John Craig

The people of Springdale, Wash., are in danger, and there's no one to warn them. A warm east wind is drying out the forest around Springdale, but Smokey Bear can't spread the word that the fire danger is rising. Someone has kidnapped him.

COLVILLE – Nick Thresher, the frail kindergarten boy it took a village to save, is graduating from high school today. The boy who wasn't expected to live is now a young man who charges down Colville Mountain on a heavy-duty mountain bike and scales rock walls with his girlfriend. He works part-time as a bicycle mechanic, and plans to begin college this fall.

Deirdre Haran Abeid, first lady of Irish dance in the Inland Northwest, died Saturday at her home near Kettle Falls, Wash. She was 48. Abeid started one of the most influential dance schools in the Inland Northwest in 1992 at her Rice-area home – in her husband, Simon's, shop building.

CHEWELAH, Wash. – Sept. 11, 2001, was a beautiful day. From the 81st floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, you could see the Statue of Liberty, according to a man who was there. Sujo John told Jenkins High School students in Chewelah on Tuesday that he relished the view because he had emigrated seven months earlier from Calcutta, India, with $50 in his pocket. With a master's degree in business administration and good English, he got a marketing job with a broadband communications company called Network Plus.

WELLPINIT, Wash. _ Students at the Wellpinit School prepared all week for something that's never happened before on the Spokane Indian Reservation: a concert by the Spokane Symphony. Kaylee Robinson and Mary Spencer were ready. The two third-graders, best friends since day care, scoured the school parking lot for musicians arriving for the Friday afternoon performance.

SPRINGDALE, Wash. — Vernon Yoder considers the valley between Springdale and Hunters a "paradise," except for one thing. There aren't enough Amish people. Yoder is the patriarch of four Amish families who will conduct a giant farm auction Saturday and return to their native Wisconsin. Two other families who came five years ago to establish a settlement nine miles west of Springdale will stay awhile at least, in hopes that others of their faith will join them.

DAVENPORT, Wash. – High school students can avoid traffic fines and increases in their insurance rates, but not the third degree, if they throw themselves on the mercy of an unusual court. But don't try to pull the wool over the judge's eyes in Lincoln County Student Traffic Court, which court officials believe is the only one of its kind in Eastern Washington. If the judge doesn't spot a phony excuse, the clerk or the jurors probably will.

A Spokane woman who turned 21 earlier this month was killed Friday morning in a head-on collision on U.S. Highway 195 at Rosalia. Stephanie Calvert's compact Ford Focus was crushed when it collided at 7:25 a.m. with a Chevrolet Tahoe sport utility vehicle driven by Shelley R. Solberg, 52, of Colbert.

A former Spokane and Newport, Wash., resident was killed by a roadside bomb Wednesday in Iraq, where he was serving with his Spokane-based National Guard unit. Sgt. Jeff Shaver, 27, a medic in the 161st Infantry Battalion, was working at a clinic in Baghdad when he volunteered for the mission that cost him his life, according to informal reports circulating among family and friends.