Sorted by date Results 1 - 19 of 19
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Four University of Idaho students who were found dead in a rental house Sunday were stabbed to death in their beds and likely were asleep, a county coroner told a cable news channel. Latah County Coroner Cathy Mabbutt also told NewsNation on Thursday that each victim suffered multiple stab wounds from a "pretty large knife." "It has to be somebody pretty angry in order to stab four people to death," Mabbutt told NewsNation. The victims were stabbed in the chest and upper body, the coroner said. Efforts by The Associated P...
MOSCOW, Idaho (AP) — Four University of Idaho students found dead in an off-campus home were targeted, and the killer or killers used a knife or other "edged weapon" in the attack, police said Tuesday. The Moscow Police Department made the announcement in a statement, adding that investigators were working to establish a timeline of the victims' activities before they were killed. Police said the killings likely occurred early Sunday morning, and that the bodies were found around noon. The students' violent deaths left the community of M...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Thousands of wildfires ignite in the U.S. each year, and each one requires firefighters to make quick decisions, often in difficult conditions like high winds and lightning. Crews and managers must determine when to bring in aircraft, what time of day is best to battle flames, whether to evacuate residents and even if certain fires should be extinguished at all. In the West, which sees many of the country's largest fires, they do all this amid the backdrop of prolonged drought and other climate change-induced conditions th...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Scientists have discovered the first nest of so-called murder hornets in the United States and plan to wipe it out Saturday to protect native honeybees, officials in Washington state said. After weeks of searching, the agency said it found the nest of Asian giant hornets in Blaine, a city north of Seattle near the Canadian border. Bad weather delayed plans to destroy the nest Friday. The world's largest hornet at 2 inches (5 centimeters) long, the invasive insects can decimate entire hives of honeybees and deliver p...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Gov. Jay Inslee has directed the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission to draft new rules governing the killing of wolves involved in conflicts with livestock, a move winning praise from conservation groups. The Democrat on Friday reversed the commission's denial of a petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity in May that called for reform of the state's wolf-management policies. He wrote in a letter to the commission that the potential for future conflicts between wolves and livestock, and the resulting k...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — A dead Asian giant hornet has been found in Washington state, and officials said Friday they were trying to learn if the honey bee predators have established colonies here. The Washington state Department of Agriculture said it was the first confirmed sighting of an Asian giant hornet in Washington this year. The hornets are known as Murder Hornets in Japan, a name that state officials frown upon. The hornet found this week was believed to be a queen, said Sven-Erik Spichiger, an entomologist for the agency. "If we s...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — They call it the Cosmic Crisp. It's not a video game, a superhero or the title of a Grateful Dead song. It's a new variety of apple, coming to a grocery store near you Dec. 1 Cosmic Crisp is the first apple ever bred in Washington state, which grows the majority of the United States' apples. It's expected to be a game changer. Already, growers have planted 12 million Cosmic Crisp apple trees, a sign of confidence in the new variety. While only 450,000 40-pound (18-kilogram) boxes will be available for sale this year, t...
