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Nicholas Kristof | The Brave Man Whom Putin Wants to Kill
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
Kristof writes: "If Vladimir Putin has left you despising Russians as brutes, cowards or warmongers, consider a tall, ailing man locked in an isolation cell in Russia."
If Vladimir Putin has left you despising Russians as brutes, cowards or warmongers, consider a tall, ailing man locked in an isolation cell in Russia.
Aleksei Navalny, Russia’s leading dissident and opposition leader, may be something of a Mandela of our age. Poisoned, imprisoned, brutalized, Navalny stands unbroken in his cell: still mocking Putin and scathing in his denunciation of the invasion of Ukraine.
He is a Kremlin nightmare. Navalny ran for president until he was blocked, and his exposés about a supposed $1 billion Putin pleasure palace infuriated the Russian leader. Navalny not only survived assassination attempts but also, when sent to the gulag, tried to unionize prisoners and guards — plus he has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and is now the star of a film that is a finalist for an Oscar.
I can’t interview Navalny in prison, so I spoke to his 21-year-old daughter, Dasha Navalnaya (the feminine form of the family name). She’s a junior at Stanford University, and while navigating exams and term papers, she is also campaigning for her dad and promoting a superb documentary about him, “Navalny.” It won the award for best documentary this month at the British Academy Film Awards.
“I sort of perceive the documentary as this ‘get out of death’ card,” she told me in flawless, lightly accented English. “The more awareness that we create, the less Putin and his posse would be tempted to kill my dad.”
Navalny, 46, is a lawyer with a large following in Russia for his withering reports about Russian corruption and about Putin, whom he calls a “madman.” Attackers presumably linked to the Russian government twice hurled chemical dye on him, damaging his vision in his right eye, and in 2020 he collapsed on a plane. He almost died but was evacuated to Germany, where scientists determined he had been poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent, used by Russia’s government for high-priority assassination targets.
The documentary follows Navalny’s recovery and the detective work to track down the Russian officials who apparently poisoned him. The film presents the extraordinary scene in which Navalny telephoned one of his would-be assassins and, pretending to be another Russian official, got him to explain how the poisoning was carried out.
By now it seemed clear that Putin wanted Navalny dead. But in early 2021, Navalny flew back to Moscow. For Dasha, who had worried since she was 12 about her dad being assassinated, and who had learned of his poisoning from Twitter, that wasn’t necessarily her first choice.
“My personal preference would have been that he stayed with me,” Dasha told me. “But I never questioned his decision to go back.”
“I’m super worried about him always, as a daughter,” she said. “I have it in the back of my head that maybe he shouldn’t be doing this. But it’s what he’s passionate about, and for the greater good of the country.”
When Navalny returned, the government promptly arrested him. The family is now allowed to communicate with him only by exchanging letters.
“He is sort of living vicariously through me, through a college experience in America, which is very fun for him,” she said wistfully.
The authorities have tried to break Navalny in prison. His back has been painful since the poisoning, so they had him sit on a stool that magnified the pain. And now he is in continuous isolation.
Some critics have argued that Navalny is a xenophobic nationalist unworthy of admiration. I looked into the accusations, and here’s what I found. In 2007, Navalny made two over-the-top, dumb and offensive video clips, each a minute or less, that could be seen as vilifying immigrants, and for several years after that he participated in a nationalist march. Then he seemed to move on, and in 2014 he denounced Russia’s invasion of Crimea.
People are complicated, but Navalny today seems so committed to democratic and European values that he is risking his life for them.
The government moved Navalny last month to continuous confinement in an isolation cell, and he faces additional charges that could leave him in prison for 35 years. At Stanford, Dasha tries not to think too much about the danger her father faces.
Navalny still has managed to get material out to his team for his social media accounts — I’m not going to say how, in case Putin is reading this — and he is as untamed as ever. To mark the anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, Navalny published a trenchant critique of Putin’s “unjust war of aggression against Ukraine” and argued that “Russia is suffering a military defeat.”
Somehow through all this, he maintains his sense of humor.
“I laugh at least thrice a day, even when I’m all alone in the cell,” he tweeted recently in a riff about the awful music and food in the prison. “I’m the merriest person at a funeral.”
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Donald Trump arrives on stage to speak at a campaign rally at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S., June 20, 2020. (photo: AP)
Feds Inadvertently Reveal They're Looking Into Trump's Shady 'Recount' Campaign
Roger Sollenberger, The Daily Beast
Sollenberger writes: "When the Federal Elections Commission rejected a recent Freedom of Information Act request related to Donald Trump's 'recount' expenses after the 2020 election, the campaign watchdog had a conspicuous reason for turning down the petition: Trump's political spending after he left the White House is currently the subject of an FEC enforcement matter."
It started with a FOIA looking for answers about Trump’s recount efforts. It revealed that the FEC is looking into these questions itself.
When the Federal Elections Commission rejected a recent Freedom of Information Act request related to Donald Trump’s “recount” expenses after the 2020 election, the campaign watchdog had a conspicuous reason for turning down the petition: Trump’s political spending after he left the White House is currently the subject of an FEC enforcement matter.
According to agency records obtained by The Daily Beast, the FEC rejected a FOIA request—filed Dec. 20 by a nonpartisan research group that shared the documents on condition of anonymity—because those records may involve an active inquiry.
“To the extent that the records you requested concern an ongoing FEC enforcement matter, we can neither confirm nor deny that any such records exist,” the agency’s FOIA attorney wrote in the letter, which was shared with The Daily Beast.
The request asked the agency for documents and communications related to a major Trump vendor that has received millions in campaign “recount” funds for seemingly unrelated services—including document production for subpoenas from the congressional COVID subcommittee.
Dan Weiner, director of elections and government at the Brennan Center and a former attorney with the FEC, told The Daily Beast that while the response itself isn’t indicative of any stage of inquiry—“readers shouldn’t get excited”—the particular issue is serious.
“The FEC could be indicating one of many different scenarios,” Weiner said, explaining that the agency opens enforcement matters under a range of prompts, from publicly generated complaints to federal referrals to internal decisions. More often than not, enforcement matters resolve in a whimper—a conspicuously glaring pattern when it comes to Trump.
(The FEC declined to comment for this article, citing the same policy laid out in the FOIA reply.)
