The financial disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic are growing. April brings new challenges for renters, homeowners and small-business owners.

Plans have been delayed by actions taken to slow the spread of the coronavirus, but Indianapolis restaurant owners have not given up on their dreams.

Indiana will issue unemployment benefits to workers who do not typically qualify. But distributing new federal stimulus money will take time.

Cummins is partnering with Minnesota-based 3M to make filters for use in respirators used during the COVID-19 outbreak.

More than 22 million Americans are out of work because of how the coronavirus has shut down much of the economy.

The Conrad Indianapolis temporarily suspended operations as occupancy rates for Downtown hotels nosedive because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The parent company of Indiana's second largest coal company, with ties to the Trump administration, landed $10 million in coronavirus relief aid.

Emmis hopes to reduce expenses, focus on growth.

Indianapolis officials say they have concerns about Simon Property Group's timelines to reopen shopping malls in Marion County.

Simon Property Group has changed the opening date for malls in Indianapolis to May 16. Its other shopping centers in Indiana will reopen earlier.

The pandemic has impacted us in many ways, but despite these challenges, our commitment to our community and you is stronger than ever.

In a blog post yesterday, Samsung announced plans to launch a Samsung Pay debit card this summer. The Verge reports: Samsung will launch the card, which will be backed by a cash management account, in partnership with personal finance company SoFi, Ahn said. Samsung is also developing a "mobile-first money management platform," according to Ahn. His blog doesn't detail what features that money management platform or the upcoming debit card may have, but he does say that Samsung will share more details "in the coming weeks." Samsung joins Apple in offering a branded payment card. Google is reportedly working on its own branded payment card as well, though Google's will apparently be a debit card, like Samsung's. Google will also supposedly offer spending-tracking tools for the card.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Annual Las Vegas hacker gathering DEF CON has officially called off its physical conference for this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Register reports: In what was pretty much a foregone conclusion, the organizing team today said the in-person event would not be held in 2020. It had been slated to take place in August. This comes after the more formal Black Hat USA event, usually scheduled to run the same week as DEF CON in Sin City, was shelved as an in-person shindig, due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic forcing everyone to stay home where possible. Both shows will tentatively take place as web streaming affairs this summer. For DEF CON 28, this means a 'Safe Mode' online gathering, with video streams and a Discord server, between August 6 and 9. "Even if a vaccine were to be discovered tomorrow it would not be soon enough to test, manufacture, distribute and administer in time for people to safely to travel by August," explained Jeff "The Dark Tangent" Moss. "Too many states have stayed open or are reopening, people partied for far too long, and the lack of federal coordination gives me no hope that things will get back to normal this year. I also worry that the conferences that postponed to later this year will be caught up in the 'second wave' after restrictions start to ease and they will end up having to cancel. Because of this, postponing for DEF CON was not an option."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: GPS is facing a major interference threat from a 5G network approved by the Federal Communications Commission, U.S. military officials told Congress in a hearing on Wednesday. In testimony to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy disputed the FCC's claims that conditions imposed on the Ligado network will protect GPS from interference. When the FCC approved Ligado's plan last month, the agency required a 23MHz guard band to provide a buffer between the Ligado cellular network and GPS. Deasy argued that this guard band won't prevent interference with GPS signals. Results from tests by federal agencies show that "conditions in this FCC order will not prevent impacts to millions of GPS receivers across the United States, with massive complaints expected to come," Deasy said. The FCC unanimously approved Ligado's application, but the decision is facing congressional scrutiny. "I do not think it is a good idea to place at risk the GPS signals that enable our national and economic security for the benefit of one company and its investors," Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said at the hearing, according to CNBC. "This is about much more than risking our military readiness and capabilities. Interfering with GPS will hurt the entire American economy." A spokesperson for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called the military's concerns "baseless fear-mongering" in a statement quoted by Multichannel News. "The FCC made a unanimous, bipartisan decision based on sound engineering principles," the spokesperson said. The FCC said "the metric used by the Department of Defense to measure harmful interference does not, in fact, measure harmful interference," and that "testing on which they are relying took place at dramatically higher power levels than the FCC approved." "Ligado said Wednesday in a statement that it has gone to great lengths to prevent interference and will provide 'a 24/7 monitoring capability, a hotline, a stop buzzer or kill switch' and will 'repair or replace at Ligado's cost any government device shown to be susceptible to harmful interference,'" CNBC reported. The FCC also said it imposed a power limit of 9.8dBW on Ligado's downlink operations -- "a greater than 99 percent reduction from what Ligado proposed in its 2015 application," Pai said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Crawling along the world's river bottoms, the larvae of the caddis fly suffer a perpetual housing crisis. To protect themselves from predators, they gather up sand grains and other sediment and paste them all together with silk, forming a cone that holds their worm-like bodies. As they mature and elongate, they have to continuously add material to the case -- think of it like adding rooms to your home for the rest of your life, or at least until you turn into an adult insect. If the caddis fly larva somehow loses its case, it's got to start from scratch, and that's quite the precarious situation for a defenseless tube of flesh. And now, the microplastic menace is piling onto the caddis fly's list of tribulations. Microplastic particles -- pieces of plastic under 5 millimeters long -- have already corrupted many of Earth's environments, including the formerly pristine Arctic and deep-sea sediments. In a study published last year, researchers in Germany reported finding microplastic particles in the cases of caddis flies in the wild. Then, last month, they published the troubling results of lab experiments that found the more microplastic particles a caddis fly larva incorporates into its case, the weaker that structure becomes. That could open up caddis flies to greater predation, sending ripple effects through river ecosystems. In the lab, the researchers found that the larvae chose to use two kinds of microplastics to build their cases, likely because the plastic is lighter than the sand, so it's not as hard to lift. The problem is that the cases with more plastic and less sand collapse more easily, weakening the larvae's protection from predatory fish, among other things. A more long-term concern is bioaccumulation. "A small fish eats a larva, a bigger fish eats the smaller fish, all the way on up, and the concentrations of microplastic and associated toxins accumulate over time," the report says. "The bigger predators that people eat, like tuna, may be absorbing those microplastics and the chemicals they leach." The study has been published in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Software developers, like everyone else, have had to transition to a work-from-home world," writes InfoWorld. For the users of GitHub, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant changes in work cadence and collaboration, along with an increased risk of burnout, a GitHub study of usage patterns on the Microsoft-owned code sharing site has found." In an "Octoverse spotlight" analysis published May 6, 2020, GitHub compared the first three months of 2020 with the first three months of 2019... GitHub said its analysis shows that developers have been resilient to the change wrought by COVID-19, with activity holding consistent or increasing through the crisis. But their analysis also found: Developers are working longer, by "up to an hour per day," seven days a week. Slightly more pushes, pull requests, reviewed pull requests, and commented issues. More collaboration on open source projects, and less time to merge pull requests into open source projects.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite a rough outing Tuesday night, Brad Stevens and Celtics believe the future is bright for the pride of New Albany.

