Kip Hill

A three-day wait for a passport has turned into a weekslong nightmare for a Liberty Lake mother, her two sons and newly adopted Ukrainian daughter. Lorraine Colwell, 26, arrived overseas May 27 with her brother-in-law, Jackson, 18, and two sons Benjamin, 3, and Isaac, who’s almost 2. She and her husband, Zach, had raised money online to adopt orphaned Nika, an 8-year-old girl with a toothy grin and long, brown bangs. Zach Colwell’s Air Force service kept him at Goodfellow Air Base in central Texas. The family picked up Nika at her orphanage, Lorraine received the OK from the courts in mid-June and Nika’s passport was set to be processed by the time the family arrived back in Kiev by train.

A Spokane mom is looking for answers after her 5-year-old son was injured by a popular Halloween toy that has been recalled multiple times. Heidi Mitchell’s son Mike was playing with a glow-in-the-dark toy eyeball Saturday evening when it cracked on a linoleum floor. When Mike held the toy up to his face, some of the fluid inside leaked into his eye.

A farm bill approved last week in the U.S. House of Representatives divorcing agriculture subsidies from food aid to the poor was designed to speed up the legislative process, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers said Thursday. The House’s plan, passed with strictly Republican support July 11, contained no outlays for food stamps, redubbed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2008. But McMorris Rodgers doesn’t think the bill will emerge from a conference with the Senate unless funds for food programs are reinstated.

Roger Fleishour, 66, walked into the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3067 on Monday afternoon, a gift tucked under his left arm. Though he’d just returned from a trip to Washington, D.C., meant to honor his tour of duty in Vietnam, Fleishour had another man’s service in mind. Diagnosed with cancer in January and given six months to live, he’s not sure how much time he has to honor others.

The first crews to arrive at two South Hill house fires Monday were from a fire station that lost its first-response firefighting capability this year due to budget cuts. Fire officials say it’s hard to say how much difference having a full engine crew on scene would have made.

At age 89, first-time Hoopfest participant Jim Metzger chose to slip a pair of dress khakis over the athletic shorts donated by his teammates and grandchildren. “Old fogeys look bad enough just showing up,” he joked as he watched his family, decked in matching lime-green T-shirts bearing the team name Gesundheit, play their first game of the tournament Saturday morning.

The workshop where Washington State University engineering students and alumni are trying to make aircraft history looks more like a clubhouse than a laboratory. Coffee cans line the shelves above a computer running a flight simulator. Discarded pizza boxes are all that remain of impromptu design sessions. In a loft a ladder’s climb above the shop’s floor, a cot is free for an overnight stay.

The Fourth of July is right around the corner, but visions of tinsel, colorful lights and ornaments are dancing in the heads of Colville National Forest staff and Ted Bechtol. Bechtol, superintendent of grounds at the U.S. Capitol, hiked through the Colville pines this week with a handful of Forest Service volunteers to select a tree to be displayed in Washington, D.C., this Christmas. The Capitol Christmas Tree, annually occupying the West Lawn of the Capitol Building within yards of where presidents take the oath of office, is part of a tradition dating back to the 1960s. Picking, decorating and transporting the perfect candidate more than 2,500 miles is a process that involves months of work and thousands of people.

The family of a Spokane Valley pastor shot to death after a confrontation with a deputy sheriff in 2010 will receive $2 million.

Forty-one years ago this week, a story in the New York Times caught the eye of Drake University student J. Paul Blake: A break-in had occurred at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., and investigators and journalists alike suspected the burglars had ties to the Richard Nixon administration. His curiosity piqued, Blake repeated a ritual begun in his teenage years: He clipped the story from the paper and folded it into a brown envelope.

Shane Jenkins paddled to the middle of a bay on Long Lake at Nine Mile Falls. His broad shoulders rose from the surface, then his life-jacketed torso and finally the dual jets fastened to his feet, shooting water with the power of more than 150 horses and propelling Jenkins almost 30 feet in the air. This is Jenkins’ second week with the flyboard, a relatively new entry into the world of water sports. Jenkins and his friend, Mike Grytdal, both rural Spokane County firefighters, are offering lessons in their free time after contracting with AV Watersports, based in Bellevue, to offer the attraction in Eastern Washington. For $90, a waiver signature and some brief safety training, thrill-seekers can experience 30 minutes of “flight time” themselves. The equipment has already caused awe on the lake waters among boaters and Jenkins’ neighbors, who are unaccustomed to swimmers rising from the waves like dolphins.

YAKIMA – A rifle squad of Washington Army National Guardsmen sprints to take cover along a plywood wall. Spc. Chaz Grady, of Spokane, provides cover with his M4 carbine, looking for a chance to flank enemy combatants in a narrow alley cutting through a small town. The arid, rolling hills outside Yakima stand in for enemy territory. In this exercise, a friendly meeting with the town elder has gone south and the 10-man team is sweeping the area for hostiles.