Matt Shafer Powell

The Chattanooga City Council’s decision to avoid discussion on a same-sex benefits ordinance Tuesday means the issue will now go before the voters in an August referendum.

After months of heated debate, packed public forums and two close city council votes, the ordinance was passed in November.  At that point, Chattanooga joined Collegedale and Knoxville as the third city in Tennessee to offer domestic partnership benefits to its city workers. 

That distinction didn’t last long.

  A group known as Regas Property LLC has reportedly purchased the building that once housed the business known as “Knoxville’s Oldest Restaurant”.  A representative of the group tells the Knoxville News Sentinel its members purchased the Regas Restaurant property at 318 N. Gay Street for $2 million to prevent someone else from buying it and demolishing it.

  If you’ve spent much time on the University of Tennessee campus, you probably know where Lake Loudoun Boulevard is.  Or Pat Head Summitt Street.  Or Johnny Majors Drive.  But you may not know that the university isn’t the one that makes the final decisions on how those roads are maintained or improved.  That responsibility lies with the City of Knoxville.

That may change tonight.

When Dale Ditmanson moved from Philadelphia in 2004 to take over the Superintendent duties at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, he received a valuable bit of advice from former superintendent Karen Wade.  “She told me, ‘be prepared to be embraced by the community,’” Ditmanson says.

For some employees of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, these last few days of December are bittersweet.  As of January 1, they’ll no longer be employed at the lab.

 Since 1942, the General Education Development (GED) exam has been a valuable tool for students who didn’t earn a traditional high school diploma.  But recent changes in the administration of the exam have moved the state of Tennessee to offer an alternative.

The changes began in earnest when Pearson VUE, the company that administers the exam, announced the cost of the exam would increase in Tennessee from $75 to $120.  More importantly, it would only be available on-line.  

 Tennessee has been named one of three states to receive a million-dollar grant to address the length of time it takes for a college student to graduate.

In most of the state’s four-year colleges and universities, it takes the average student about five years to earn a bachelor’s degree.  And it takes the average student at a two-year college approximately four years to earn an associate’s degree.

As Holiday shopping seasons go, this has been a strange one.

For starters, Thanksgiving came six days later this year than last.  “That’s significant,” says Ann Fairhurst, a retail professor and head of the Department of Retail, Hospitality, and Tourism Management at the University of Tennessee.  “That’s six fewer days that the retailers have to capture those dollars and so they’re really pushing promotions all the way to Christmas.”

It was one of the darkest moments in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s long history. 

Residents of the Swan Pond community living near the TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant awoke early on the morning of December 22, 2008 to a sea of gray sludge barreling its way through the community.  More than a billion gallons of coal ash being stored in a nearby pond had broken through a retaining wall and blanketed more than 300 acres around the plant, destroying homes, killing fish and filling local waterways with a thick muck laden with toxic materials.  

 An important link to Oak Ridge’s nuclear history no longer exists.

This morning, crews completed the demolition of the K-25 plant, the giant U-shaped building that once served as the nation’s main source of bomb-grade uranium.  At the time it was built, the K-25 plant was the world’s largest building under one roof.