Watch Gary Varvel's time lapse video of how he draws the Indiana Senate race.

Braun and Donnelly tout their support for Trump's policies

Could a Trump investigation wash up?

Bill Titus, chair of the advisory board of A Kid Again Indiana, lists the fun events planned for families of children with life-threatening illnesses.

Watch Gary Varvel's time lapse video of his process of drawing Mayor Joe Hogsett's Christmas cartoon.

A reelection campaign song

Chris Hirschfeld has a message for the media: Stop stereotyping conservatives.

Once again, Indiana government officials are pushing plans to increase logging in state forests.

President Trump's latest immigration decision shows a lack of heart and common sense.

St. Thomas Aquinas Church has long worked with communities in Haiti and Africa. The church responded to the president's recent comments.

I wondered about what the next generation of journalists thought about the movie's message, and about the tensions between the press and government.

An effort to have a legislative hearing on a bill to check the power factory farms have over the communities they pollute died quietly in recent days.

The advance of a cruel payday lending bill is the latest reminder that something is broken at the Statehouse.

The need for a special session shows once again that Statehouse Republicans have lost their way.

Senate candidate Luke Messer airs a new TV ad. It's refreshing because it doesn't demean the opposition and doesn't aim to anger primary voters.

With Matt Tully's death, our community has lost a strong and passionate advocate for those whose needs are often overlooked, especially children.

Ordinary people in their ordinary cars take to the drag strip to get their need for speed.

Pat O'Neil, an Indiana Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, was declared cancer-free Tuesday.

The third-ranked Orioles knocked off Ben Davis 41-17 with strong QB play and a defense that just keeps scoring.

Avon, the top-ranked team in Class 6A, found itself in unfamiliar territory on Friday night — trailing by two touchdowns early in a game.

Avon, ranked No. 1 in Class 6A, has had to display a high level of resiliency and develop that elusive clutch gene to remain unbeaten at 8-0.

After five consecutive sectional losses to Avon dating to 2010, Brownsburg finally knocks off its rival in tournament

Allison Bosse scored 23 points to lift the Bulldogs over Mooresville, 51-42, in Tuesday's sectional opener.

"We've always disinfected oral, nasal cavities that would be exposed to that exhale procedure," said Eric Bell, a funeral director in Pittsboro, Ind.

The Western world remains where it has been for some time, delicately poised between anaemic recovery and a shock that could tip us back into economic contraction.

Perhaps the most conspicuous manifestation of the instability is that investors can't make up their minds whether the greater risk comes from surging inflation that stems largely from China's irrepressible growth or the deflationary impact of the unsustainable burden of debt on peripheral and not-so-peripheral eurozone (and other) economies.

And whence do investors flee when it all looks scary and uncertain, especially when there's a heightened probability of specie debasement - to gold, of course.

Unsurprisingly, with the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, implying that a writedown of Greece's sovereign obligations is an option, and with consumer inflation in China hitting 5.4% in March, there has been a flight to the putative safety of precious metal: the gold price hit a new record of $1,480.50 per ounce for June delivery yesterday and could well break through $1,500 within days (say the analysts). Silver is hitting 30-year highs.

In a way, if a sovereign borrower were to turn €100bn of debts (for example) into an obligation to repay 70bn euros, that would be a form of inflation - it has the same economic impact, a degradation of value, for the lender. But it is a localised inflation; only the specific creditors suffer directly (though there may be all sorts of spillover damage for others).

And only this morning there was another blow to the perceived value of a chunk of euro-denominated sovereign obligations. Moody's has downgraded Irish government debt to one level above junk - which is the equivalent of a bookmaker lengthening the odds the on that country's ability to avoid controlled or uncontrolled default.

Some would say that the Irish government has made a start in writing down debt, with the disclosure by the Irish finance minister Michael Noonan yesterday that he would want to impose up to 6bn euros of losses on holders of so-called subordinated loans to Irish banks.

But I suppose the big story in the eurozone, following the decision by the European Central Bank to raise interest rates, is that the region's excessive government and bank debts are more likely to be cut down to manageable size by a restructuring - writedowns of the amount owed - than by generalised inflation that erodes the real value of the principal.

The decision of the ECB to raise rates has to be seen as a policy decision that - in a worst case - a sovereign default by an Ireland, or Greece or Portugal would be less harmful than endemic inflation.

But is that right? How much damage would be wreaked if Greece or Ireland or Portugal attempted to reduce the nominal amount they owe to levels they felt they could afford?

