Whitney Jones

From NPR: Tax experts say the upcoming fiscal cliff is really more like a pot of water getting ready to boil. The country won’t jump to its doom Jan. 1, the heat will just be turned up then. The experts say people won’t immediately be affected. The changes will come slowly, and probably won’t be noticeable until around the end of January.

The Illinois State Crime Commission is declaring war on drug dealers who supply heroin to teenagers. The commission and the Police Athletic League of Illinois plan to air television ads offering a reward for turning in drug dealers. Officials say they'll give a one thousand dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of people who provide heroin to young people.

Activists with the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty have sent Governor Steve Beshear more than 1,500 postcards asking him to sign no more death warrants and get rid of the punishment. Each card calls the death penalty “a risky, arbitrary, unfair, ineffective and costly distraction from justice.”

A Daviess County family is planning to restore a cemetery in Utica that’s the resting place for a Revolutionary War soldier who was friends with Thomas Jefferson. Charles Evans says he plans to set the tombstones back up in the family plot south of Owensboro and fence it off. He also plans on applying for a historical marker. Evans’ great-great-great grandfather was Capt. Benjamin Field who was commissioned as a captain in the American Revolution by Jefferson.

A Kentucky sheriff offering his own reward money in hopes of solving three murder cases is being asked to turn over his information in one of the slayings. Commonwealth's Attorney G.L. Ovey has filed a motion asking Trigg County Sheriff Ray Burnam to appear in court Wednesday with his file on the Chantell Humphries murder case. Humphries' body was found on a Trigg County cattle farm a decade ago. A trial earlier this year ended in a mistrial.

From NPR: The Orange County Register got a new CEO this summer who is moving his focus from digital to print. Aaron Kushner says advertisers are reducing what they do digitally, so the Los Angeles newspaper is hiring more reporters and printing more pages.

A Marshall County jury will be back in session Tuesday to recommend a sentence for a 20-year-old woman convicted last week of second-degree manslaughter, wanton endangerment and drunken driving in a 2011 traffic death. After three days of testimony and more than four hours of deliberation the jury returned the verdict against Tiffany Pittman.

A multi-vehicle accident on I-69 involving a semi-truck has blocked traffic around the crash site. Southbound and westbound traffic is being detoured at Exit 12 through Princeton. The delay and detour are expected to last until around 9 a.m.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is expected to meet Monday to discuss delegating authority to the utility's new chief executive until it fills several vacancies on its board. The board is made up of nine members and five seats are pending congressional action, including one that's up for reappointment. Congress is set to adjourn this month.

Four western Kentucky public river ports and a fifth in Louisville have been awarded state grants for repairs and improvements. The grants from the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet total more than $400,000 and will be matched by the ports. Gov. Steve Beshear says business and industry depend on the ports for freight and raw materials, and the grants are an "investment in a critical part of Kentucky's commercial supply chain."