Today's News

We understand that expansion of the Medicaid plan as part of the Affordable Care Act is seen as a political football, a topic to be kicked back and forth across a field of ideology with not a whole lot of regard for the players involved.

We also admit that we don’t have the sufficient grasp of either the process or economics to reinforce the decision last week by Gov. Steve Beshear to expand the rolls and open up the possibility that perhaps 300,000 more Kentuckians can have access to health insurance.

I was heartened to hear members of the Shelbyville City Council may make adult-provided or adult-present minors' use of illegal substances a city as well as a county and state penalty (“Adult hosts of teen parties may be fined,” May 20). This I hope you will pass.

However, I encourage you to change the minimum fine to $1000 for the first offense, with multiples of that for later offenses. Here is why.

Tell the truth: If you are a parent, you thought twice about sending your child to school on Tuesday morning.

You looked at the satellite images of the approaching weather system that had laid waste to miles and miles of homes in Oklahoma. You looked at the darkening skies in the west. You thought about families whose children were huddled in a school not built to withstand the right cross from nature’s most fearsome force.

A man charged with manslaughter in a 2011 crash received a new court date of July 1 during a disposition hearing Monday in Shelby County Circuit Court.

Lonnie Monroe, 45, of Shelbyville originally was arrested Sept. 24 by Kentucky State Police and charged with murder in a tractor-trailer accident from November 2011 in which a passenger in his truck was killed. On Oct. 4, that charge was amended to second-degree manslaughter, which is a Class C felony that carries a penalty of 5 to 10 years in prison.