Let's push to one side the reputational and economic costs to those countries - which are quite big things to ignore, by the way - and simply look at the damage to external creditors from a debt write down.

And I am also going to ignore the difference between a planned, consensual reduction in sums owed - a restructuring that takes place with the blessing of the rest of the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund - and a unilateral declaration of de facto bankruptcy by a Greece, Ireland or Portugal (although the shock value of the latter could have much graver consequences for the health of the financial system).

So the first question is how much of the impaired debt is held by institutions and investors that could not afford to take the losses.

Now I hope it isn't naive to assume that pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and central banks that hold Greek, or Irish or Portuguese debt can cope with losses generated by a debt restructuring.

The reason for mild optimism in that sense is that those who finance investments made by pension funds and insurers - that's you and me by the way - can't get their money out quickly or easily. We simply have to grin and bear the losses to the value of our savings, when the stewards of our savings make lousy investment decisions.

As for hedge funds, when they make bad bets, they can suffer devastating withdrawals of finance by their investors, as and when the returns generated swing from positive to negative. But so long as those hedge funds haven't borrowed too much, so long as they are not too leveraged - and most aren't these days - the impact on the financial system shouldn't be significant.

Finally, if the European Central Bank - for example - ends up incurring big losses on its substantial holdings of Greek, Portuguese and Irish debt, it can always be recapitalised by solvent eurozone nations, notably by Germany and France.

However this is to ignore the node of fragility in the financial system, the faultline - which is the banking industry.

In the financial system's network of interconnecting assets and liabilities, it is the banks as a cluster that always have the potential to amplify the impact of debt writedowns, in a way that can wreak wider havoc.

That's built into their main function, as maturity transformers. Since banks' creditors can always demand their money back at whim, but banks can't retrieve their loans from their creditors (homeowners, businesses, governments), bank losses above the norm can be painful both for banks and for the rest of us.

Any event that undermines confidence in the safety of money lent to banks, will - in a best case - make it more difficult for a bank to borrow and lend, and will, in the worst case, tip the bank into insolvency.

Which, of course, is what we saw on a global systemic scale from the summer of 2007 to the end of 2008. That's when creditors to banks became increasingly anxious about potential losses faced by banks from a great range of loans and investments, starting with US sub-prime.

So what we need to know is whether the banking system could afford losses generated by Greek, Irish and Portuguese defaults.

And to assess this, we need to know how much overseas banks have lent to the governments of these countries and also - probably - to the banks of these countries, in that recent painful experience has told us that bank liabilities become sovereign liabilities, when the going gets tough.

According to the latest published analysis by the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers'central bank), the total exposure of overseas banks to the governments and banks of Greece, Portugal and Ireland is "just" $362.2bn, or £224bn,

Now let's make the heroic guess that a rational writedown of this debt to a sustainable level would see a third of it written off - which would generate $121bn (£75bn) of losses for banks outside the countries concerned.

If those loans were spread relatively evenly between banks around the world, losses on that scale would be a headache, but nothing worse.

But this tainted cookie doesn't crumble quite like that. Just under a third of the relevant exposure to public sector and banks of the three debt-challenged states, some $118bn, sits on the balance sheets of German banks, according to the BIS.

For all the formidable strength of the German economy, the balance sheets of Germany's banks are by no means the strongest in the world. German banks would not be able to shrug off $39bn or £24bn of potential losses on Portuguese, Irish and Greek loans as a matter of little consequence.

This suggests that it is in the German national interest to help Portugal, Ireland and Greece avoid default.

If you are a Greek, Portuguese or Irish citizen this might bring on something of a wry smile - because you would probably be aware that the more punitive of the bailout terms imposed by the eurozone on these countries (or about to be imposed in Portugal's case) is the expression of a German desire to spank reckless borrowers.

But as I have mentioned here before, reckless lending can be the moral (or immoral) equivalent of reckless borrowing. And German banks were not models of Lutheran prudence in that regard.

If punitive bailout terms make it more likely that Ireland, Greece or Portugal will eventually default, you might wonder whether there has been an element of masochism in the German government's negotiating position.

My colleague Tanya Beckett has conducted a rare and fascinating interview with Viktor Vekselberg, one of the billionaire oligarchs who co-own TNK-BP with BP - and who have fallen out with BP over BP's desire to form a business relationship with Rosneft, Russia's largest energy group, which would involve BP and Rosneft taking stakes in each other.