But Weiner joined other campaign finance experts in noting that the news comes with critical context, as suspicious fundraising and spending for so-called “recount” accounts has begun drawing greater scrutiny to what Weiner described as a “culture of impunity.”
“Recount fundraising is a particularly wild west area of campaign finance, where the absence of any visible guidelines has led to some fairly abusive behavior,” Weiner said, pointing to Trump’s recount spending as a glaring example.
That spending—including payments through possible shell vendors—is now reportedly a target of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation. But Trump isn’t alone. Other “recount” funds have recently drawn attention, including those belonging to Rep. George Santos (R-NY) and former senatorial hopeful Herschel Walker, who received a notice from the FEC after shuffling tens of thousands of dollars in donor funds to a “recount” that was never in the cards.
Transparency advocates say those misuses of donor money expose a loophole in a lightly regulated area of election law. Federal law allows certain political committees to maintain an extra account where they can raise and spend money to pay costs associated with recounts, which can give rise to unforeseen expenses. But, these critics say, a pattern seems to be emerging where candidates exploit the loose rules, treating “recount” accounts as slush funds or repositories for excess contributions.
Weiner pointed out that recount fundraising, left unchecked, could also create perverse incentives for democracy.
“One thing that’s particularly concerning is where fundraising can become a vehicle for spreading lies about election denial, and where you also have election denial itself as a fundraising vehicle for losing candidates,” he said. “These accounts are increasingly being operated within a culture of impunity, and there are some common-sense changes the FEC will need to make.”
Trump famously raised tens of millions of dollars from supporters on the back of his false claims about the 2020 election. And he spent “recount” cash lavishly after he left office, when he converted his 2020 campaign committee to a PAC called “Make America Great Again PAC.”
In fact, MAGA PAC’s highest paid vendor over the last two years received the majority of its payments from the “recount” fund. That would be “2M Document Management and Imaging, LLC,” a firm created about two months after Trump left office, and which handled document production and review in connection with congressional subpoenas.
It’s also the same company that was the subject of the FOIA request.
Essentially, the FOIA request shines a light on an inquiry involving a specific Trump vendor that does not appear by name in known FEC complaints, or Google search results involving activity.
But the fact that 2M’s payments are part of an enforcement matter doesn’t necessarily mean the company itself did anything wrong. The focus could be on MAGA PAC’s raising and spending, for instance, with 2M simply being a vendor, or one of many vendors, that received payments.
But it’s a lot of payments.
All told, 2M has banked more than $6.2 million spread across 40 MAGA PAC payments—all on the backs of Trump donors—with more than two-thirds of that amount, more than $4.6 million, coming out of the “recount” fund. The total represents 33 percent of the $19 million that MAGA PAC has spent between March 30, 2021, and Dec. 30, 2022. And no other political committee has ever paid the company, according to federal records.
The FOIA request asked the FEC for all documents, communications, and attachments within the agency that mention 2M—as well as all communications between FEC employees and anyone with an email address at that company—created between March 2021 and the end of 2022. The FEC replied that it had no responsive documents, citing its enforcement policy.
As laid out in the “Follow the Money” appendix to the Jan. 6 House Select Committee’s final report, 2M was created on March 24, 2021—two months after Trump left office, and more than four months after the election was called. Six days later, it received its first Trump paycheck—a $650,000 retainer for what the PAC described as “Recount: Research Consulting.”
However, as the firm’s founder Matthew Clarke told House investigators, the company was initially retained to handle work that would appear entirely unrelated to the campaign, let alone to a recount.
According to Clarke, the “vast majority” of 2M’s work for Trump involved document production in response to congressional subpoenas from the Jan. 6 committee and COVID committee. And for the first two or three months, he said, it was only COVID. Clarke also confirmed to investigators that 2M was still doing COVID and Jan. 6 work as of the date of his interview—Aug. 4, 2022.
That same day, MAGA PAC paid 2M $111,048.76 for “Recount: Research Consulting,” FEC records show. The firm received one more “recount” payment after the interview, for $318 the next month.
The Daily Beast sent questions to Clarke by text message and email, but received no reply. Campaign finance experts, however, called these actions an “abuse” of recount funds.
Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at nonprofit watchdog Campaign Legal Center—which recently published an article about Trump’s recount activity—called on the FEC to issue clear rules.
“Recount funds are not supposed to be spent on subpoena responses in connection with congressional investigations into COVID-19 and the January 6 attack,” Ghosh told The Daily Beast. “This type of abuse is a growing problem that the Federal Election Commission urgently needs to address.”
Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of watchdog group Documented, said the committee’s report details “a stunning abuse of recount funds,” which he said the FEC should be investigating.
“Trump began fundraising for his recount account the day after the 2020 election, and quickly raised a ton of money with ‘Stop the Steal’ appeals,” Fischer said. While Trump put some of his recount donations towards election challenges, Fischer noted he had millions of dollars left.
“So it appears that the Trump campaign used its recount account as a slush fund to pay for a wide range of expenses, and continued doing so for years after all recounts had concluded,” he observed.
Jordan Libowitz, of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told The Daily Beast that campaigns generally try to spend all their money by Election Day—“you don’t want to lose and have a million bucks left over”—and that recount funds have a purpose.
“While recounts rarely change the outcome of an election, they can be expensive and can go on for a long time—paying lawyers, staff, ballot counts, all kinds of things,” Libowitz said. “But if you’re transferring money when you don’t expect a recount or there isn’t one, there’s a question of what you’re doing with that money. You might expect that a candidate would give that money back to their donors, but the sad truth is that if you give politicians money, they’re going to hold onto it as long as they can.”
Fischer noted that he couldn’t see “even a remote connection between the Trump White House’s COVID response and the Trump campaign’s efforts to contest the 2020 election.”
Clarke, who is also a lawyer, apparently agreed.
“We didn’t do any, like, recount work,” he told investigators in his interview.
He later told them his company was “never retained” to do a recount. “If something was classified as a recount, I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said.
Clarke did say, however, that many of the 10 or so Jan. 6 witnesses that 2M helped during the course of its Trump work did have connections to the campaign.
But that came later. Initially, he said, 2M was brought on specifically to handle the COVID subpoenas.
“How we ended up in this was the former administration was responding to—there were requests made from the House Oversight committee, I guess, on COVID, or the White House response to COVID that they were getting from [the National Archives and Records Administration],” Clarke said.
