Shawn Vestal

When Seth Connell graduates from Washington State University, he'll be more than $60,000 in debt. In that respect, he's not unlike the two-thirds of college students who leave school with a sheepskin and thousands of dollars in student loans.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Wednesday that illegal immigrants ought to have a "pathway to citizenship" in America, and the country needs to honor its legacy of welcoming people who came from somewhere else. "I think building walls and sending the National Guard to the border is not the kind of America that I want," Albright, whose family fled Czechoslovakia when she was an infant, told a standing-room-only crowd at Eastern Washington University.

Public colleges in the Inland Northwest are participating in a rite of spring – besides graduation. Call it the raising of the tuition. It's as automatic as the seasons.

Rodolfo Arevalo has been taking a short course in the Inland Northwest. In his first days on the job, the new president of Eastern Washington University met the governor and key legislators in Olympia. He's met community leaders in Spokane and Cheney and the region's congressional delegation in Washington, D.C.

PULLMAN – The next wave of architects, teachers, engineers and grad students will cross the commencement stage here today, dressed identically in caps and gowns. But in their last week of school, everyone in the Washington State University Class of 2006 took their own path.

Jim Fleming was a biology professor at Eastern Washington University when he and some colleagues had the idea that would change their lives. They developed a chemical process to identify the presence of bacteria quickly, something useful in everything from cheese making to screening for terrorist threats.

An early morning fire put 15 elderly and disabled people out of their Post Falls group home Sunday. No one was badly injured in the fire at Garden Homes assisted-living facility, 820 N. William St., and the residents have been given temporary shelter in other facilities, said Ruby Stoker, owner of Garden Homes.

MOSCOW, Idaho – DNA comes in all kinds of packages. The boxes that fill Lisette Waits' work space contain stuff most people can't imagine saving: wild poop. But the test tubes of bear, fox and snow leopard scat may hold answers that help endangered animals. As genetic science has mushroomed, wildlife biologists like Waits are using newfangled genetics to learn more about rare and remote species.

Eastern Washington University's newest degree program in game design may sound like a lot of fun. But slackers need not apply.

MOSCOW, Idaho – A group of engineering students at the University of Idaho has been learning some new formulas. Such as the inexact and unscientific "rule of pi" – which grad student Jacob Leachman translates as: "Whatever time you think it's going to take to make something, multiply it by about three."

Everybody's heard of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." You have to dig a little deeper to find "Zauberlinda, The Wise Witch." Zauberlinda was a very Oz-like story published in 1901, replete with an Oz-like scene on the cover and an Oz-like story inside. Instead of Toto, there's a cat. The knock-off shows just how popular the land of Oz was, decades before the 1939 movie drilled it into the cultural consciousness. A copy of Zauberlinda sits on a wooden bookshelf in Currie Corbin's South Hill home. It's part of his extensive collection of items related to writer L. Frank Baum, from his Oz books to the titles Baum wrote under pen names to the authors who flattered him with imitations.

PULLMAN – With spring comes baseball and softball. With baseball and softball come statistics: batting averages, runs batted in, earned run averages. But when Lloyd Smith puts bat to ball, he's looking for different information. The coefficient of restitution. The mass motion of inertia.

Eastern Washington University is moving ahead with efforts to shift its Spokane programs to the Riverpoint campus it shares with Washington State University. The school has received state approval – awaiting the governor's signature – to sell its downtown center and put the proceeds toward a new facility. EWU is stepping up efforts to find a buyer and considering options at the Riverpoint campus, spokesman David Rey said.

Who would paint a house on a damp March day in Spokane? About 50 college students on spring break who are painting 10 West Central homes for free this month as training for starting their own businesses.