Shawn Vestal

In the annals of overhyped disappointments, the canyon fizzle holds a unique place. It had been touted for weeks in the newspapers, on television, on radio, in magazines. Evel Knievel sold the event as a celebrity-filled extravaganza. He had hired a legitimate space scientist to design a steam-powered rocket, the X-2 Skycycle.

This year, four enormous sugar-water companies – the makers of Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, and Red Bull – have spent almost $5 million to prohibitively outlaw any future taxes on their products.

It was January 2016, and Spokane police Officer Chris McMurtrey had a man in his cruiser who he had arrested in a domestic violence case. The man taunted and threatened McMurtrey, who lost his cool and unleashed a profane tirade against the suspect. McMurtrey’s body camera captured the incident, including him stopping the car to more forcefully berate the suspect.

When folks arguing against gun-safety measures need a knee-jerk retort, they often deploy just a question: What about Chicago?

Hundreds of times every month, someone in Spokane County picks up the phone and calls police to report violence in their home. A husband beat a wife, or a wife beat a husband, or a parent hurt or neglected a child, or...

Two hundred and forty-two years ago, the men who founded the country did something supremely uncivil. It was insurrectionary. It was impolite. It was revolutionary.

In Week 1 of The Spokesman-Review’s Summer Stories series, award-winning author and newspaper columnist tells the the story of one man’s attempt to get out from under.

If America had some good friends right now – the kind who will tell you hard truths – those friends would be sitting the country down and saying it’s time to go cold turkey on football.

People living around Fairchild Air Force Base drank water contaminated with a chemical found in firefighting foams, probably for decades. In the year since the pollution was discovered in city wells, residents have gone from bottled water to home water filters, and city officials have negotiated a temporary deal to access Spokane aquifer water. The goal has been to find clean water, not clean the dirty water. It’s a good thing, too, given that a new federal report indicates the water around the base was dirtier than previously known.

A faulty assumption has continually been employed to justify the current anti-immigrant zealotry, and it goes like this: We are being flooded with illegal immigrants. They are coming in an unstoppable wave. They are threatening our very way of life.

WSU fiddles while football coach Mike Leach burns university’s credibility with hoax Obama post on Twitter.

On Father’s Day, between greeting cards and platitudes, let’s acknowledge the complicated fact that part of what makes parenting so fulfilling is that it’s difficult.

If you’re having trouble imagining just what kind of country we are becoming, vis-a-vis that whole “tired, poor and huddled masses” thing, think of SeaTac.

The celebration of the graduating Freeman High School Class of 2018 was made all the more poignant Saturday by the weight of what they’d been through together, and how they had responded with kindness and community and grit and love.

Spokane rents are rising. The vacancy rate is whisper thin. And the average renter is putting more of her income into housing than in years past.

The new crop of Nazis don’t come in uniform. They come in suits and ties, college boys with at least occasional good manners, wearing pocket squares and high-and-tights, spiffed up and buff, ignorant but deploying 25-cent words, putting out podcasts and YouTube videos complete with advertisements for home products made with essential oils.

From torn-up roads, to large infrastructure and park projects, to that one looming crane, Spokane is entering a construction season that marks the way the city is changing distinctly.

The third issue of the city’s newest newspaper was put to bed this week, full of stories from the staff of enterprising young – emphasis on

Take that for good or for ill, but among the many things you might say about Tim Eyman you have to give him that.

Try and picture the legal and political landscape of Spokane without the Center for Justice. On issue after issue, it is almost impossible to imagine the same results without the involvement of the center, its clients and the man who’s led it for the past six years, Rick Eichstaedt. Whether or not you share the center’s progressive vision, you can’t dispute that it’s been woven durably into the city’s civic life.

A modest proposal: If you own a deadly thing – a thing that, when it does what it is meant to do, can kill people – then you should be held at least partly responsible if somebody else gets their hands on your deadly thing and kills people. Say you own a tiger. You love your tiger. You are an excellent, law-abiding tiger owner who can ensure that your tiger does what it is supposed to do – play in its enclosure, eat the meat you toss in, jump through hoops – and not what it is not supposed to do – maul children.

We have plenty to be proud of in the city’s push towards a fairer criminal justice system. But two years after receiving an award from the MacArthur Foundation, a significant breach has opened up between leaders of Spokane’s communities of color and the nearly all-white board of community leaders overseeing the grant work.

Call it Mike and Mike’s Excellent Adventure: A Twitter Bromance.

They signed up for health insurance on the state exchange. But about 3,200 Washingtonians, all of whom were nearing age 65, also got something they didn’t ask for. Their contact information was stolen by a contractor and provided to a Spokane-area insurance company, which used it to target sales pitches for Medicare-related insurance products.