He explained that 2M would “assist [NARA] with the technology and the hosting and consulting and review” regarding the massive document requests, specifically “looking at documents and trying to determine” whether they might be off-limits due to executive or attorney-client privilege.
NARA, Clarke recounted, was swamped by the requests—sometimes tens of thousands of pages at a time—and “grateful” for the expertise of his team, which threw between five and 20 people at the work at a time, depending on volume. (Clarke said his firm never worked with NARA’s general counsel on the requests.)
A NARA spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Clarke claimed that 2M landed the MAGA PAC contract via his pre-existing relationship with former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, who connected Clarke to Trump’s legal team after Trump left office. Ultimately, Clarke said, 2M was retained by a law firm founded by Trump attorneys called Elections LLC, with MAGA PAC fielding the costs as a third party. The firm would communicate with a handful of Trump officials, Clarke said, most notably bookkeeper Sean Dollman, attorney and Elections LLC co-founder Justin Clark, and occasionally former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin.
“There were a couple times where we had documents that we thought maybe we didn’t have authorization to look at,” Clarke said. They would then call in Philbin to review.
In at least one instance, Clarke recalled, the 2M team came across a document marked classified. They immediately went “pencils down,” he said, and stopped all work until the issue was resolved.
House investigators keyed in on curiosities in MAGA PAC’s expenses to 2M, most specifically the way the company would often receive two payments on the same day—one large, one small. Clarke said that he had no real insight, chalking it up to unknown billing decisions within the Trump operation.
But Clarke acknowledged that, as the Jan. 6 investigation steamed along, 2M handled mountains of document production and reviews on behalf of a number of congressional witnesses—with those costs footed by MAGA PAC.
“Donald Trump has never done anything on his own without expecting something back. He even used his charity for his own purposes, and that money wasn’t even coming from him,” Libowitz said. “So this isn’t a favor; this is a payment.”
Some of that money, however, went right down the drain. When it came to executive privilege, for instance, 2M’s work was essentially moot.
“As I understand it, the current administration gets to veto all that, and then it all goes out the door anyway,” Clarke said.
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Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kent Frizzell, right, meets with AIM leaders at Wounded Knee in April 1973. Kneeling is Wallace Black Elk and to his left are AIM leaders Russell Means, Dennis Banks and Carter Camp. (photo: Jim Mone/AP)
Native Americans Seized Wounded Knee 50 Years Ago. Here's What One Reporter Remembers
Rachel Treisman, NPR
Treisman writes: "It's been exactly 50 years since hundreds of Native American activists seized the South Dakota town of Wounded Knee, kicking off a monthslong occupation that helped galvanize the movement for indigenous rights across the U.S."
It's been exactly 50 years since hundreds of Native American activists seized the South Dakota town of Wounded Knee, kicking off a monthslong occupation that helped galvanize the movement for indigenous rights across the U.S.
On Feb. 27, 1973, some 200 members of the Oglala Lakota tribe, led by members of American Indian Movement (AIM), occupied the Pine Ridge Reservation village — which was also the site of the 1890 massacre in which federal troops killed as many as 300 Lakota men, women and children.
The activists set out to protest corruption in tribal leadership and highlight the U.S. government's failure to honor Native treaties. They went on to hold the town for 71 days, in what the U.S. Marshals Service calls the "longest civil disorder" in its history.
Journalist Kevin McKiernan, who covered the occupation as a rookie reporter for NPR — even though the federal government had banned journalists from Wounded Knee — recalls AIM co-founder Dennis Banks (Ojibwe and Turtle Clan) citing poverty and police brutality as two of the driving forces behind the movement.
"I remember his quote," McKiernan told Morning Edition. "It was, 'People were in the gutter and they wanted to get up.' They wanted to get up. They wanted to do something. They were desperate."
Federal authorities descended on the reservation, where they exchanged gunfire and negotiations with the protesters. They killed two Native men, Frank Clearwater (Cherokee and Apache) and Lawrence "Buddy" Lamont (Oglala), and wounded and arrested many others. The activists ultimately surrendered on May 8 after officials promised to investigate their complaints.
McKiernan says the image most people have of the occupation is one of violence and guns (of which there were plenty, with the government later admitting to firing some half a million rounds into the area). But he doesn't think that's the whole story.
"The real story, in my mind, were the religious ceremonies that took place inside Wounded Knee," he says. "And this became a kind of laboratory for the hundreds who came there, in getting their religion back, learning some of their language, which led to a revival ... And these are two components of what I would look at as a core identity, language and religion."
The Wounded Knee occupation (which was part of a broader string of Native American protests, including the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island) leaves behind a nuanced legacy.
Congress took no major steps to remedy broken treaties, though the Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that it owed the Sioux money for taking its land a century earlier (the tribe has not accepted that compensation, which is now valued at $2 billion). Two AIM leaders, Banks and Russell Means, were arrested on felony assault and riot charges but ultimately acquitted.
The occupation did draw public attention to the federal government's repeated injustices against Native Americans and infringements upon their sovereignty. It helped energize the movement for indigenous rights, and many saw echoes (and even some of the same activists) in the more recent Standing Rock resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
McKiernan — who made a documentary called "From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock: A Reporter's Journey" — says there were other gains from the occupation, like legislation such as the Indian Freedom of Religion Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
But he thinks its legacy is best encapsulated in a story shared with him by a member of the Yuchi tribe, who was 20 years old at the time of the occupation. His grandmother didn't read or speak English, which embarrassed him when he was young and had to do things like order for her at the general store.
"And after Wounded Knee, he realized this was his greatest teacher, that she was a mentor," McKiernan recalls. "And I think that shows you the arc from being on bended knee to standing up straight."
McKiernan spoke to Morning Edition about how he ended up on the reservation, what he learned and how the legacy of the occupation lives on today.
Interview highlights
On how he got his historic first assignment
I had never been on an Indian reservation, much less seen someone shot or killed. And this was sort of my graduate school, and it was quite an experience ... I think that one of the motivating factors for the Minnesota public radio station was that I wasn't being paid. And so they said, "Go ahead, we'll give you this NPR card." And they typed it out on a Selectric typewriter and handed it to me and presto, I was a reporter. But of course, I wasn't and didn't really know what I was doing.
