John Webster

This week, Kim Crompton’s career comes to an end. He’s retiring as editor of the Journal of Business.

Then, as now, smoke hung in the pines overlooking the young pioneer town beside the Spokane Falls. Area forests were ablaze. People and horses trudged along the dusty streets in the heat of an August afternoon. Little did they imagine that the buildings they passed within hours would catch fire and collapse into 32 blocks of ruin. Friday, 128 years later, Spokane history lovers plan to re-enact the day their city burned to the ground.

For more than a century, Avista and Washington Water Power Co. contributed leadership and charitable support to the Spokane area’s economic development and civic betterment initiatives.

Once upon a time there was a gritty little railroad town. Next to the switching yards where locomotives chuffed and cinders flew, its downtown had a nice department store where everybody shopped, and a famous hotel where everybody stayed. But in the 1960s a freeway bypassed the gritty little town, and out beyond its outskirts of bars and used-car lots some shiny suburban shopping malls appeared. We’re new, they said to the gritty little town, and you’re old. The future is here and it will pass you by. We will change, said the leaders of the gritty little town, rolling up their sleeves.

The choir of Whitworth University staged a flash mob Sunday in Spain’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Last week a group called Friends of the Davenport disbanded. Thirty-one years have come and gone since the group was created. Years marked by cutthroat business competition, some of most divisive political battles the city of Spokane has ever experienced, and, in the end, a triumph – a victory not just for a much-loved building, but also for the spirit of a community, a city of people who each considered the Davenport Hotel to be theirs. More on the Davenport Hotel, including historic and new photos, can be found in The Spokesman-Review’s

As Republicans tried to repeal coverage for mental health and substance abuse, a Princeton research paper exposed a worsening death rate from suicide and drugs among white, poorly educated Americans.

The Spokane River’s falls drew Native tribes for millennia. And then came the settlers, who gradually came to treasure the natural beauty at the heart of Spokane.

Little noticed in the Republican plan to repeal Obamacare is a tax cut that would benefit the wealthy and undercut Medicare, the federal program that insures 55 million older Americans and disabled people.

Trade experts warn that Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric foreshadows a trade war with China and a scrapping of hard-won tariff reductions. Washington state farmers, who would be among the casualties in such a war, hope the president-elect will listen to farmers’ concerns and help shield Washington’s trade-dependent economy.

The same nativism that infused Donald Trump’s campaign has a long and sometimes violent history – in Europe, as well as the United States.

Upending the political establishment and shocking pollsters, an avalanche of disillusioned voters handed the White House to Donald J. Trump and control of both the House and Senate to Republicans.

Beginning Nov. 1, Comcast will impose a new fee on heavy users of its cable internet service.

In the end, when voters have their say, the U.S. Constitution kicks the pollsters to the curb. The bookies who set the odds, the statisticians who crunch their numbers, the candidates who fill the air with braggadocio and promises, the phone bank robocallers who drive Americans nuts with dinnertime interruptions – all of them, come election day, have no choice but to fall silent and wait. It’s democracy’s turn. The people are about to speak.

Fly over Eastern Washington’s 5th Congressional District and you might need a geologist’s eye to sense the fire and ice that marked this land of picturesque small towns and gently rolling fields. Jutting out from those gentle hills, towers of jagged basalt bear witness to eruptions past. Deep, cliff-shaded coulees mark the gouging path of ancient ice-age floods.

The Spokesman-Review is inviting residents of Eastern Washington’s 5th Congressional District to submit short essays about the goals and concerns that will shape the way they vote this year. We’ll publish as many as we can.

The Spokesman-Review is inviting residents of Eastern Washington’s 5th Congressional District to submit short essays about the goals and concerns that will shape the way they vote this year. We’ll publish as many as we can.

The 1915 collapse of Spokane’s Division Street bridge convinced the young city it had to take better care of its bridges, and build them with concrete instead of steel.

For the second year in a row, there’s a deficit exceeding $13 million in the Washington State University Athletic Department.