Shawn Vestal

As an organization that uses a lot of energy and emits pollution, the city is squarely within its purview to identify and adopt ways of saving gas, using less energy and reducing carbon emissions.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will hold actual hearings on health care next month, focused on trying to find ways to stabilize insurance markets and bring down costs.

The Pavilion controversy in Spokane’s Riverfront Park has the mayor and council president suggesting that independent Park Board be brought under City Council control.

Here’s a thought experiment: Instead of trying to give everyone the same tax deal as Boeing, why not give Boeing the same deal as everyone else?

At the heart of the lawsuit against the former owners of two Spokane hospitals is a reminder of the freaky, shady way hospitals set prices. They seem to just … make them up. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say they set them very, very high as a kind of opening bid in a negotiation. The way the pricing scheme works says a lot about the unholy and opaque alliance between health care providers and insurers, one that drives up costs with an elaborate game of hide-the-ball-from-the-patient.

A new analysis published by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows the fallacy of promoting laxer gun laws.

Welcome to The River, the 2017 edition of The Spokesman-Review’s Summer Stories series. Beginning this week, we will feature 10 new works of short fiction by Spokane-area writers in the Sunday Today section. First up is Shawn Vestal. Vestal, in addition to being a columnist for The Spokeman-Review, is the author of the award-winning story collection, “Godforsaken Idaho,” and the novel “Daredevils.”

Drug court is a proven alternative to jailing offenders, however Spokane County Prosecutor Larry Haskell is reluctant to use the program for those with lengthy criminal records.

Mike Kreidler calls it “dumbing down” health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office uses a different metric to measure the worsening of health insurance now proposed in Congress: sinking actuarial value.

In recent years, there’s been a lot of deservedly happy talk about what’s been added downtown. From Huntington Park to the Grand Hotel, from West Main to East Sprague, Spokane’s core has been in a period of growth and revitalization, with new construction, businesses and infrastructure improvements everywhere.

A columnist’s dip into coaching shows him that fun, rather than fundamentals, is what underpins Hoopfest.

When Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell urged their bosses in the CIA to halt the waterboarding of a terrorism suspect in 2002, they were pressured to keep going, according depositions in a federal lawsuit. “They kept telling me every day a nuclear bomb was going to be exploded in the United States, and that because I told them to stop I had lost my nerve, and it was going to be my fault if I didn’t continue,” said Jessen, one of two former Fairchild Air Force Base psychologists who helped develop and implement the post-9/11 torture program from their offices in downtown Spokane.

Every month, more than 16,000 households in Spokane County receive federal help buying food.

Last week, as millions of Americans tuned in to hear former FBI chief Jim Comey testify, Idaho Sen. Jim Risch took the lead in the weakest defense of presidential misbehavior since Bill Clinton parsed what the “meaning of

In the Google Maps image, you see him clearly: Sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk at the intersection of Division and Sharp, huddled behind a cardboard sign asking for help. Steven J. Hackett was a fixture at that corner, so it’s only fitting he’s a part of the map. But he won’t be at his regular post any longer; police found him dead in an alley behind a nearby liquor store Monday. It was the kind of heartbreaking end his father had feared for Steven, after years of addiction and living on the streets.

County health officials agree: We have our share of cancer here – and more than our share of breast, lung and skin cancer – but there’s reason to be wary of any single statistic that puts us at the top of a national list.

The election is 18 months away, but Ben Stuckart is finding fodder for optimism in early polling on his effort to unseat Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

Just curious: What kinds of defamation and libel laws will we have here once we’ve created the new God-honoring, gun-loving, Eastern Washington state of Liberty?

Ho hum. The Legislature flunks again.

Officially, Spokane’s homeless numbers went up significantly this year. Rob McCann thinks that’s great news.

Is there any kind of vigilante shooting-in-the-back that a Spokane jury won’t bless with a not-guilty verdict?

In big, broad ways, there is reason to feel proud of Spokane on this front: We have evolved from the city that sued and blamed the family of Otto Zehm to one that is engaged in forward-thinking reform efforts at every stage of the justice system.

Rep. Raul Labrador and the others who are trying to do things that will worsen health care for vulnerable people will say anything to pretend they are not, Shawn Vestal writes.

You could look at it as a three-quarter-million-dollar mistake – that’s how much state taxpayers will likely fork over to pay for the wrongful convictions of three Spokane men in a series of 2008 “drug-rip” robberies. Or you could look at it as a 3,741-day mistake – that’s how long Paul Statler, Tyler Gassman and Robert Larson collectively spent in prison for crimes for which a judge ruled this month they are “actually innocent.”