On why the federal government banned reporters from Wounded Knee
White House officials and Justice Department officials did that. And the reason was they thought that the press was a kind of oxygen, and if you choked off the oxygen, the confrontation would come to an end. Of course, I don't think they understood very much about Indian Country or about what was going on there, in the sense that they were mostly trained agents for work in urban areas and they weren't familiar with who they were dealing with and the underground railroad that kept it alive on the reservation.
On how and why locals smuggled him into Wounded Knee
McKiernan says a man at a nearby gas station encouraged him to travel some 80 miles away to Rosebud Reservation, the staging ground for weapons and smugglers getting in and out of Wounded Knee.
They were open to ... provide me with a guide and put me on this so-called underground railroad, because they were afraid, as they expressed it, of another massacre once the press was gone and there were no witnesses.
A woman who was eight months pregnant and a man who was not her husband were assigned to drive the '64 Chevrolet that took me over the dirt roads, and I was asked to lie on the back floor so no one would see me. I was brought to a safe house ... about eight miles from Wounded Knee. I had to sit out in the junkyard out back all day — it was in the wintertime — because of passing BIA cars and then when evening came, a bunch of very old men ... came out and asked me to join them in a sweat lodge ... suddenly I had strangers praying for me and my safe entrée to Wounded Knee through the FBI cordon, which was considerable at that time.
... When I tripped on a trip wire going into Wounded Knee at night, on this eight-hour journey with my Indian guide, phosphorescent flares went up in the air and they lit the area in the woods, in the snow, up as if it were noon time. And then FBI agents came out in a four-wheel drive vehicle and came very close. My guide and I were in the ditch, and we could hear the agents talking, but they moved on. And we didn't hit any more wires, and so we made it into Wounded Knee just before dawn.
On why he considers the occupation a spiritual fight, too
The 1890 massacre victims ... were killed because of their religion ... So I think that the Indian people, indigenous people, were acutely aware, having had this family tradition passed down to them, that what was considered wrong with them was what they believed spiritually and in the language they used to talk to the creator. And these are the two things they wanted back the most.
... I think what I found out was that the real difference between the image that was projected and what the Department of Justice put out and what Indian people were doing was the sweat lodge and the other religious ceremonies that took place in Wounded Knee.
There were dozens of congressional acts that were passed after Wounded Knee, but ... the first task was to get passed the [American Indian Religious Freedom Act], which was passed a couple of years after Wounded Knee. Now, that's extraordinary. If you're a Catholic, you don't need a congressional act to pray. If you're Jewish or if you go to a temple or if you're Muslim, you don't need a congressional act because your religion is not proscribed. But theirs was. And so I think that was the real story.
On what he sees as the occupation's legacy
I think that it's the land back movement, like the NDN Collective in South Dakota and Rapid City. And I think that there is a collective or a movement like that on every reservation with every tribe. They're going to get back, to buy back, to get donated — just do it by inches.
These folks were different from the civil rights struggle, which, people back then — the marchers and protesters — were trying to get into the system. They wanted to have equality with housing and jobs and education and so forth. Uh-uh. Indian people were separatists, you might say. They wanted out of the system. They wanted their stolen land back. And I think that's what's going on in every inch of Indian country today.
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U.S. president Joe Biden's administration has announced a new crackdown on child labour. (photo: Reuters)
US Announces Crackdown on Child Labour Amid Surge in Violations
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The United States government has announced plans to clamp down on child labor in the country following a surge in violations and news reports detailing the illegal employment of underage refugees and migrants in dangerous industries."
Biden administration’s announcement comes after reports of underage refugees and migrants working in dangerous industries.
The United States government has announced plans to clamp down on child labour in the country following a surge in violations and news reports detailing the illegal employment of underage refugees and migrants in dangerous industries.
US officials said on Monday that the Department of Labor had seen a nearly 70 percent increase in child labour violations since 2018, with 835 companies found to have violated child labour laws in the last fiscal year alone.
Officials told reporters during a conference call that US President Joe Biden’s administration is probing the employment of children at companies, including Hearthside Food Solutions and suppliers to Hyundai Motor.
To try to curb the rise, a joint task force by the Department of Labor and the Department of Health and Human Services — responsible for unaccompanied minors arriving in the country — will seek to improve information sharing between the two agencies.
A parallel initiative by the Department of Labor will focus on better enforcement of existing laws, especially in regions and industries where offences are most widespread. According to existing laws, the maximum fine for breaking child labour laws is $15,138 per case.
It was not clear whether the probe will lead to criminal charges, fines or other penalties. Hearthside said in a statement the company was “appalled” at allegations of child labour and would “work collaboratively with the Department of Labor in their investigation and do our part to continue to abide by all local, state and federal employment laws”.
The uptick in illegal child labour coincides with a massive influx of unaccompanied children fleeing poverty and violence in Latin America, resulting in the referral of 130,000 minors to US government shelters in the last fiscal year.
“This is not a 19th-century problem — this is a today problem,” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said in a statement on Monday, calling for a vast mobilisation of resources to tackle the problem.
“We need Congress to come to the table, we need states to come to the table.”
Children are allowed to start work at 14 in the US, subject to restrictions on their working hours, but employment in certain workplaces such as slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants is off limits for minors.
A weekend expose by The New York Times reported on an increased presence of migrant minors — some as young as 12 years old — working in sectors across the US economy, from car factories to construction sites and delivery services.
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The Biden administration is giving agencies 30 days to wipe the app from all government devices. (photo: Adobe Stock)
Federal Agencies Given 30 Days to Wipe TikTok From Devices
Charisma Madarang, Rolling Stone
Madarang writes: "The Biden administration is giving agencies 30 days to wipe the app from all government devices."
The Biden administration is giving agencies 30 days to wipe the app from all government devices
The White House is giving government agencies 30 days to remove TikTok from all federal devices and systems, Reuters reports.
The Office of Management and Budget calls the guidance, announced Monday, a “critical step forward in addressing the risks presented by the app to sensitive government data.”
In December, Congress passed the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act” amid growing national security concerns over the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance. App use is still allowed in certain exceptions, including for national security, law enforcement, and security research purposes.
On Tuesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee expects to move forward with a bill that would give President Joe Biden the power to wipe TikTok from all U.S. devices. If passed, the bill would give the administration the authority to eliminate not only TikTok but all software apps it deems a threat to national security.