It implies, perhaps for the first time, that there may be a solution to a dispute that has damaged BP's reputation and jeopardised the value of its very substantial assets in Russia.

Because of the tensions that have arisen with AAR, the group that represents the oligarchs, BP in collaboration with Rosneft would dearly love to buy AAR's half share in TNK-BP. But their offer of $27bn for 50% of TNK-BP, which values the whole of TNK-BP at $54bn, was rejected earlier this month.

All may not be lost for BP, however. Mr Vekselberg suggests that a sale is possible. He tells Tanya Beckett:

"Of course it can be happen, for sure. If it will be [an] interesting proposal for us according to our understanding of (the) valuation of this company, of course we can accept. So far we have not received this."

So what would be an "interesting" valuation of TNK-BP? Well those close to the oligarchs say that they value TNK-BP at more than $70bn.

It's not clear BP and Rosneft are prepared to pay as much that. The difficulty for BP is that if it fails to reach an accommodation with Mr Vekselberg and his colleagues on price, then it will be stuck in a difficult place - because BP will have been publicly humiliated by the failure to consummate the Rosneft deal and will somehow have to rebuild relations with AAR in order to continue to extract billions of dollars in dividends from TNK-BP.

BP's partnership with AAR is in tatters, as Mr Vekselberg makes clear, in emotive terms, because of AAR's conviction, upheld in arbitration proceedings, that BP's proposed deal with Rosneft breached its contract with AAR:

"The picture is really simple. TNK-BP was created eight years ago, 2003. It was created like [a] joint venture between Russian shareholders and BP, huge global player... The company grew very active; it's now one of the best companies - not just Russian but internationally, because we have investment outside Russia...
 
And really I personally was surprised, I was surprised why BP decided to do something which [was] not according to our shareholders agreement. I am not surprised why BP would like to do this but I am surprised why they did it without any consulting or even just like, just inform us about that (sic). I was very upset, I am still upset even now".

Mr Vekselberg says he is "not so interested in money". The billionaire
adds: "I have enough money, for my life, for my family, for all that".
But "we are businessmen, we are not ideological or something", so of course a sale to BP and Rosneft "can happen".

So what would occur if BP and Rosneft were to make him several billion dollars richer? "I am already very upset" he says "but I will [be] double upset if I have to decide to sell. It's because I dedicated for this company almost like 15 years".

These remarks by Mr Vekselberg are a sign that the impasse over the purchase by BP and Rosneft of AAR's stake in TNK-BP can be overcome.
It offers hope to BP, perhaps for the first time, that it may be able to buy AAR out of the joint venture by the time of the May 16 extended deadline set by Rosneft.

But here's the question? Is the price that Mr Vekselberg and his fellow billionaires will accept one that BP's owners will see as acceptable?

Some of them are already dubious about the terms of the new partnership it wants to form with Rosneft. At a time when BP remains financially stretched by the costs of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, BP's shareholders won't want it to further enrich Mr Vekselberg more than is strictly necessary.

For more on the Vekselberg interview, see Russia Business Report.

The cost of Britain's controversial new aircraft carriers is set to rise by at least £1bn, and perhaps almost £2bn, as a result of the government's decision taken last October to make them compatible with different aircraft than those originally envisaged.

I have learned that the working assumption of the contractors on the project, which are BAE Systems, Thales UK and Babcock, is that the carriers will now cost taxpayers some £7bn in total, compared with the £5.2bn cost disclosed by the Ministry of Defence last autumn - and up from the £3.9bn budget announced when the contract was originally signed in July 2008.

One defence industry veteran said the final bill was bound to be nearer £10bn, though a government official insisted that was way over the top.

The Ministry of Defence and the Treasury believe that total final costs could be nearer £6bn, if only one of the carriers is reconfigured to take the preferred version of America's Joint Strike Fighter aircraft.

An MoD official said no final decision had been taken on whether the first carrier to be built, the Queen Elizabeth, or the second carrier, the Prince of Wales, or both would be reconfigured.

He said it would probably be the case that changing the design specification for the Prince of Wales would be the cheapest option. But if that happened, it is not clear when - if ever - the Queen Elizabeth, due to enter service in 2019, would actually be able to accommodate jets (as opposed to helicopters).

Whatever happens, the increase in the bill will be substantial - and is only regarded by the Treasury as affordable because the increment is likely to be incurred later than 2014/15, when the expenditure constraints put in place by the Chancellor's spending review come to an end.

