FRANKFORT – The Kentucky Department for Environmental Protection announced that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded four brownfield grants to Kentucky totaling $800,000 to fund the assessment and cleanup of properties with environmental problems. Brownfields are properties that are abandoned or underutilized due to real or perceived environmental contamination. They can include old factories, former gas stations, mine-scarred lands and abandoned dry cleaning establishments.

Funeral arrangements have been set for former Kenton County Police Sergeant Brett Benton, who was killed in Afghanistan on Saturday while working for a contractor. Visitation will be held at 3 p.m. Tuesday, June 14, at First Church in Richmond. Funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday, June 15, at the church with burial at Richmond Cemetery immediately following. Benton, 37, was killed when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle near Alingar District, Langham Province.

Afternoon temperatures in Lexington could tie the record of 95 degrees Wednesday, prompting the National Weather Service in Louisville to warn of heat exhaustion, stroke or other health problems. The weather service expects afternoon highs of 94 degrees Wednesday, but forecasts generally have a margin of error of one to two degrees, according to the weather service. "If we hit 95, we'll tie the record," hydrologist Mike Callahan said.

Jail employees in Clay County strip-searched a Fayette County woman without justification and made racial slurs after she was arrested at a public pool with a biracial child, the woman has charged in a federal lawsuit. One female guard subjected Jennifer C. Philpot to a rough, painful body cavity search even though there was no cause to suspect she was hiding contraband, the lawsuit said.

Elizabethtown city officials are in the process of tweaking an ordinance regulating purchases made by junk, secondhand and scrap metal dealers through the Leads Online database, which can be accessed by the Elizabethtown Police Department as a tool to locate stolen items. Under the ordinance, dealers would be required to obtain the license plate number of the vehicle in which the registered item was transported, in addition to photo identification, the address of the seller, the date the property was received and an accurate description of the item.

Today marks the day that a new state law drastically rewriting Kentucky’s criminal code goes into effect. Local prosecutors and law enforcement believe that new law likely will worsen the drug problems in Harlan County. “The way it looks like the law is going to be implemented, it will make the drug epidemic worse,” said Commonwealth Attorney Henry Johnson. “They are taking away all the tools we have to fight the drug problem.”

Lynette Holloway is a frequent contributor to The Root. The Chicago-based writer is a former New York Times reporter and associate editor for Ebony magazine.

Eighteen-year-old Aleshia Napier didn't have to die the way that she did.

The nearly $19 billion that the U.S. has already spent on foreign aid to Afghanistan and the billions more to come in the next few years could end up doing little if any long-term good unless more focused planning is done, according to a report today from the Democratic majority in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Charli Carpenter is associate professor of international relations at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and blogs about human security at the Duck of Minerva. Lina Shaikhouni is completing a degree in political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with an emphasis on human rights and humanitarian law.

Eastern Kentucky University employees are getting their first pay raise in three years. The hike is included in the 2011-12 budget approved Tuesday by the EKU Board of Regents. The salary increase will not be less than 500 dollars for any full-time employee. The budget of more than 233 million dollars is an increase of 6-point-9 percent over the previous year. It includes a 5 percent tuition increase for undergraduates and graduate students, with certain exceptions. The general increase had been approved earlier. The Board approved resident tuition rates for non-resident military veterans and a $60-per-credit hour rate for EKU Now! students.