James Hagengruber

The name and design elements of a future dog park in Riverfront Park were announced Saturday at the Humane Society’s Parade of Paws fundraiser in the park.

Flooding continued to rise in some waterways in the region Tuesday, washing out a portion of roadway near Mount Spokane State Park and overflowing parts of the Palouse River.

Halfway through the month of June, Spokane already has had nearly twice as much rain as the average for the whole month.

BAGHDAD – On a bright Sunday morning in March, Ambassador Ryan Crocker stepped out of a meeting with top embassy staff, adjusted his silk tie and greeted two visitors from his hometown under the rotunda of Saddam Hussein's former palace. Diplomats of his caliber – 37 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, ambassador postings to the world's toughest countries and now America's leading political problem-solver in Iraq – are typically known as masters of restraint and decorum. But Crocker's grin can only be described as dumbfounded.

A few decades back, Bruce Shadduck could climb the foothills of Canfield Mountain and stare out across a scattering of small farms, patches of forest and the huge green carpet of the Rathdrum Prairie. On Saturday, the retired teacher climbed the same slope and saw acres and acres of beige houses, winding ribbons of fresh asphalt and emerald green patches of fertilized lawn. But the land where he stood remained largely the same as when it was owned by his grandfather.

BAYVIEW, Idaho – Just in the nick of time, Lake Pend Oreille's kokanee salmon should again have a clean bed of gravel for fall egg-laying. The gravel beds and tens of thousands of fertilized eggs were smothered by silt in April as a result of an expansion project at the Harborview Marina in Bayview. The work was illegal, officials say, and likely wiped out a large portion of this year's class of native kokanee on Lake Pend Oreille.