CORYDON, Ky. (AP) -- A city council in western Kentucky has ousted its mayor after a contentious hearing in which he was accused of misconduct and neglect of duty.

The Gleaner (http://bit.ly/OKWZdQ) reports council members in Corydon voted unanimously late Tuesday to remove Larry Thurby from office. The newspaper reports he had served as mayor of the town in Henderson County for more than eight years, much of it mired in controversy.

In a brief meeting on Wednesday, officials named Councilwoman Hilda McCormic as mayor.

At Tuesday's meeting, Councilman Phil Brewster said Thurby was ousted for "misconduct and willful neglect in the performance of his office."

Thurby referred questions to his attorney, who said he needed to talk with his client but had no immediate plans to appeal the decision to court.
Twitter was once notorious for its down times, but has since improved its performance. Still, the sheer popularity of the site -- and its heavy use by up-to-the-second journalists -- mean that even modest outages quickly become news. In June, Twitter experienced problems that lasted about two hours. The company blamed a technical glitch.

The latest breakdown comes only hours before the Olympics are expected to bring an unprecedented surge of activity by sports fans on Twitter, among other social networking sites. At the recent European Championship final, users fired off more than 15,000 tweets per second, setting a sports-related record for the site.

Social media users were already complaining about an earlier outage that affected Google's chatting services. The Mountain View, California-based company said Thursday morning that the majority of users were seeing error messages and unable to use its Google Talk service. The issues were resolved five hours later.