Members of at least 221 Rohingya Muslim families were interviewed Wednesday and Tuesday ahead of the repatriation that was scheduled to start Thursday. Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said her government will not force the refugees to return and the repatriation will only happen if they are willing.

The trend, fueled by growing cellphone ownership in North Korea and the country’s still buoyant border trade with China, has provoked a new clampdown by Pyongyang in the past year, according to reports on Daily NK, a defector-led news service with extensive links in the North. That followed Kim Jong Un’s 2018 vow to “crush bourgeois reactionary culture.”

Nurses in the Providence hospital system are preparing for strikes after ten months of contract negotiations have produced little progress.

One person is in the hospital after a shooting near the intersection of West Chelan Avenue and North Post Street Wednesday afternoon.

The mandatory tag requires Flynn and the building’s other pet owners to have their animals’ DNA collected and registered with the Tennessee-based company PooPrints. Then, if there is any unattended pet poop left on the building’s grounds, it can be tested and traced back through the registry to the proper resident, who then must pay fines starting at $350 for failing to pick up the poop.

The undertaking aims to bring the libraries’ design up to the demands of 21st century library patrons, who are increasingly utilizing the system for far more than just checking out books.

INPE, as the institute is known, recorded an 84% increase in fires in Brazil between 2018 and 2019, with well over half taking place in the Amazon rainforest. It was the highest level since records began 7 years ago. Speaking to reporters in Brasilia on Wednesday, the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said that NGOs could be behind the fires, in an attempt to discredit him and to draw attention to the cuts in their funding. He offered no evidence for his claim.

The Congressional Budget Office says the federal budget deficit is expected to balloon to more than $1 trillion in the next fiscal year.

James Lowe will perform with the symphony on Saturday, Sept. 7 at 4 p.m., part of a full weekend of activities scheduled to celebrate the reopening of the signature attraction in the downtown park.

Police arrested a man accused of filming women in a changing stall at Hut 8 clothing store in north Spokane on Tuesday.

A man suspected of shooting at a building in a Spokane Valley business park last Friday before sheriff’s deputies shot and killed him has been identified as Colin Osborn.

Spokane County Prosecutor Larry Haskell on Wednesday cleared a Spokane Police Officer who shot and killed a Spokane man last January, but the man’s family vowed to sue, claiming the investigation was flawed.

Firefighters have mostly contained the Williams Flats Fire, which had burned 44,515 acres on the Colville Indian Reservation as of Wednesday, making it the largest wildfire in the state this year.

Spokane’s passenger air industry debuted when Lt. Fred Kelso began carrying passengers for $10 a flight, the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported.

The division will present potential options to close that gap to the Spokane Park Board in the fall. Officials say the increase in costs is driven primarily by salary and wage increases, much of it a consequence of a rising minimum wage for seasonal workers next year, which is required by state law.

After a flurry of recent actions, the Trump administration is winning praise from conservative religious leaders for fulfilling many of their goals.

Spokane’s police chief and mayor have declared state Rep. Matt Shea unfit for office after leaked emails revealed the Spokane Valley lawmaker sought to conduct surveillance on local progressive leaders as part of his quest to establish a 51st state governed exclusively by Christians.