METALINE FALLS, Wash. (AP) — Times are tough in a rural county in northeast Washington state because one of the region's biggest employers is shutting down. The Pend Oreille Mine, just north of Metaline Falls, closed on July 31, at a cost of about 200 family wage jobs in an area of less than 1,000 residents. It's another sign of the imbalance of prosperity in Washington state. While the Seattle area gorges on high-paying jobs, many rural counties like Pend Oreille County that depend on natural resource industries — logging, fishing, mining — ar...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — No airborne radiation was detected after steam escaped Friday from a tunnel containing radioactive waste at a former nuclear weapons production site in Washington state, U.S. officials said, the second problem with aging tunnels at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in a year. Workers who had been ordered to stay inside buildings were released about five hours later, the U.S. Department of Energy said. There were no reports of injuries. The agency said cameras revealed that the steam resulted from the drying of a c...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — The trade war with China is making life difficult for many farmers across Washington. The state's 1,900 wheat growers, who export the vast majority of their crop, are particularly hurt. But so are cherry growers who just harvested their highly perishable crop. Washington stands to lose $480 million in agricultural exports to China because of retaliatory tariffs, according to the state Department of Agriculture. Mike Carstensen, a wheat grower whose farm is near Grand Coulee Dam, said that last year China was the No. 4 cust...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — The eruption of a Hawaii volcano in the Pacific "Ring of Fire" has experts warily eyeing volcanic peaks on America's West Coast that are also part of the geologically active region. The West Coast is home to an 800-mile (1,300-kilometer) chain of 13 volcanoes , from Washington state's Mount Baker to California's Lassen Peak. They include Mount St. Helens, whose spectacular 1980 eruption in the Pacific Northwest killed dozens of people and sent volcanic ash across the country, and massive Mount Rainier, which towers above t...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — The air crew who used their U.S. Navy warplane to create a vulgar sky writing above the town of Okanogan, Washington, this week have been grounded, the U.S. Navy said Friday. An electronic warfare plane from Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in western Washington state created sky writings in the shape of male genitals in the skies over the rural community on Thursday. Many residents spotted the contrails in the clear blue skies above the central Washington town of 2,500 people. Witnesses took photos and placed them on s...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Prosecutors filed 51 new charges Wednesday against a 15-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting a classmate and wounding three others at his rural Washington state high school. Caleb Sharpe already has been charged with first-degree murder and three counts of attempted first-degree murder in the Sept. 13 shooting at Freeman High School near the tiny town of Rockford. He previously pleaded not guilty. Spokane County prosecutors upgraded the murder charge to premeditated murder and added 51 counts of assault, r...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — It's been a quarter-century since a standoff in the mountains of northern Idaho left a 14-year-old boy, his mother and a federal agent dead and sparked an expansion of radical right-wing groups in the United States that continues today. The gunfight at Ruby Ridge occurred when agents approached Randy Weaver's property near the Canadian border looking for a place to arrest the military veteran on gun charges. They had been investigating him for possible ties to white supremacist and anti-government groups. Weaver, his d...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Student leaders at Washington State University are asking administrators to adopt a policy that prevents the recruitment of any athlete who has been convicted of a sex-related crime. They sent the request in a letter in late June to WSU President Kirk Schulz and Director of Athletics Bill Moos. "This is part of a larger effort to talk about sexual assault on college campuses," Jordon Frost, the student body president, said Wednesday in a telephone interview from Pullman, where Washington State is located. Frost signed t...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Ranchers on Monday sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture, seeking to force meat to again be labeled if it's produced in other countries and imported to the United States. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Spokane, seeks to overturn a March 2016 decision by the Department of Agriculture to revoke regulations requiring imported meat products to be labeled with their country of origin. That change allowed imported meat to be sold as U.S. products, the lawsuit said. "Consumers understandably want to know where their f...
RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) — Future accidental radiation releases at the largest U.S. site of waste from nuclear weapons production are likely following back-to-back emergency evacuations of workers in May and June because aging infrastructure is breaking down, the top Energy Department official at the site told The Associated Press. Adding to the likelihood of more nuclear mishaps at the sprawling Hanford Nuclear Reservation is inadequate government funding to quickly clean up the millions of gallons of toxic nuclear waste at the site, said Doug S...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Harvesting Washington state's vast fruit orchards each year requires thousands of farmworkers, and many of them work illegally in the United States. That system eventually could change dramatically as at least two companies are rushing to get robotic fruit-picking machines to market. The robotic pickers don't get tired and can work 24 hours a day. "Human pickers are getting scarce," said Gad Kober, a co-founder of Israel-based FFRobotics. "Young people do not want to work in farms, and elderly pickers are slowly r...
SANDPOINT, Idaho (AP) — Scott Brusaw has a vision for the nation's roads. He believes the solar-powered glass pavers his company makes could transform thousands of miles of pavement into a new energy source. His business, Solar Roadways, recently unveiled its first public installation, in a downtown plaza in this northern Idaho resort town. It's 150 square feet of hexagon-shaped solar panels that people can walk and bicycle on. The company is working on proof that the panels, for which it has a patent, are strong enough and have enough t...
