023, up from 16 in all of 2022.
Overall, 556 improvised explosive devices of all types – roadside, drone-carried and car bombs – were found in 2023, the army said in a news release last year.