“My bill empowers the administration to ban TikTok or any software applications that threaten U.S. national security,” Representative Mike McCaul, the committee chair, said in a statement. “Anyone with TikTok downloaded on their device has given the CCP a backdoor to all their personal information. It’s a spy balloon into your phone.”
McCaul has accused the Chinese Communist Party of using the app to “manipulate and monitor its users while it gobbles up Americans’ data to be used for their malign activities.”
Several government agencies including the White House, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department have already banned TikTok from government devices.
Canada also announced a ban on TikTok from government-issued devices starting Tuesday. The app “presents an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security,” a government spokesperson said in a statement, per BBC.
Last week, The European Union’s two biggest policy-making institutions also banned the app for cybersecurity reasons from staff phones.
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An aerial view shows a building and cars burnt in an attack by Israeli settlers, near Huwara in the West Bank, February 27, 2023. (photo: Ammar Awad/Reuters)
Israeli Military Calls Settler Attacks on Palestinians 'Actions of Terror' After Weekend of Violence
Hadas Gold, CNN
Gold writes: "The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sees the previous day's attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank as 'actions of terror,' an IDF official said Monday, as tensions in the region simmered after a weekend of violence."
ALSO SEE: Tensions High in West Bank
After Deadly Israeli Settler Rampage
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sees the previous day’s attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank as “actions of terror,” an IDF official said Monday, as tensions in the region simmered after a weekend of violence.
At least one Palestinian man was killed, a Palestinian fire engine was stoned by a crowd of about 50 settlers, and other Palestinians were injured with stones or metal bars, Palestinian medical officials said Sunday, blaming Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
Violence continued into Monday, when a 27-year-old man, who has not yet been named publicly, was pronounced dead, according to a statement by Hadassah Mt. Scopus hospital.
He was shot in the West Bank on a highway between Jericho and the Dead Sea on Monday, according to Israel’s Magen David Adom (MDA) emergency service.
The West Bank victim “was unconscious outside his car with gunshot wounds to his upper body,” when MDA paramedic Eden Cohen arrived to treat him, Cohen said in a statement released by the service.
The attacks followed the fatal shooting of two Israeli brothers earlier on Sunday in the town of Huwara, south of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, just days after a massive Israeli military raid into Nablus in search of wanted militants left at least 11 Palestinians dead.
“Last night there was revenge activity done by people that live in the area. I wanted to say we see these actions as actions of a terror, these violent riots,” the IDF official said, asking not to be named due to the sensitivity of the situation. “It’s been a horrible night,” the official added.
The official said the reason the IDF was sending three additional battalions to the area was to keep the Palestinians and Israelis apart.
“More forces will de-escalate” the situation, the official said. “This morning we’ve sent in another Givati (reconnaissance) battalion – the Givati Special Forces battalion – into the area in addition to two Border Patrol companies, basically trying to de-escalate and keep the two sides apart.”
Israel’s Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant vowed to arrest the individual or individuals who killed the settlers and called for calm while allowing military and security forces to work and apprehend the perpetrators.
“It is neither legitimate nor possible to operate individually,” Gallant said Monday, while visiting the location where the incident took place. “We cannot allow a situation in which citizens take the law into their hands. I call on everyone to follow law and order and to trust the IDF and security forces everywhere, across the country.”
The IDF detained eight people in connection with the attacks in Huwara, some of whom have since been released, Israel Police spokesman Dean Elsdunne told CNN Monday.
Cycle of violence
Sameh Hamdallah Mahmoud Aqtash, 37, was shot in the abdomen and killed in the town of Za’tara, between Huwara and the Israeli settlement of Kfar Tapuach, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said Sunday night. In Huwara itself, at least one person was stabbed and another assaulted with an iron bar, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.
The Israeli settlers who were killed earlier were named as brothers Hillel Menachem Yaniv, 21, and Yagel Yaakov Yaniv, 19, according to the local settler council.
Video from the scene showed that their car had crossed a median, and hit a vehicle going the other direction, suggesting they were shot while driving.
Late Sunday, the IDF announced that the older brother, Hillel, was a serving soldier and expressed condolences in a statement.
Peace talks
Following rare talks on Sunday brokered by Jordan, Egypt and the United States, Israeli and Palestinian representatives “affirmed their commitment to all previous agreements between them, and to work towards a just and lasting peace.”
Israel and the Palestinian Authority confirmed their “joint readiness and commitment to immediately work to end unilateral measures for a period of 3-6 months. This includes an Israeli commitment to stop discussion of any new settlement units for 4 months and to stop authorization of any outposts for 6 months,” a joint statement read.
However, in response to the announcement of a halt on settlement construction, far-right Religious Zionism party leader Bezalel Smotrich firmly rejected a pause, “even for one day.”
In a post on Twitter, the Israeli finance minister appeared out of alignment with his government, writing: “There will not be a freeze on settlement building and development, not even for one day (this is under my authority). The IDF will continue to act to counter terrorism in all areas of Judea and Samaria without any limitations (we will reaffirm this in the cabinet). It’s very simple.”
Israeli cabinet approves bill allowing death penalty for ‘terrorists’
Also on Sunday, Israel’s cabinet approved a proposed law to impose the death penalty on “terrorists.” It is officially a private member’s bill sponsored by the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, rather than government-backed legislation.
The law would give courts the power to “impose the death penalty on those who have committed the crime of murder on nationalistic grounds against the citizens of Israel,” a statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ben Gvir said.
After a preliminary vote in the Knesset, or parliament, Israel’s political-security cabinet will next discuss the language in the bill, before it goes to the committee stage. If it passes the committee stage, it will require three Knesset readings to become law.
There have been previous attempts to introduce the death penalty in 2016 and 2018, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, but they did not become law.
In response to the moves, the Palestinian government on Monday condemned “in the strongest terms” the Israeli cabinet’s approval, according to a statement from the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“The death penalty violates the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people to life, non-discrimination, and self-determination. It is a cruel, barbaric, and inhumane bill rooted in Jewish supremacy and precisely aimed to deny the Palestinian people their right to exist and their humanity,” it said, while also calling on the international community to take “concrete actions to pressure Israel to rescind its bill.”
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Doug Smith darts a male wolf from a helicopter in Yellowstone National Park, Jan. 29, 2015. (photo: Ronan Donovan)
Ryan Devereaux | How to Save Yellowstone's Wolves
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "If you ever plan to dart a wild wolf sprinting over a snow-covered mountain from a low-flying helicopter, there are a few things you need to know."
