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Commentary: Fifty-one cents on the dollar — the quiet fight over Lexington’s police and fire pension
In January, in a meeting no reporter attended, Lexington’s pension board set the city’s contribution at 51.24 percent of police and fire payroll — about $52.5 million in the budget council just adopted. The fund is $386.6 million short, stuck near 72 percent funded for eight years, retirees are losing ground to inflation under…
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Pizza picks and restaurant closures dominate r/Lexington today
Pizza lovers share favorite local spots while residents mourn Bourbon n’ Toulouse’s Leestown Road closure. Construction, housing reviews, and a dispute over nonprofit tax forms round out today’s r/Lexington discussions.
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‘The Dumocrats are at it again’: Trump attack on California election offers midterm preview
California often takes days or even weeks to tally votes after its elections, a product of measures to protect voters and a deluge of mail ballots dropped off on Election Day. Incomplete vote totals reported in the hours after polls close don’t always reflect final results. None of this is evidence of fraud. But…
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Kentucky Lantern staff honored at regional awards dinner
LOUISVILLE — Kentucky Lantern staff took home six awards at the regional Society of Professional Journalists awards dinner, held Thursday in downtown Louisville. The awards honored reporting from 2025. McKenna Horsley, the Lantern’s political reporter, won a second place award in politics and government reporting. Horsley’s award winning coverage included her reporting on the…
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Four Wildcats Advance to Finals at NCAA Track Championships
Four Kentucky track and field athletes advanced to NCAA Championship finals Thursday, led by junior Emmi Scales in the 100-meter hurdles and sophomore Janet Jepkemboi Amimo in the 800 meters. The 4×400-meter relay team also qualified for Saturday’s final.
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Dawn on Henry Clay’s lawn: Morgan’s 1862 raid on his own hometown
At first light on Oct. 18, 1862, John Hunt Morgan’s 1,800 horsemen hit a Union cavalry camp on the grounds of Ashland — the Henry Clay estate, a mile from the courthouse in Morgan’s own hometown. The fight lasted about as long as breakfast; the argument over his statue lasted a century. The finale…
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Belle Brezing: the record and the legend, sharing the same address
Lexington’s most famous madam ran the “most orderly of disorderly houses” on Megowan Street, was pardoned by a governor, bankrolled by a Philadelphia millionaire, and shuttered by the War Department in 1917 — then spent 23 reclusive years in the fading mansion. Between the wink and the scrapbook at UK lies the documented story,…
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Before Kitty Hawk, Lexington looked up: the mystery airship craze of 1897
In April 1897 — six years before the Wright brothers — tens of thousands of Americans saw a cigar-shaped airship with colored lights crossing the night sky, and Kentucky papers from Paducah to Hopkinsville carried the sightings. Lexington’s Daily Leader covered the wave with Bluegrass skepticism: a Muncie hoax of balloons and lanterns, a…
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The Phoenix in flames: the hotel Lexington couldn’t kill — until it did
Aaron Burr slept there. Henry Clay toasted there. It burned in 1820, burned again on a race-week night in 1879 while pickpockets worked the crowd — and rose every time, metal phoenix on the parapet, until a developer’s never-built skyscraper did what fire never could. The story of Main and Limestone, from the original…
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“The city without a theater”: the 1886 fire that gave Lexington its Opera House
On a frozen January morning in 1886, fire burst from the grocery beneath Lexington’s opera house while the water sat frozen in the mains. Eighteen months later the city opened the Oscar Cobb jewel box on North Broadway that still hosts 85,000 people a year — after surviving a second brush with death in…