The Treasury is adamant that the MoD will receive no leeway to increase spending before then.

An MoD spokesman sent me the following statement late last night:

"The conversion of the Queen Elizabeth Class...will allow us to operate the carrier variant of the Joint Strike Fighter that carries a greater payload, has a longer range and is cheaper to purchase. This will give our new carriers, which will be in service for 50 years, greater capability and interoperability with our allies. Final costs are yet to be agreed and detailed work is ongoing. We expect to take firm decisions in late 2012."

The disclosure of the rise in costs is bound to reopen the debate about whether the UK really needs new carriers, especially since the UK will be without any aircraft carrier till 2019, following the decision to decommission Ark Royal.

British Tornado jets are currently active in Libya, flying from a base in Italy, without the use of a British aircraft carrier.

The latest increase in likely expenditure on the enormous carriers - which are almost the size of three football pitches - stems from the decision of the Ministry of Defence in October to change the design one or both of them so that they can be used by the carrier version of America's Joint Strike Fighter.

This would mean they have to be fitted with catapults and traps - or "cats and traps" - rather than ramps.

The likely final cost will depend on whether the cats and traps are cheaper traditional steam devices, or newer-technology electromagnetic ones - and also whether the cats and traps are fitted to both carriers or just one.

Industry and government sources tell me that even if the MoD goes for the cheaper option, and even if the cats and traps are fitted to only one carrier, the additional bill will still be of the order of £1bn.

The hope however would be that in the longer term savings could be achieved because the maintenance costs of the more conventional Joint Strike Fighter should be lower.

One of the reasons the refit could be relatively more expensive is that for one of the carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth, there would have to be a retrofit - because so much work has already been done on it.

"Retrofitting is always very pricey" said a senior defence executive.

The carrier project has been beset by controversy and cost increases.

In June 2009, I disclosed that the carrier costs had soared by more than £1bn as a result of a decision taken by the previous government to delay their entry into service.

Then last October the government, in its Strategic Defence and Security Review, came close to cancelling one or both carriers.

In the end, it committed to build both, but with the strange caveat that it might end up using only one of them. This was the reason given by the Prime Minister David Cameron in the Commons for building both:

"They [the previous government] signed contracts so we were left in a situation where even cancelling the second carrier would actually cost more than to build it; I have this in written confirmation from BAE Systems".

However in a memo to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the Ministry of Defence estimated that cancelling both contracts would have saved £2bn and cancelling just one would have saved £1bn.

The MoD told MPs that "as the cancellation costs would have had immediate effect, the costs in the short term would have been significantly higher than proceeding with both carriers as planned; nearly £1bn more in financial year 2011/12 if both carriers had been cancelled".

The MoD was also concerned that cancelling the carriers would have undermined British capability and know-how in the manufacture of complex warships.

The carriers, called Queen Elizabeth Class Aircraft Carriers, are being built by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, whose members are the UK defence giant BAE systems, the British engineering group Babcock, and Thales of France. The Ministry of Defence is also described as both a member of the Alliance and a customer.

Update 15:06:It has been pointed out to me, by what you might term a grizzled sea dog, that the UK does still possess two ships that can take aircraft. They are HMS Illustrious and HMS Ocean (which is a commando carrier with a flat top).

However they can't accommodate jet airplanes, only helicopters - so for veteran sailor it was a terrible error for the government to scrap the illustrious Harrier jumpjet.

He also takes the view, which I've heard from many other military personnel, that it would be bonkers to convert only one of the new carriers to take the carrier version of the Joint Strike Fighter - because if that were to happen, one of the carriers would be an enormous white elephant, and the other would not be able to provide a service for 100% of the time (it would need periodic servicing).

That said, the cost of retro-fitting the first carrier being built now and also redesigning the other one would certainly be nudging £2bn, maybe more.

He believes there is powerful strategic logic to building two new huge ships able to handle jets.

The problem for David Cameron is that he may find it hard to make the strategic case, since last autumn he justified building the two on the basis that it would not save any money to cancel one - which is not the most positive case for what turns out to be a very substantial public investment that anyone has ever advanced.

Lloyds has decided not to use the courts any further to contest the decision of the regulator, the Financial Service Authority, that it should pay restitution to customers who were mis-sold PPI loan insurance.

This will be welcomed by thousands of Lloyds customers, although it will be very expensive for Lloyds - which is making a provision of £3.2bn to cover the likely costs.

That £3.2bn charge means Lloyds is back in loss, to the tune of £3.5bn on a statutory or official basis.