If you ever plan to dart a wild wolf sprinting over a snow-covered mountain from a low-flying helicopter, there are a few things you need to know. The wolf should be running away, and you should be aiming for the back or butt. Never take a shot at a wolf that’s facing you. The risk of injuring the animal with a dart to the face is too high. Also, a dart shoots hard but it’s not a bullet; you need to loft your shot. Try to keep the chase under a quarter mile. Push a distressed wolf much farther and you’re being cruel. Finally, while you’re leaning out over the helicopter’s landing skids focusing on the wolf, don’t forget the treetops rushing by under your feet. If you get snagged, you’re done.
These were the lessons Doug Smith took home after a trip to the Alaskan outback in 1999. Smith had recently become director of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, the research program that followed the reintroduction of wolves into the national park four years earlier. At the heart of the nascent program was the winter study, when Smith and his team would track packs deep into the park, collect predation data, and fix individual wolves with radio collars.
The study relied heavily on aerial darting. Smith grew up shooting guns but hitting a moving wolf from an aircraft was different challenge. He phoned Layne Adams, a darting pro with the U.S. Biological Survey, who was doing work at Denali National Park, and asked if he could come to Alaska to study his craft. The pair spent a week in the air. Smith vividly remembers the first wolf he darted. It was an evasive alpha female. His first shot missed.
“Take those fucking gloves off!” the pilot shouted into his headset. Smith was wearing flying gloves. He ditched them. Below, the wolf stopped running, took shelter in a patch of brush, and faced the strange object hovering above her. The pilot was shouting at Smith to shoot. Smith was shouting at the pilot to reposition. The wolf took off. Smith can’t recall how many darts he fired, but he knows that the last one hit its mark.
Smith darted six more wolves in Denali that week. Back in Yellowstone, over the next two and half decades, he darted some 600 more. The captures became the backbone of the winter study — today a top contender for the world’s most respected predator research project. Smith spent all year waiting for the snow to come, thinking about what the last winter revealed, obsessing over how to improve. He took those lessons to heart. “I never computed my long-term average, but I was getting down to like 1.2, 1.3 darts per wolf,” he told me recently. “Two days in my career, I fired 10 darts and got 10 wolves.”
When future historians sit down to tell the story of how wolves regained a foothold in the United States after near total annihilation, they will find many names. Few, if any, are likely to surface as often as Doug Smith. For more than a quarter century, Smith was the face of one of the most historic and controversial government conservation initiatives of all time. In November, he retired.
When we met on an overcast morning in Bozeman, Montana, Smith was six weeks into his new post-Yellowstone life. His former colleagues were in the midst of their first winter without him. “It’s the first time since the beginning I wasn’t there to handle capture,” he said. Smith was not yet sure if stepping away was the right call. He wavered sometimes. “It was a very hard decision,” he said. “I’m still doubting it some days.”
Now free from the constraints of federal employment, the veteran biologist offered critical observations on the way wolves are seen, managed, and killed in the Northern Rockies, and the values that treatment reflects. Smith’s exit comes at a tumultuous time for wolves in the Northern Rockies and wildlife more broadly. Last winter, he and his colleagues recorded the deadliest season in Yellowstone history. With 25 wolves killed, more than double the previous record, roughly a fifth of the park’s entire wolf population was lost.
The killing was concentrated on Yellowstone’s northern border, which cuts into southwestern Montana. In the run up to the unprecedented season, a panel of wildlife commissioners appointed by Montana’s first Republican governor in a decade and a half, Greg Gianforte, abolished quotas that had limited the number of wolves that could be killed north of the park.
With its 2023 legislative session now underway, Montana’s new GOP supermajority remains intent on dramatically slashing the state’s wolf population with an array of highly controversial and recently legalized hunting and trapping methods. Many of the West’s most respected wildlife biologists have spoken out at what they see as a politicized wave of “anti-predator hysteria” sweeping the region. Meanwhile, mass habitat loss continues to fuel biodiversity loss at a staggering pace, leaving national parks like Yellowstone among the only places on Earth where large predators like wolves are both protected and studied in depth.
In the weeks leading up to his retirement, Smith completed a major paper with more than a dozen biologists from national parks across North America. A decade in the making, the rare, interpark collaboration — titled “Human-caused mortality triggers pack instability in gray wolves” and published in “Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment” in January — tackled the question of how wolf hunting outside of national parks impacts the social stability of wolf packs living inside them. The research showed that while wolf populations are remarkably resilient, the loss of a single wolf can be devastating to an individual pack. This was especially true in the case of leaders. “Literally, if you get the wrong wolf at the wrong time, that pack can fall apart,” Smith said. The study also found that despite living in the most protected environs available, wolves in national parks experience “high levels” of human-caused mortality. Last winter, Smith and his colleagues witnessed those effects firsthand at an unprecedented scale.
The paper was a fitting exit for one the country’s most celebrated biologists. The entirety of Smith’s Yellowstone career was bound up in questions of how the outside world shaped the bubble of preservation he signed up to study and protect. Under his tenure, the park’s wolf program became an exemplar of predator preservation and research worldwide. Taking advantage of Yellowstone’s unmatched observational opportunities, Smith oversaw studies detailing how the return of apex predators — not just wolves, but grizzly bears and cougars as well — helped usher in an era of ecological recovery rarely witnessed in the modern world. At the same time, while always keeping an eye on the science and planning for the next winter study, Smith’s work required navigating a social and political minefield. “Cross-boundary management is a bugaboo in wildlife management,” he told me. “Most of the time, people go, ‘They’re not our jurisdiction anymore, so we’re not going to do anything’ — that doesn’t benefit the resource at all.”
The boundaries that divide national parks and states are more than a delineation between jurisdictions. Those invisible lines represent different worlds, both for the animals that cross them and for the human institutions on either side. The borders invite questions that policymakers generally try to avoid asking. After two and a half decades on the front line, Smith firmly believes those discussions, uncomfortable though they might be, must happen for wildlife to have any chance of survival. The study, in addition to its scientific revelations, was an attempt to spur those conversations. “That was the other reason we did it,” Smith said. “It was like, ‘Let’s shine a light on this.’ You have to expose painful topics to solve them.”
