Emry Dinman

As the Spokane City Council prepares to reform local homelessness laws, a slate of business groups has asked for carve-outs to make it easier to remove homeless people when they linger near downtown businesses.

As immigration protests broke out downtown Wednesday night, Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown had to strike a balance, not wanting to appear to be assisting or condoning the actions of federal immigration agents while fearful President Donald Trump could use a weak police response to justify the deployment of the national guard, as he did recently in California.

Spokane’s Pride Parade and Festival will proceed Saturday along with several protests planned well in advance of an anti-ICE protest Wednesday that quickly escalated into a standoff with police and ended with a curfew order.

It’s been a slow week on South Perry, where Street Music Week, Spokane’s annual noontime busking celebration to support the 2nd Harvest Food Bank, expanded for the first time this year.

Stifling conditions are settling into the Pacific Northwest and Columbia River Basin to start the week, with triple-digit temperatures and readings flirting with records. The brief but intense heat wave will last through the middle of the week, replaced with near- or below-typical warmth.

Two months after the state Supreme Court overturned Spokane’s voter-approved anti-homeless camping law, the Spokane City Council is set to overhaul its suite of homelessness laws in a way supporters argue simplifies and streamlines the law, but that critics call either toothless or too sharp.

Street Music Week will be back for its 23rd year on Monday, filling streets with live music across Spokane and in Coeur d’Alene all week at the noon hour and celebrating everything busking while raising money for Second Harvest Food Bank.

Thousands will congregate in the Spokane Arena Saturday for the evangelical wealth building conference Life Surge, an all-day star-studded event that many describe as spiritually and fiscally fulfilling – but that also faces mounting accusations of leveraging faith and a megachurch atmosphere to lull attendees to buy $38,000 classes while even encouraging them to go into debt to do so.