Dallas Mavericks owner and IU alum is taken aback to learn the NBA is stopping play in the wake of a player's coronavirus test

Sabonis has two dance videos out, one in Pacers gear, the other shirtless.

"When we do start back, everybody will be off the same amount of time," McMillan says.

Domantas Sabonis is a long shot in the NBA's video game tournament; he was a long shot before making the All-Star skills competition final, too

If $200,000 is raised by Thursday, Herb Simon and Jim Irsay will boost the pot that goes to neighborhood centers linked to United Way

Three boys grew up knowing someone named Roger Brown was their grandfather. Then, one day, they began to understand the legacy of the Pacers legend.

Myles Turner of the Indiana Pacers discusses coronavirus and how his performance changed after the All-Star break

Source: The Pacers will listen to the government and follow its lead before bringing players back

Turner: 'It was a rough path for a couple of weeks'

Indiana Pacers are coming off a second straight season with 48 regular-season wins and a first-round playoff loss

What Miller did may have been the greatest one-man comeback in the history of the NBA.

Busy weekend traffic couldn't sustain the restaurant, co-owner says

IndyStar's Liz Biro demonstrates how to turn a Thin Mint Girl Scout cookie into a straw to drink milk, beer or bourbon.

Stay toasty during dinner or warm up with a drink at these 10 Indy restaurants with fireplaces.

Tacos, smoked wings, a brewery with pizza and a kart track serving burgers are right across the street from the Indy 500.

Take a look at a new Downtown Indianapolis restaurant with Japanese-style crepes, T-Swirl Crepe.

Take a look at a variety of crepes being created at T-Swirl Crepe, a new place to eat in Downtown Indianapolis.

Whether it's out of necessity, to pass time or to calm nerves, bread baking is a hot topic during coronavirus pandemic

The Netflix series "Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker" was produced in Ontario, Canada. But it references Indianapolis locations.

Restaurants and bars in central Indiana respond to the coronavirus, or COVID-19, health pandemic while operating under state-issued restrictions.

Tucked into his porch, musician Tim Brickley sang classics for a tiny group of neighbors and passersby as relief from home isolation.

Empty seats. Silent screens. How Franklin's Artcraft Theater is weathering the pandemic.

Shapiro's delicatessen, a Kosher eatery just south of Downtown Indianapolis, is adapting to a carryout model amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Several Indianapolis-area restaurants are offering brunch deals and takeout specials to help mom relax and stay out of the kitchen on Mother's Day.

As a fundraiser for Feeding America, the cast of "Parks and Recreation" shot a special episode during the coronavirus pandemic. It will air April 30.

Finalists for the James Beard Foundation's culinary awards have been announced, and Indianapolis isn't on the list.

Symphony on the Prairie has been canceled, along with other popular concerts this summer. Here's when the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra will be back

Sign up for IndyStar's Things To Do newsletter. "The IndianapoList" gives you new ways to explore your city and the quirky stories behind it.

Discover new restaurants, the best drinks and local food at Liz Biro's new Indylicious Facebook group.

These restaurants are turning Indiana's ban on dining in restaurants to their favor by throwing back to olden days with drive-up service.

As The Children's Museum, Newfields and others wait for the OK to reopen, they are strategizing how to keep visitors safe from the coronavirus spread.

Sample Indy's best burgers, crush a bunch of ice cream and load up on discounts at restaurants.

We're on the quest to find Indianapolis' best things in 150 categories. Nominate your favorites now!