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

The number of workers seeking unemployment benefits in Indiana rose for another week during the coronavirus pandemic.

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.

Indiana businesses are receiving a second round of payroll protection loans to assist with the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic.

The number of initial unemployment claims filed in Indiana last week has dropped compared to the number of new claims filed a week earlier.

The unemployment rate in the United States is surging because of business closures and disruptions related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Honda announced Friday it would start resuming production at its U.S. and Canada plants, including one in Greensburg.

Gov. Mike Pence's Scott County order allowing a needle-exchange program is a welcome step. But it's just a start.

The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 14.7 percent in April, the highest level since the Great Depression, as many businesses shut down or severely curtailed operations to try and limit the spread of the deadly coronavirus. From a report: The Labor Department said 20.5 million people abruptly lost their jobs, wiping out a decade of employment gains in a single month. The speed and magnitude of the loss defies comparison. It is roughly double what the nation experienced during the entire 2007-09 crisis. As the virus's rapid spread accelerated in March, President Trump and numerous governors imposed restrictions that led businesses to suddenly shed millions of workers, putting the economy in a deep freeze. Analysts warn it could take many years to return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate the nation experienced in February in part because it's unclear what a new economy will look like even if scientists make progress on a vaccine, testing, and treatment.

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Uber lost $2.9 billion in the first quarter as its overseas investments were hammered by the coronavirus pandemic, but the company is looking to its growing food delivery business and aggressive cost-cutting to ease the pain. Tech Xplore reports: The ride-hailing giant said Thursday it is offloading Jump, its bike and scooter business, to Lime, a company in which it is investing $85 million. Jump had been losing about $60 million a quarter. "While our Rides business has been hit hard by the ongoing pandemic, we have taken quick action to preserve the strength of our balance sheet, focus additional resources on Uber Eats, and prepare us for any recovery scenario," said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a statement. "Along with the surge in food delivery, we are encouraged by the early signs we are seeing in markets that are beginning to open back up." On Wednesday, San Francisco-based Uber said it was cutting 3,700 full-time workers, or about 14% of its workforce, as people avoiding contagion either stay indoors or try to limit contact with others. Its main U.S. rival Lyft announced last month it would lay off 982 people, or 17% of its workforce because of plummeting demand. Careem, Uber's subsidiary in the Middle East, cut its workforce by 31%. Uber brought in $3.54 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 14% from the same time last year. Revenue in its Eats meal delivery business grew 53% as customers shuttered at home opted to order in. Gross bookings grew 8% to $15.8 billion, with 54% growth in the food delivery business and a 3% decline in rides, on a constant currency basis. The report adds that rides were down 80% globally during the month of April. "But rides have been increasing for the past three weeks and bookings in large cities across Georgia and Texas, two states that started re-opening, are up 43% and 50% respectively from their lowest points," the report says.

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IT services provider Cognizant said in an earnings call this week that a ransomware incident that took place last month in April 2020 will negatively impact its Q2 revenue. ZDNet reports: "While we anticipate that the revenue impact related to this issue will be largely resolved by the middle of the quarter, we do anticipate the revenue and corresponding margin impact to be in the range of $50 million to $70 million for the quarter," said Karen McLoughlin, Cognizant Chief Financial Officer in an earnings call yesterday. McLoughlin also expects the incident to incur additional and unforeseen legal, consulting, and other costs associated with the investigation, service restoration, and remediation of the breach. The Cognizant CFO says the company has now fully recovered from the ransomware infection and restored the majority of its services. Speaking on the ransomware attack, Cognizant CEO Brian Humphries said the incident only impacted its internal network, but not customer systems. More precisely, Humphries said the ransomware incident impacted (1) Cognizant's select system supporting employees' work from home setups and (2) the provisioning of laptops that Cognizant was using to support its work from home capabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Humphries said staff moved quickly to take down all impacted systems, which impacted Cognizant's billing system for a period of time. Some customer services were taken down as a precaution.

