Kevin Graman

Two and a half years ago, Bridget Bradick and her children stepped off a train in Spokane as refugees from domestic violence and stumbled into poverty and homelessness. She left Ohio to start anew with four children in a town she chose at random from a list of cities she knew nothing about except that they were far from her former husband.

Saying the state government now faces “one of its hardest moments since the Great Depression,” the head of the Washington Department of Social and Health Services brought bad news Wednesday night to the region’s most vulnerable citizens and those who serve them. Despite making more than $2.2 billion in cuts to social services in the past two years, Susan Dreyfus told an emotional crowd of about 400 people overflowing the DSHS office in Spokane Valley, “Additional reductions are inevitable.”

Military families have a lot of the same issues as anybody else – employment, education, health care – but their problems are compounded by the massive government bureaucracy that is the Department of Defense. On Monday, a group of about 100 service members and dependents gathered at Fairchild Air Force Base to discuss how hard it is to raise a family in the military with a panel of officials who are in a position to do something about it.

Attorneys for Spokane police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick have filed a counterclaim of malicious prosecution against a detective who is suing the chief and the city over how he was treated by the department during a messy divorce more than four years ago. Detective Jay Mehring’s wrongful termination and defamation lawsuit goes to trial Monday after Superior Court Judge Kathleen O’Connor denied the defendants’ motion for a stay over the new complaint.

After spending the past 25 years cutting through military bureaucracy and secrecy, Amy Berger has found hope that one day she will know what happened to her cousin, a crewman on a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane shot down in the Korean War on July 4, 1952. “It is possible that (Airman 1st Class) Clifford H. Mast bailed out, and was subsequently captured by the enemy,” a recently declassified intelligence document revealed.

Occupy Spokane, the 2-day-old action in solidarity with the 2-week-old Occupy Wall Street protest against economic injustice, was visited Friday morning by police enforcing a city ordinance. About a dozen protesters who have occupied the grassy median at the intersection of Riverside Avenue and Monroe Street in downtown Spokane were told to remove tents and other “permanent” elements of the protest that violate the city’s transient shelter ordinance, said Capt. Frank Scalise, patrol division commander of the Spokane Police Department.

Occupy Spokane, the two-day-old action in solidarity with the two-week-old Occupy Wall Street protest against economic injustice, was visited this morning by police enforcing a city ordinance.

Rita Flynn, a lifelong Roman Catholic who was a key witness in the child sex abuse lawsuit that resulted in the bankruptcy of the Diocese of Spokane, died Tuesday after a stroke at age 85. Flynn, who raised 11 children in north Spokane’s Assumption Parish, was among the first to raise suspicions about Patrick O’Donnell, a pedophile and now defrocked priest.

A few days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, a mostly non-Muslim crowd showed up at the Spokane Islamic Center in north Spokane for afternoon prayers. “We had people come in – Christian, Jews, Native Americans – to show support,” said Mamdouh El-Aarag, a board member of the center, which has since moved to the Spokane Valley.

Jerre Lewis’ family lives in a comfortable mobile home in Coeur d’Alene now, but things didn’t always look so bright. “We didn’t have anything and nowhere to go,” the 22-year-old recent mother said.

An advertisement appearing on Spokane public buses was bought by a national atheist coalition and coincides with the appearance of an atheist booth at the Spokane County Interstate Fair. The message, “Are you good without God? Millions are,” is running this month on 11 Spokane Transit Authority buses.