Charlie Strong will remain the football coach for the University of Louisville, he said Thursday morning in a news conference.

The University of Tennessee offered him the Volunteers' head coaching position on Tuesday, he said.

In confirming that he'd return for a fourth season, Strong spoke highly of Louisville athletics director Tom Jurich -- noting that Jurich gave him his first head coaching position after 27 years as an assistant. 

This week on our audio diary series "The Big Break," Actors Theatre of Louisville apprentice Samantha Beach finishes her run of "A Christmas Story" with a fun souvenir—a recording of herself playing the teacher during a student matinee. Over at the Louisville Ballet, Claire Horrocks explains why the snowflake and the flower are the toughest roles she tackles in "The Nutcracker" and Brad Raymond spends his break from the Kentucky Opera learning music for the Kentucky Opera. (No rest for the talented.)

Visibly frail and in a wheelchair, Bob Dole reappeared on the U.S. Senate floor Tuesday to support ratification of a treaty advocates say will help disabled people worldwide. Dole served in the Senate from 1969 to 1996, many of those years as the Republican leader. He'd been the Republican's 1996 presidential nominee, the Republicans 1976 vice-presidential nominee and the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The Kentucky Department of Education is changing the way it assesses the state’s lowest performing schools and Commissioner Terry Holliday says some may be subject to more state oversight soon.

The school board’s Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Committee heard testimony Wednesday from KDE officials who are rewriting current regulations that manage the way the state assesses its 41 priority schools, formerly known as persistently low achieving (PLA) schools.

More to say about the Ashley Judd vs. Mitch McConnell for Senate speculation, which is becoming Kentucky's political version of Pacquiao-Mayweather -- an interesting idea that may never happen.

(You decide who's who. I'm not going there.)

The Daily's blog posted a handy charticle:

Click here to see the whole thing.

A delegation of activists representing several social justice groups in Kentucky visited the White House on Wednesday for a meeting on how to avoid the fiscal cliff.

The discussion was hosted by President Obama’s director of public engagement, and was organized to build support for his plan that includes raising taxes on the wealthy. Leaders from the Louisville NAACP, Fairness Campaign and Planned Parenthood of Kentucky attended the session, along with a delegation from Tennessee.

ACLU of Kentucky Executive Director Michael Aldridge also attended the meeting. He says going over the fiscal cliff will not only hurt the economy, but would set back civil liberties issues as well.

"When Congress is preoccupied with having to tend these budgetary concerns they’re not taking up a lot of civil liberties issues that we would like them to be focusing on such as immigration reform, which the Obama administration has stressed they’re going to be taking up in the second term," he says. "They’re not going to be able to move forward until they get their fiscal house in order."

Indiana Governor-elect Mike Pence has announced three cabinet appointments.

All three appointees work in the current administration of Governor Mitch Daniels.

Pence announced today that Ron Wynkoop will continue as commissioner of the Department of Administration and Mike Alley will stay on as commissioner of the Department of Revenue.

Anita Samuel, who has been serving as Daniels’ general counsel, will become director of the Department of Personnel in the Pence Administration.

Pence will be publicly sworn in as Indiana’s next governor on January 14.

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded Louisville’s Council on Developmental Disabilities a Challenge America Fast-Track grant to help fund a group art exhibit, The Striped Show, in the spring.  The $10,000 grants, which receive an expedited application review, are intended to increase access to the arts for underserved communities.