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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883
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Shawn Vestal

Shawn Vestal

Current Position: columnist

Shawn Vestal joined The Spokesman-Review in 1999. He currently is a columnist for the City Desk.

Email
shawnv@spokesman.com
Phone
(509) 459-5431

All Stories

News >  Spokane

Suspect sought after body found in river

A 45-year-old Spokane man missing for more than a week was found dead in the Spokane River on Saturday afternoon, and police were searching the Northwest for one of two suspects in the possible killing. Donald Lynn Smiley-Lyle, 17, is being sought on a warrant for first-degree murder in the case, said Cpl. Tom Lee of the Spokane Police Department. Another suspect, Robert Allen Entel Jr., 18, was arrested in Salem, after a day of feverish developments around the region.
News >  Spokane

Washington law fights cost of textbooks

Sometimes a textbook is not just a textbook. In more and more cases, it comes shrink-wrapped with a CD, computer program or supplemental text – extras that critics say drive up the price but frequently go unused.
News >  Spokane

Seminar focuses on tribal issues

Carrie Dann's battle with the United States has played out on Nevada rangeland and in the chambers of the Supreme Court. It's reached from tribal councils to Congress. But her efforts to claim property rights for ancestral lands of the Western Shoshone tribe have run into roadblock after roadblock. The federal government has pointed to years of court rulings and a multimillion-dollar trust payment as evidence that the land in question is government property.
News >  Spokane

Collegians spring into action

Scores of regional college students are headed south for spring break, but their antics probably won't wind up on any sensational videos. Girls Gone Kind? Boys Gone Charitable?
News >  Spokane

Students spring to action

Scores of regional college students are headed south for spring break, but their antics probably won't wind up on any sensational videos. Girls Gone Kind? Boys Gone Charitable?
News >  Business

Selling an image

Want to create an effective advertisement? Your best bet might be to ignore the product completely. Pick some pleasant music or a sexy spokesmodel. Make it funny. Remind people of the good old days.
News >  Spokane

WSU students vote today on fees for stadium work

Looking to renovate its football stadium, Washington State University is turning to an increasingly common source of financing. A letter writer in the student paper called it the "Bank of Associated Cougar Students."
News >  Spokane

Project gets lift from contest

An award-winning business plan put together by a team of Washington State University students got its start in a coloring book. In crayon.
News >  Spokane

Invasive species control urged

Nine years after it moved into Lake Michigan, the quagga mussel has covered the bottom to depths of more than 300 feet. In a little more than a century, cheatgrass went from a North American newcomer to the dominant species on a lot of Western grassland.
News >  Spokane

WSU branches blossom

For more than a century, when people have thought of Washington State, they've thought of Pullman. But over the last 15 years, WSU has been planting its flag all over the state – in Spokane, in the Tri-Cities, in Vancouver. Across the state line, the University of Idaho has done the same thing, offering courses in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho Falls, Boise and Twin Falls.
News >  Spokane

Energy study sees gold mine in cow pies

Washington could supply half its appetite for residential electricity with things found in the trash and the barnyard, according to a new report. It just needs to figure out how to use the 41,039 dry tons of apples that don't make it to market each year. Or the 7,932 tons of poultry feathers. Or the 699,436 tons that drop from hind ends of cows.
News >  Spokane

Teacher says she lost job for speaking out

Teresa Knudsen taught English at Spokane Community College for 17 years. She had an office. She was listed in the course catalog. She frequently taught three classes a quarter. But as a member of the adjunct faculty, Knudsen was paid less, got fewer raises and had no guarantee that she'd have a job when the next quarter rolled around.
News >  Spokane

Some students cold to ice rink

A new recreation center planned for the heart of Eastern Washington University's campus in Cheney has stumbled into student opposition over rising costs and the prominence of an ice rink. As construction costs go up, the project has scaled back its basketball courts and running track – while keeping the ice rink and multiuse surface at the center of the project.
News >  Spokane

Swank GU scanning system is truly digital

When Scott McCoy pays for his pancakes at Arny's these days, he swipes a fingertip, not a card. McCoy and about 400 other Gonzaga University students are among the first in the country to use a new program that allows access to funds through "biometric finger scans." Students can use the scans to pay for meals on campus, and other businesses in the Gonzaga area have added or are adding the program for services, including haircuts and lattes.
News >  Spokane

GU asks fans to quell ‘inappropriate’ chants

On the eve of the Gonzaga basketball team's nationally televised game against Stanford, students and faculty members are urging fans not to repeat chants of "Brokeback Mountain" against opposing players. In Monday's GU game against St. Mary's, some students chanted the title of the movie at an opposing player, apparently a culturally current suggestion the player was gay. The movie, considered a top contender for a best picture Oscar, tells the story of two Wyoming sheepherders who fall in love.
News >  Spokane

Only the best for family’s best friend

PULLMAN – The patient wore a bandanna that read, "I'm a Cancer Survivor." He was back for a checkup after a month of radiation treatments, and the doctor thought he was ready for the next step.
News >  Spokane

Migrant to mainstream

PULLMAN – Jose Gonzalez dropped out of school in 11th grade so he could work. As he moved from washing cars in a lot to picking cherries to driving a tractor, he heard a repeated refrain from co-workers: Go back to school.
News >  Spokane

Rape report uncovers perception gap

PULLMAN – Ashley Miller used her cell phone's calculator to do the math. She was trying to turn percentages into people as part of a discussion at Washington State University about a survey in which 11 percent of WSU women said they'd been raped. She was wondering how many women that would be – more than 900.
News >  Spokane

Gulf Coast trip an eye-opener

The destruction still hung from the trees – clothing, plastic sheets, Mardi Gras beads twisted through the limbs. It filled the gutters and spread across the landscape. When 18 Whitworth College students went south to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, they were shocked at how far from recovery many of the impoverished victims were months after the storm.
News >  Spokane

Money & mortarboards

A new study suggests that the performance of colleges and universities doesn't have that much to do with how much money they get. And it uses Washington's system of community colleges to make its point.
News >  Spokane

Big Easy, hard choices

When colleges and universities in the hurricane-blasted New Orleans area opened their doors again this week, about 40 students who'd come to the Inland Northwest after the storms faced another big decision. Arthur Rowe went back to Tulane.
News >  Idaho

State extends UI repayment deadline

The University of Idaho will have to wait five years for the repayment of $7 million lost in a questionable series of transactions that financed the school's expansion into Boise. The state's Board of Education voted to extend the deadline for the repayment of the money from the UI's fund-raising foundation until 2010. It also agreed that UI would be repaid only after the foundation finished repaying the millions it borrowed from trust funds.
News >  Spokane

‘Others’ a category alone on college applications

When Rae-Lynn Conger, a junior at Eastern Washington University, is asked to identify her race on forms or applications, she checks an increasingly popular box: Other. It's not that Conger doesn't know which box is correct. She just objects to the premise that her race – she's white – is considered at all.
News >  Spokane

Mice and man

Somewhere right now, a mouse is being born with the express purpose of getting cancer, so someday, maybe, a human won't have to. Somewhere else, a mouse is running in a wheel or splashing through a water maze. A mouse is being made anxious or sleepless or ill. A mouse is being born whose genes have been manipulated to give it diabetes or eliminate its immune system, to make it super-strong or addicted to nicotine.