The Star - News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area

A person can be defined by the little things he remembers and his favorite places. My parents liked to take drives, and on one of them they would stop at a roadside springs to get a drink of ice cold water. They had a collapsible tin cup that was...

The Washington State Legislature once again is attempting to make government records more obscure, this time by trying to shield public employee birthdates from disclosure with the introduction of HB 1888. Rep. Zack Hudgins, of the 11th Legislative...

By proclamation of the governor, January is School Board Recognition Month. It’s a great time to recognize our elected community members who selflessly give their time and energy in support of high-quality public schooling for our youth. School...

Here’s a basic truth about people who make decisions about public policy: they rarely have all the facts they want. Yet policy has to get made anyway. No one is confronted more often with this conundrum than the President of the United States,...

In 1869, the Daily Cleveland Herald quoted lawyer John Godfrey Saxe as saying, “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” That saying, or variants of it, have been repeated so often that it has...

My earliest and most vivid memories take me back to when I was 6 years old. That was the year I started the first grade, and also when I started to get store-bought haircuts. My father, who could do most anything, cut my hair until he took constructi...

The annual Trees of Sharing project began Nov. 1 and culminated with the delivery of wrapped Christmas gifts to 115 children in 48 families Saturday, Dec. 14. Thank you to every person who enthusiastically supported this project by purchasing gifts...

You don’t know how important your freedoms are until you start to lose them. That’s what is behind the protests going on in Hong Kong. In April the government in Mainland China passed an extradition bill that would allow officials to take...

Don Brunell, who wrote a column on this page, doesn’t know the local Portch family, but he might as well have used them as an example in his column on local business owners who do good for their communities. Like his parents before him, Loepp...

It was so long ago that carbon paper was at the center of the controversy around my first big scoop. As a junior in a high school journalism class, I’d turned in a story about a very popular teacher who would be resigning at the end of the year, a...

In 1964, the United States and Canada ratified the Columbia River Treaty to increase coordination between our countries on power generation and flood control issues, along with critical support of irrigation, navigation, and ecosystem habitat needs....

Bridges shouldn’t have to sink to be replaced. However, at times that’s what it takes. Too often, new projects succumb to years of fighting among interest groups and endless political bickering. In 2013, opposition killed the Columbia Crossings...

Looking back is much easier than looking forward, but it’s not like no one is trying. Two opinion pieces on this page point to turning points in two different areas of society that will converge at some point to change the future, hopefully for the...

Science, technology, engineering, and math – more commonly known as STEM – have become some of the most highly demanded careers in our nation’s economy. Schools across the country and in Central Washington have emphasized education programs to... Full story