John Stucke

Earl Spangle, who has spent all of his 79 years in Spokane, sat atop a rock wall and enjoyed every cold lick of his sherbet cone Thursday. “Just wonderful,” he said. “These folks gave us something nice today.”

A legal fight over an $8 million pollution cleanup at the Kendall Yards housing development near downtown Spokane has been settled. The lawsuit didn’t threaten current homebuilding on the 77-acre site along the north bank of the Spokane River. Rather, it was a dispute involving a company run by Marshall Chesrown that paid for some of the cleanup work several years ago, the Union Pacific Railroad, which used the site for decades as a refueling depot, and the bankruptcy trust of Metropolitan Mortgage and Securities Co., the company that bought the railroad yard 21 years ago from UP with visions of an urban development.

Five kitchen workers at Camp Lutherhaven have been sickened by E. coli, Idaho Panhandle Health officials confirmed Friday morning. Three more staffers are ill, but lab tests haven’t linked those illnesses to the bacterial infection.

Five kitchen workers at Camp Lutherhaven have been sickened by E. coli, Idaho Panhandle Health officials confirmed this morning.

A small food company in the northernmost reaches of Idaho is reeling in the wake of a national salmonella outbreak that federal and state health investigators suspect may have come from contaminated alfalfa sprouts. About 20 people, including nine in Eastern Washington, have been sickened by salmonella. Other cases have been reported in Idaho, Montana and North Dakota.

A small food company in the northernmost reaches of Idaho is reeling in the wake of a salmonella outbreak that federal and state health investigators suspect may have come from contaminated alfalfa sprouts.

Five people in the Moses Lake area have been sickened, though not seriously, by what health officials suspect is a rare livestock-related bacterial infection called Q fever. The infections have sparked a multiagency investigation by federal, state and local health and agricultural officials, who have now traced infected goats purchased from or bred at the quarantined farms in Grant County to nine other Washington counties, including Spokane County.

Group Health Cooperative is closing its Coeur d’Alene Medical Center after failing to attract adequate numbers of patients. In a letter to patients, the Seattle-based organization said that “organization efforts to grow our enrollment have not been successful, and we have determined that the Coeur d’Alene Medical Center is not on a sustainable path.”

Group Health Cooperative is closing its Coeur d’Alene Medical Center after failing to sustain adequate numbers of patients.

In the eyes of the U.S. Census Bureau, Spokane and Coeur d’Alene have been merged into a single metropolitan area with a population of 609,000 people. The combined statistical area “Spokane-Coeur d’Alene” ranks as the 87th most-populous metropolitan area in the United States, just behind Boise.

The Spokane metropolitan area is about to become a lot bigger. Spokane and adjacent Coeur d’Alene will be combined into a single metropolitan area as a result of the 2010 Census. The Census Bureau said it will be called Spokane-Coeur d’Alene.

Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center’s plan to add more patient beds has been rejected, again. The setback for the region’s largest hospital is the latest development in its failed expansion quest. Sacred Heart wanted to add 152 beds – a proposal that included adding floors to a hospital wing and enlarging its emergency room.

Contentious contract negotiations that came down to a final take-it-or-leave-it offer from Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center to its emergency room doctors has roiled long-standing professional ties and caused two physicians to resign. One departing physician, Dr. Jovan Ojdrovic, blames a “new corporate culture that has seeped into our hospital.”