She really does bleed silver and gold • Owyhee designation inches closer to reality • Details sketchy on Hayden rape homicide • Idaho's best tattoos part I • Behold the Whizzer • Where have all the bees gone? • It's gonna be a huge year for the Emmett Cherry Festival

She really does bleed silver and gold

The Lewiston Tribune profiles Melissa Newhouse, a 21-year-old student who is about to become the 48th member of her family to graduate from the University of Idaho.

She will graduate with an accounting degree from the university that "has launched so many of her kin into careers in law, real estate, business, engineering, finance and more."

Newhouse told the Tribune she believes the earliest Vandal in the family to go to U of I was her great-great grandfather John Rossgood, who went to Moscow in 1908.

Read more at the Lewiston Tribune's Web site. (Subscription required)

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Owyhee designation inches closer to reality

The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources approved Sen. Mike Crapo's Owyhee initiative and sent the bill to the full U.S. Senate Wednesday.

The Owyhee Public Lands Management Act will likely be included in a package of other land-management bills that will be considered together by the Senate as early as next month, the Mountain Express reports.

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Details sketchy on Hayden rape homicide

The Kootenai County Sheriff's Department is looking into the death of a man in Hayden on Thursday after a woman said that she killed him after he raped and stabbed her.

The Coeur d'Alene Press reports that sheriff deputies responded to a 911 call from the woman just before 5 a.m. Thursday.

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Idaho's best tattoos part I

A 23-year-old Lewiston funeral home employee's sweet tattoo is landing her a spot on The Learning Channel's TV show "Miami Ink."

Lacyn Jordan's tatt shows a beautiful woman in fishnet stockings standing in front of a 1959 Cadillac hearse. It represents her journey from near death in a southern Colorado horse arena to working as a mortician in a Lewiston funeral home.

The episode is scheduled to air Thursday at 10 p.m.

Read more at the Lewiston Tribune's Web site. (Subscription required)

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Behold the Whizzer

A Sandpoint couple is bringing cool, retro, 1950s mopeds called Whizzers to Idaho. See a picture of the bikes here.

When Linda Patalono and Craig Skerston decided to buy one, they found out there were no distributors in the Inland Northwest and decided to start their own business selling the bikes.

The bikes reach speeds of 25 mph and get 125 miles per gallon.

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Where have all the bees gone?

Boise's Channel 2 reports on a new survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America that shows there has been a 36 percent loss in commercially managed beehives in the U.S. since last year.

A spokesperson for the Idaho Farm Bureau told 2 that almost all of Idaho's food crops depend on bee pollination and if the trend continues, the nation's food supply could be at risk.

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It's gonna be a huge year for the Emmett Cherry Festival

The Pacific Northwest cherry crop will be about 27 percent less than anticipated and about 18 percent less than record crops of the last two years because of April freezes in Washington and Oregon.

However, according to the Wenatchee World, the estimate of cherries grown in Idaho is 2,800 tons this year, up from 900 last year.

Washington traditionally produces 80 percent of the crop grown in the five-state region of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Montana. Washington produced 123,380 fresh tons last year but will only produce about 91,000 tons this year.