Montana
Grizzly Shot, Killed After Charging Mushroom Pickers Near Montana Prairie Town
A grizzly was shot and killed after it charged two men who were picking mushrooms near Choteau, Montana, late Wednesday.
Choteau is in the part of Montana where grizzlies have increasingly been reclaiming their natural prairie habitat.
According to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP), two landowners were picking mushrooms about a mile north of Choteau on Wednesday night when they were charged by an adult female grizzly bear.
The men shot and killed the bear at close range, according to FWP. The men were not injured.
An FWP report identified the men as “John” and “Justin,” without giving their last names. Messages sent Friday from Cowboy State Daily to FWP officials were not returned.
More Grizzly Trouble In Montana
Grizzly trouble isn’t unfamiliar in Montana, including in areas that were, until recently, not occupied by bears.
In April, two anglers fended off a grizzly with gunfire at Red Rocks Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in southwest Montana.
It wasn’t known if any of the shots hit the bear, and the anglers were unharmed, according to FWP reports.
In fall 2023, there were two run-ins between hunters and grizzlies in the Freezout Lake Wildlife Management Area. It’s between the small towns of Choteau and Fairfield, Montana, about 40 miles west of Great Falls.
After one incident in which a bird hunter fired his shotgun at a grizzly, a Montana wildlife official told Cowboy State Daily that he found a shotgun wad with some grizzly hair in it, but no blood.
Wildlife agents later used drones and a helicopter to search for the bear “about 4miles in each direction,” but found nothing, said Chad White, a bear management specialist with the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. That means the bear probably wasn’t seriously hurt.
In another incident, a grizzly tried to claim the carcass of a whitetail buck that an archery hunter had just killed.
The bear ran away when the hunter and an FWP agent drove up to the scene in the agent’s pickup. That gave them enough time to toss the deer carcass into the truck’s bed and leave.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) is facing yet another lawsuit over allegations of unlicensed sampling — only this time, it’s centered on a video clip of the rapper’s infamous 2013 fight with paparazzi.
In a case filed Wednesday (July 15) in Los Angeles federal court, the celebrity news agency Bauer-Griffin claims that Ye, French Montana (Karim Kharbouch) and others used audio from the headline-grabbing incident in “Where They At,” released in 2024 off French’s Mac & Cheese 5.
The May 2013 video, which also features a pregnant Kim Kardashian, shows West charging at a photographer outside a Los Angeles restaurant and shouting “don’t take no photos” and a string of profanities: “All of you m*therf*ckers stop it, man!”
The clip appears prominently in the intro to Montana’s song — a use that the lawsuit calls “blatant and willful” copyright infringement.
“Given Mr. Ye’s history of numerous confrontations with paparazzi, the video was highly newsworthy,” the agency’s lawyers write in legal documents obtained and first reported by Billboard. “Listeners immediately recognized the audio sample that begins the infringing record as being copied from the video.”
Ye has been sued over a dozen times for allegedly using unlicensed samples and interpolations in his music, including a high-profile battle with Donna Summer. In May, he lost a jury trial over using an uncleared sample in an early version of the Grammy-winning “Hurricane” from Donda. He had testified at trial that he’s “very generous” about giving credit and compensation when it’s due, but that “a lot of people try to take advantage of me.”
In Wednesday’s complaint, Bauer-Griffin says the creators of “Where They At” showed no such respect to its rights in the video of the paparazzi incident, using it despite being well aware that sound recordings must be licensed when any amount is directly sampled into a song.
“In the music industry, copyrights are prevalent and well understood,” lawyers for the agency write. “Every defendant knew that they needed to have but did not have permission to use the audio sample.”
Reps for both stars did not immediately return requests for comment. The lawsuit also names as defendants producers Dem Jointz (Dwayne Abernathy Jr.) and BoogzDaBeast (Jahmal Gwin), as well Gamma, the label that released the song, and its distribution unit Vydia.
The confrontation at issue in Wednesday’s lawsuit was one of two high-profile scuffles with paparazzi that year for the rapper, who was then still known as Kanye West. Two months later, he clashed with photographer Daniel Ramos outside of LAX, resulting in a civil assault lawsuit that the star eventually settled two years later on the eve of trial.
As many celebrities have learned over the years, simply appearing in a photo or video does not give someone any legal rights to it. Ownership of such material is always retained by the creator — an inconvenient fact that has sparked lawsuits against Jennifer Lopez, Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa.
It’s unclear who filmed the May 2013 incident, which happened outside a Beverly Hills restaurant minutes after the star had also been filmed accidentally banging his head into a signpost while trying to avoid other photographers. But the rights to the footage have been owned by Bauer-Griffin from the beginning: When TMZ first posted it at the time, it came with a watermark crediting the agency.
“The infringing record has been widely distributed on various streaming platforms, in flagrant violation of plaintiff’s exclusive rights under copyright laws,” Bauer-Griffin’s attorneys write. “Plaintiff brings these claims to vindicate those rights.”
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