My post from last night explains much of the background to this.

Ignoring one-offs, on what Lloyds calls a combined business basis, Lloyds remained in profit, to the tune of £284m, for the first three months of the year - although this was well down on the £1.1bn made in the equivalent period of last year.

There was also a charge of £1.1bn to cover the expected cost of Irish loans going bad. This was £500m more than expected.

The reason for the higher than anticipated Irish lending loss is that the new chief executive Antonio Horsa-Orsorio decided to factor in a further possible fall of 10% in Irish commercial property prices.

Other striking characteristics of these figures for the first quarter of the year is that net lending to small businesses rose, bucking the national trend, and overall income was down from £6bn to £5.2bn.

What stands out however is Lloyds' decision to settle with PPI claimants.

It was a unilateral decision, but will put pressure on the other banks to do the same.

The size of Lloyds charge implies that the big British banks will in total take a £9bn hit to settle PPI claims, with Royal Bank of Scotland, the second most exposed, perhaps taking a £2bn hit.

Update 09:21: For taxpayers, it is good news that Lloyds has been weaning itself off loans and loan guarantees provided by us.

So in the first three months of the year, there was a further reduction of £26bn of funding for Lloyds in effect provided by the state.

Which means that Lloyds' residual dependence on de facto loans from us is £70bn - with £26bn of this still owed to the Bank of England's Special Liquidity Scheme and £44bn of debt guaranteed by the Treasury (under the Credit Guarantee Scheme) still needing to be repaid.

Barring a meltdown in wholesale markets, Lloyds should be free of exceptional taxpayer funding support by the target of 2012.

By contrast, the timetable for privatising taxpayers' 41% stake in Lloyds is yet to be decided - although today's decision by the new chief executive to face up to the mistakes of the past (the PPI and Irish losses) should make privatisation easier.

The next milestone for Lloyds on the road away from state ownership and influence will be the announcement in June of Mr Horta-Orsorio's new strategy for the group.

Update 09:54: Royal Bank of Scotland will not make a decision till next week on whether to join Lloyds in agreeing to settle PPI cases.

It had the second biggest share of the PPI market, with around 20%, compared with 35% for Lloyds.

My banking sources are surprised by the magnitude of the PPI charge taken by Lloyds. It was significantly bigger than they had expected.

They would expect RBS to eventually take a PPI hit of around £1bn (as I mentioned in a post last month) rather than the £2bn implied by Lloyds' PPI provision.

That said, it is highly unlikely that RBS will quantify the potential PPI damage when it announces its first quarter results tomorrow.

On RBS's imminent results, I would expect it still to be in the red at the statutory level, including - for example - a debit from a market valuation of credit insurance provided to RBS by taxpayers under the Asset Protection Scheme.

But at the operating level it will be in profit. And RBS's general insurance operations should be back in the black (some would say 'at last') - which matters, because RBS is committed to dispose of these well-known insurance activities, probably by floating them on the stock market.

Although Royal Bank of Scotland is back in loss on a so-called statutory basis, having made the tiniest of profits in the final three months of last year, that doesn't really tell the story of what has been going on at this semi-nationalised bank.

For the record, the statutory attributable loss was £528m in the three months to March 31, compared with a profit of £12m in the last quarter of 2010 and a £248m loss in the first quarter of 2010.

But, as is par for the course with big, complex universal banks, these numbers do almost as much to obscure as to enlighten.

They are, for example, heavily influenced by changes in the valuation of debt sold by Royal Bank of Scotland to investors and of credit insurance bought from taxpayers in the form of the Asset Protection Scheme.

There was a loss of not far off £1bn on these items. Now it's moot whether it really enhances our understanding of Royal Bank of Scotland's performance that the value of these contracts - which can't be broken at a moment's notice - have moved against RBS.

More important, I think, is that operating profits of RBS's retail and commercial operations are almost a fifth better than a year ago at £1.9bn, though a little bit lower than in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The trend at RBS's global banking and markets business - what most would call its investment banking arm - was more volatile. Operating profits were £1.1bn in the latest period, double what was generated in the final quarter of 2010, but a third less than the bumper first three months of last year.

For the bank as a whole, the charge for debts going bad seems to be on an unambiguously declining trend, from £2.7bn in the first quarter of 2010, to £2.1bn in the final quarter of last year, and just under £2bn in the latest quarterly figures.