People Riding Around With Guns
Early in Smith’s Yellowstone career, a legendary park ranger named Jerry Mernin offered him a piece of advice he would never forget. “You’re not doing your job. No one gives a shit about your science,” Mernin told him. “What you gotta do is you gotta go in the mountains, on horseback, and talk to the people riding around with guns. That’s conservation.”
Mernin was referring to the outfitting camps that ring Yellowstone’s border, providing guided hunts for paying clients, particularly those in pursuit of elk. Along with livestock interests, the outfitters were among the most vocal opponents of the federal program to repopulate the West with wolves. They didn’t ask for it, they didn’t want it, and they saw the wolves as a threat to their bottom line. Smith could see that Mernin was right. He needed to talk to them. Together, they loaded up their horses and rode out.
Like his winter study, Smith’s visits to the camps became a tradition. As it was with darting, the learning curve was steep. Smith quickly discovered that riding in with a list of points to hammer home never worked. “Literally, you had to go in and just establish contact, a rapport, a relationship,” he said. “Listen more than you talk.” Smith did not expect to uproot deeply held convictions. The goal was subtler, more human. “If you let those guys go, they will go,” he said. “So most of the time, you’re just rapping, and you’re trying to establish that I’m not as bad as they think I am, and even though I’m a government employee, they shouldn’t hate me for that — because they hate the government.”
Nothing was ever perfect, tensions and resentments remained, but bit by bit relationships were built. “I continued that almost until the day I retired,” Smith said. “I would consider it to be one of the more effective conservation efforts that I did in my career.”
Raised in rural northeastern Ohio on a horse camp that his parents ran, Smith began working with wolves as a teenager. He earned his Ph.D. studying under the legends of the field, old-school biologists whose groundbreaking insights were the product of handwritten notes compiled while trudging through deep snow in remote places. Among his mentors was L. David Mech. In an email, Mech, who is considered by many to be the most authoritative wolf expert in the world, described Smith’s predation studies in Yellowstone as “the most intensive and extensive wolf-prey system ever scientifically investigated.”
Smith lived for the science, but he also recognized that the most important decisions in wildlife management happen outside the realms of biology and ecology.
In 2011, facing a precarious vote in the upcoming midterm elections, Montana’s lone Democratic senator, Jon Tester, attached a rider to a must-pass budget bill reversing a federal judge’s order returning wolves in the Northern Rockies to the Endangered Species List. The move was unheard of — Congress had never intervened to remove an animal from the endangered species list before — and led to state authorization of wolf hunting and trapping seasons. The following year, Smith and his colleagues released a report unlike anything they had published before, documenting the then-unprecedented loss of 12 wolves to hunting and trapping, many just over the edge of the park’s boundary lines.
Smith understood well that the goal of the Endangered Species Act was delisting, and that delisting meant state management, and state management meant hunting. Still, there were elements to the way the states structured their approach that he found ethically unsettling. Smith was a lifelong hunter, using elk and deer to fill his fridge. The meat was the “resource value” of the animal he killed. A wolf’s resource value was ostensibly its pelt, and yet Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho — then and now — started their seasons during the transition from summer to fall, when wolves’ pelts were at their least valuable. “You’re killing for a full two months for what?” Smith asked, before answering his own question. “Hatred.”
Boundary Lines
Following the deadly 2012 season, wolf advocates lobbied for hunting quotas north of Yellowstone. While most of the park’s boundaries lie in remote areas, well-removed from human settlement, Yellowstone’s iconic northern entrance is in the unincorporated community of Gardiner, Montana, where open access to wildlife moving out of the park is readily available. The region is but a tiny sliver of Montana. Still, opponents of wolf hunting quotas on Yellowstone’s boundary line argued that the park was pushing out its border and asked, with great frustration, where do you draw the line?
For Smith, it was the wrong question. Hard boundary lines didn’t make sense for wildlife in general and for wolves in Yellowstone specifically. The wolves spent 96 percent of their time in the park, with much of that time in Wyoming — meaning that killing those wolves to reduce Montana’s wolf population made little sense. There was limited livestock ranching in the pocket of Montana that the park pushed up against, and the state routinely reported healthy elk populations in the area. That meant two of the most common arguments for heavy wolf killing — livestock and elk protection — were shaky at best. Finally, because the wolves were born and raised in a national park, they grew up with little reason to fear humans watching them from a distance. This habituation raised serious ethical questions about the shooting of a wolf that stood 100 feet north of a line that it didn’t know existed by humans who it didn’t see as a danger. As an alternative, hunters and trappers in Montana still had access to the rest of the fourth largest state in the country, where they could stalk wolves that actually knew they were being pursued.
“They’re tolerant of having people watching, and so you can’t have an arbitrary line on a landscape — go from that, complete protection, to no protection,” Smith said. It was matter of fair chase, an ethical principle undergirding the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, a set of pillars revered by many hunters around the world. In a fair chase hunt, “an animal knows you’re after it,” Smith said. “You’re not riding a four-wheeler chasing it down. You’re not using walkie talkies to trap it. Those are all fair chase measures. This is one of them.”
In place of a hard line, Smith and others advocated for a zone of protection that gradually faded into the broader state management regime. For many, it was the economics of Yellowstone’s wolf program that served as the strongest argument for such an approach: According to an economic study published in 2022, wolf watching alone in Yellowstone generates $82 million a year in local ecotourism dollars.
Though he wouldn’t disagree with the value of ecotourism, Smith’s arguments tended to reflect his dual identity as a scientist and public servant. With the wolf reintroduction, Yellowstone, and by extension the broader public, gained an incomparable asset, allowing for deeper insights into the innerworkings of one of the last great ecosystems of North America. If there were ever an example of a National Park Service initiative achieving its mission of preservation and public access, it was the Yellowstone Wolf Project. “I believe in the mission,” Smith said. “I would argue — and I know the world does not work this way — don’t do a job unless you believe it.”
In his day-to-day work over the years, Smith routinely met with people whose opinions on that mission ranged from unaccommodating to outright hostile. For Kira Cassidy, who began her Yellowstone wolf career in 2008, it was Smith’s earnest interest in seeking out those conversations that made him indispensable. “For being such a science-focused person, he also has a very beautiful, philosophical way of looking at the human condition and human relationships with wildlife,” she said. “He’s not argumentative, but he’s convincing in what he believes.”
