U.S. Senate Republicans have unanimously voted to give Mitch McConnell of Kentucky a fourth term as leader.

McConnell's last term was marked by staunch opposition to President Barack Obama and efforts to give the GOP a majority in the chamber. The latter didn't happen, but all signs indicate McConnell will continue the former. He recently stated that any of the president's plans to increase government revenue by raising taxes on the wealthy will be “non-starters” in the chamber.

Louisville Metro Police traffic investigators are trying to determine how the driver lost control Wednesday morning of a AAA Rescue Ranger pick-up truck on Interstate 71, causing a chain-reaction that left the driver dead, police said.

The AAA Rescue Ranger driver has not been identified.

The accident happened at about 6 a.m. Wednesday and left northbound I-71 near the Watterson Expressway closed for hours, said Dwight Mitchell, a Louisville Metro Police spokesman. Traffic was moving on I-71 in the area by the early afternoon, according to TRIMARC.

Taken together, Kentucky's special taxing districts spend more money than the state spends on Medicaid and infrastructure -- and nearly half of those districts are not following rules on filing budgets or submitting audits, said a report from State Auditor Adam Edelen released Wednesday. 

A special taxing district is a quasi-governmental agency that collects fees or taxes, such as library boards, soil districts and health districts.

Crews successfully finished moving early Wednesday the chemical butadiene from the train derailment site in southwestern Jefferson County. The butadiene has been delivered to a rail yard, according to MetroSafe.

The National Book Award ceremony is tonight, and if you didn't score tickets to this year's revamped, glammed-up awards dinner in New York's Cipriani Wall Street, where you can rub elbows with Gen X darling actress/author Molly Ringwald and McSweeney's founder (and fiction nominee) Dave Eggers, the event will be live-streamed. The action starts at 9 p.m.

After over eight months of negotiations, U of L Hospital and University Medical Center will enter into a joint agreement with KentuckyOne Health on March 1, 2013.

KentuckyOne Health -- which is under directives of Catholic Health Initiatives -- will maintain the day-to-day operations but U of L Hospital and the James Graham Brown Cancer Center will remain independent in its oversight and health directives, which was a major criticism during last year's merger talks.

The problem was with spam, not the pizza.

A class-action lawsuit seeking $250 million has been filed against the Papa John's pizza chain because of a 500,000 unwanted text messages sent to customers, CNN Money is reporting. 

The CNN story reported that Papa John's franchises sent blast text messages through a third-party services -- and, after ordering a pizza, some customers began getting dozens ads for pizza specials, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Adam Rapp is no stranger to Actors Theatre of Louisville. Several of his plays have made their world premieres at the Humana Festival of New American Plays (the most recent, "The Edge of Our Bodies," opened in 2011), debut productions which Rapp has also directed. In fact, his directing career has focused on new plays, but when artistic director Les Waters invited him to direct a production of Sam Shepard's 1980 play "True West" this season, he took the challenge. 

Some time ago, a man wearing jeans, cowboy boots and a hoodie drove a dirty Ford Explorer into a carwash in Fort Worth, Texas. As soon as the car came back clean, he got it filthy again, and drove to the next carwash. He did this with every single full-service carwash in town.

The man wasn't suffering from a strange mental disorder; Patrick Kinkade was a criminologist conducting an experiment.

For the first time in a decade, Kentucky’s industrial hemp commission will meet Wednesday.

The commission has been revived under Agriculture Commissioner James Comer, with support from U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Bowling Green.

They argue that industrial hemp can create jobs for Kentucky farmers, many of whom have not recovered since the tobacco buyouts years ago.