As for other important measures, RBS is succeeding in widening the gap between what it charges for credit and what it has to pay to borrow (good for shareholders, not always welcomed by customers) - and overheads appear to be under control.

So there is progress towards re-establishing RBS as thriving, growing business, which could prosper without the benefit of exceptional support from taxpayers - although that progress goes by fits and starts rather than in one giant leap (witness, as with Lloyds, a big increase in losses on lending to the troubled Irish economy).

What will perhaps spark some controversy is that the provision of credit to small businesses fell 7%. And, once again, RBS puts this down to a weakness of demand rather than a lack of any determination on its part to supply - but that doesn't enlighten on whether it's the unattractive borrowing terms on offer that puts off some potential business borrowers.

Also RBS has gone on the record for the first time with its opposition to the proposal from the Independent Banking Commission that internal firewalls should be erected inside giant banks such as RBS.

RBS says that the Independent Banking Commission's recommendation that universal banks like it should erect internal firewalls, or should put their retail and investment banking operations into separate insulated subsidiaries, are "likely to add to bank costs - impacting both customers and shareholders -without the safety gains that the broader Basel process is delivering" (the Basel process is the global negotiations on strengthening banks).

It is also striking that RBS signals that it isn't overjoyed at the unilateral decision made yesterday by Lloyds to chuck in the towel in the banks' legal battle against the regulators' judgement that they should make comprehensive restitution to those mis-sold PPI loan insurance. The banks says: "a decision on appeal of the court case...has not yet been made as it relates to important other issues of retrospective regulation".

As I've mentioned before, if RBS follows Lloyds's lead and offers a comprehensive PPI settlement, that would probably cost the bank a bit more than £1bn, about a third of the cost to Lloyds.

And if we're in the business of comparing the two partly nationalised mega banks, Lloyds and RBS, both still look some way from being in a fit state to see taxpayers' huge stakes privatised at a profit to all of us.

However if Lloyds entered the reporting season looking as though it was nearer to privatisation than RBS, their respective latest results probably show RBS inching forward a bit in that journey and Lloyds perhaps retreating slightly.

Andretti Autosport needs sponsorship to re-sign Indy 500 champion Alexander Rossi

Frenchman reportedly leaving KVSH, kicking off IndyCar's driver movement for 2017

SONOMA, Calif. — Simon Pagenaud's excellence this Verizon IndyCar Series season can be summed with two words: One mistake.

Simon Pagenaud and Team Penske will be the featured honorees at Tuesday night's IndyCar Series awards ceremony at the Hilbert Circle Theatre (streamed on IndyCar.com beginning at 6:45 p.m.

Don't blame Josef Newgarden for leaving Ed Carpenter's popular IndyCar Series team, and don't blame powerful Team Penske for signing Newgarden. It's the right thing to do for the employee and his new employer.

All Avon schools will close through March 20 as one student has tested positive and a second student is showing symptoms of the novel coronavirus.

As districts prepare for the possibility of an outbreak of the novel coronavirus in their schools, most consider a move to online learning.

Both school systems are moving to eLearning over coronavirus concerns. They're the second and third districts in the metro area to do so.

Most Marion County public schools will close Friday and all public schools in the county will close by Monday.

Gov. Eric Holcomb announced new steps to combat the spread of the coronavirus Thursday, including the prolonged closure of schools.

Gov. Eric Holcomb announced that all Indiana schools are closed until May 1, possibly beyond that.

Many Indianapolis area districts started eLearning this week only to learn that school closures will be longer than expected due to COVID-19 concerns.

Teachers from North Elementary School in Noblesville decorated their cars and paraded through neighborhoods, waving and honking at students from afar during the closure of schools because of the coronavirus outbreak.

In less than 24 hours, teachers organized a parade of nearly 40 cars to say hello to students from afar.

Schools across the state are closed until at least May 1, and it's possible that will be extended so students finish the year at home.

Colleges across Indiana are navigating how to handle refunds for students who have had to vacate residence halls during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Indianapolis is partnering with YMCA, At Your School and Early Learning Indiana to provide care for children of first responders at a discounted rate.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Jennifer McCormick announced Thursday that schools will stay closed for the rest of the academic year.

Indiana's K-12 schools will stayed closed through the end of the academic year as the state continues to fight the spread of the coronavirus.

While learning loss is a concern, ESL teachers are finding ways to stay connected, even if that means doing more in students' native languages.

With schools and campuses closed, high school seniors are planning for college just like they are finishing their high school careers: virtually.