Gradually, through years of negotiations among an array of stakeholders, the number of wolves that could be killed in the two districts north of Yellowstone was pared down to one each. At the same time, statewide in Montana, wolf regulations were kept permissive, and hundreds of individual animals were hunted or trapped every year. Smith wasn’t an enthusiastic fan of the state’s wolf hunt, but he understood it as part of the complex world of trade-offs in which the Yellowstone Wolf Project was situated.
“That’s the give and take we need in our society,” he said. “The whole point here is reasonability, compromise,” he added. “I don’t think we’re being unreasonable by saying, ‘Look, you can kill them, you just can’t kill them all.’”
Mind Your Own Business
In 2016, the research into how human hunting affects wolves in national parks began to gather momentum. After a successful project with an Alaska-based biologist in Denali National Park, Smith and Cassidy began kicking around the idea of bringing in collaborators from around the continent. Eventually, they assembled a wide-ranging team of wolf researchers from Denali, Grand Teton, and Voyageurs national parks, as well as the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve in remote eastern Alaska.
In addition to hunting, the biologists included vehicle strikes, poaching, lethal control by government agencies, and rare incidents of death during research capture in their analysis. With data stretching back to the 1980s, they had an extraordinary wealth of information to pull from. While Cassidy delved into the nitty-gritty of the research, Smith navigated the complexities of wrangling multiple national parks in a study that was inherently controversial.
“It was tough,” he said. “A lot of people were like, ‘Leave it alone. When they leave the park, they’re none of your business.’” To Smith, that response was premature. The research had not been done to determine the extent of the issue, so who was to say whether it was the business of national parks or not? “I’m OK with not doing anything,” Smith said. “But don’t you want the information to know?”
No adjustment to the status quo after reviewing data was one thing. “I’m actually OK with that,” he said. “But that’s different than ‘We don’t know, and everything’s fine.’”
As it turned out, everything was not fine. In August 2021, Montana eliminated the hunting quotas north of Yellowstone entirely. In the months that followed, the wolf project recorded an unprecedented 480 percent increase in mortality compared to previous seasons. Smith and Cassidy watched in real time as patterns they had traced for years emerged again and again across the park’s Northern Range.
The hunters would arrive at dawn or dusk, often with assault rifles, at known lookout points on the park’s border. They used predator calls to draw wolves over the line and often left the carcasses where they fell. Just as data coming in from parks around the country indicated, larger packs fared better in the face of the heavy human killing. Smaller packs did not.
The Phantom Lake Pack was a stark example. The pack was relatively small and traditionally held its ground on the northernmost edge of the park. Seven of its members were killed in two months. “We think that one of the first wolves that they lost during the hunting season was probably their breeding female,” Cassidy said. “They seemed to crumble after that.” With the Phantom Lake wolves gone, Yellowstone’s largest pack moved in. Though the Junction Butte Pack lost eight wolves to the hunt after taking the newly available territory, most of were pups or yearlings, and the pack had gone into the season with nearly 30 members. The pack persisted.
Most illustrative of all was the Eight Mile Pack. Unlike other packs in the park, the wolves were elusive and seemed to consciously avoid humans. Cassidy attributed the evasiveness to the seasoned alpha female that had led the pack for five years: “It seemed like for years she knew exactly how to avoid human-caused mortalities.” The wolf did not, however, appear to understand traps and was caught and killed late in the season. “Within 48 hours after the alpha female was trapped, the pack got up and traveled all the way until Lamar Valley,” Cassidy said. The journey was nearly 40 miles. “We have never recorded them doing that,” she said. “It seemed to be in reaction to this pretty severe disruption.”
As the biologists suspected, numbers alone failed to tell the full story of what happened inside packs when humans killed wolves. The process of confirming their hypothesis, however, was painfully grim. “This is the kind of study you don’t want to see succeed,” Smith said. “It relies on dead wolves being killed by people.”
The hunt marked the worst year of Smith’s career. It wasn’t just the loss of the individual wolves or the scientific setbacks, though both were brutal; it was also the damage done to the project of compromise and moderation in which he had invested so much time and effort.
Smith spent last summer working to convince the governor’s wildlife commissioners of the unique value of the Yellowstone’s wolf program and the important role quotas played in helping the Park Service achieve its mission. In August, at a hearing to establish this year’s regulations, he thanked the commissioners for hearing him out. In the end, the commissioners — some of whom had been prepared to begin another season with no quotas in place — agreed to a park proposal of a six wolf limit. Smith was sent to deliver the proposal. Following his remarks, a woman whispered to him that he had let the wolf advocates down. “That caused me to flinch,” he said.
At that point, the subject of retirement was already on his mind. Smith would be 62 soon, the age at which he and his wife had agreed to discuss a potential change in direction. Following the hearing, the couple took a canoe trip around Yellowstone Lake. The quotas may have been reinstated, but laws aiming to slash wolf populations in Montana and Idaho were still on the books. Smith knew that his words carried weight in the Northern Rockies. He thought hard on whether he should stick it out a little longer.
Though he managed to hold onto his flying and winter study captures until the very end, the fieldwork and research that gave him purpose had been subsumed in recent years. “I had become a supervisor and administrator and a bureaucrat,” Smith said. “More and more of my job became keeping the show on the road, and less and less biology, ecology.” As he and his wife took in Yellowstone’s late summer beauty, Smith decided the time had come. Three months later, he retired.
“This is really the first time in 44 years I haven’t had my finger on the button,” Smith told me. “And you know, that’s hard. I’m still thinking about what that looks like.”
Just as the loss of a longtime leader can disrupt the most experienced pack, the loss of Doug Smith rattled Yellowstone’s tight-knit core of wolf researchers. “It was hard for us to even bring up really,” Cassidy said. The park’s 55th winter study was just gearing up and the project had lost its most seasoned darter: counting Smith, there were only two.
Smith was uneasy when their paper finally published. The concluding paragraphs called for a “renewed interest in interagency collaboration … defined by compromise and based on science.” To the layperson, the language would appear inoffensive, but Smith knew it would ruffle feathers. He worried he’d be seen as coaching his former colleagues from the sidelines. That was not his intent. As usual, he was looking to start a conversation. “I think it’s critical,” he said. Smith is not done with wolves — far from it. He’s itching to get back in the field, somewhere new perhaps. “Credit is not what I’m after,” he said. After a lifetime of studying wolves — and people — he still has questions. He’d like to find some answers. “I’m interested,” he said. “That’s what I’m after.”
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