Good morning; on the Beacon today, 15 years after John Paul Noyes opened Big Sky Martial Arts, it has become the largest taekwondo club in the state. A Montana family says its efforts to obtain official information about a son’s shooting death in March have been repeatedly stymied by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. Ronan police have released the name of a man, James Finch, who was stabbed to death in a Ronan bar over the weekend. Mick Holien relates who really runs the UM football program: the equipment managers. Warren Miller recalls an epic Hawaiian wind surf.
More than 200 people showed up at a town hall in Bozeman, where passions led some to occasionally spar with both U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg and the crowd itself. Sen. Max Baucus, however, plans no public meetings this month, and Sen. Jon Tester met with health care officials in Billings. Grasshoppers are eating grass and other forage grown for livestock in such proportions that some U.S. ranchers are selling cattle because they won’t have feed for the animals this winter. Home resales in July posted the largest monthly increase in at least 10 years as first-time buyers rushed to take advantage of a tax credit that expires this fall. The Bubba Burger of Eureka is on track to be the top sandwich in the country. Conservation groups are asking a federal judge in Missoula to block fall wolf hunts in Idaho and Montana.