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Google's move to put Javier Soltero, VP and GM of G Suite, in charge of Messages, Duo, and the phone app on Android, puts all of Google's major communication products under one umbrella: Soltero's team. Dieter Bohn reports via The Verge: Soltero tells me that there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of Google's apps, so don't get your hopes up for that (yet). "We believe people make choices around the products that they use for specific purposes," Soltero says. Still, Google's communications apps are in dire need of a more coherent and opinionated production development, and Soltero could very well be the right person to provide that direction. Prior to joining Google, he had a long career that included creating the much-loved Acompli email app, which Microsoft acquired and essentially turned into the main Outlook app less than two months after signing the deal. Soltero has also moved rapidly (at least by the standards of Google's communication apps) to clean up the Hangouts branding mess, converting Hangouts Video to Google Meet and Hangouts Chat to Google Chat -- at least on the enterprise side. Google Meet also became free for everybody far ahead of the original schedule because of the pandemic. Cleaning up the consumer side of all that is more complicated, but Soltero says, "The plan continues to be to modernize [Hangouts] towards Google Meet and Google Chat." "Soltero will remain on the cloud team but will join Hiroshi Lockheimer's leadership team," Dieter adds. While Lockheimer believes there are opportunities to better integrate Google's apps into its platforms, he says it doesn't make sense to force integration or interoperability too quickly. "It's not necessarily a bad thing that there are multiple communications applications if they're for a different purpose," Lockheimer says. "Part of what might be confusing, what we've done to confuse everyone, is our history around some of our communications products that have gone from one place or another place. But we're looking forward now, in a way that has a much more coherent vision."

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An anonymous reader quotes CNN: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued an emergency use authorization for the first at-home Covid-19 test that uses saliva samples, the agency said in a news release. Rutgers University's RUCDR Infinite Biologics lab received an amended emergency authorization late Thursday. With the test, people can collect their own saliva at home and send their saliva samples to a lab for results... "Authorizing additional diagnostic tests with the option of at-home sample collection will continue to increase patient access to testing for COVID-19. This provides an additional option for the easy, safe and convenient collection of samples required for testing without traveling to a doctor's office, hospital or testing site," FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen M. Hahn said in the FDA's press release on Friday... The test remains prescription only.

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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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Donnie Strack, now in the Thunder front office, checked out Utah's Rudy Gobert on the night of the league's first COVID-19-related cancellation.

An insurance payment due to Victor Oladipo's injury gives Pacers lowest payroll in NBA

Mike Conley is Tamika Catchings' first-round opponent in the NBA's HORSE event on ESPN; competitors will remain separated

Michael Jordan after his first title on 'The Last Dance': 'At last I fit somewhere in the category of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson'

Indiana Pacers TV announcers Chris Denari and Quinn Buckner are among those up for honors

Mike Storen, the Pacers' first general manager, former ABA commissioner and the father of ESPN broadcaster Hannah Storm, died Thursday. He was 84.

Italian beef and Chicago-style hot dogs are now being sold near Ronald Reagan Parkway and U.S. 36.

The Vasquez family makes tamales to sell at the Carmel Farmer's Market

Wagyu steak, baby lamb chops, dumplings, pie and more were served with fine wine at the IndyStar Wine & Food Experience at Clay Terrace in Carmel.

Restaurant owners are discussing what could change after coronavirus restrictions lift in Indiana. Here are some changes that could be on the way.

After ending print publication in 2019 and moving to online nonprofit model, Nuvo will cease operations.

Two Indianapolis restaurants have announced they will permanently close.

Miss an episode of "Dogfish Head Brewery presents IndyStar Sessions at Square Cat Vinyl"? We have the musical highlights.

The sports bar and restaurant owned by former Colts football player and Super Bowl champion Gary Brackett is closing.

First-half incident resulted in an ejection for Illini player as he stepped on Boilermakers guard

Boilermakers and Hoosiers try to break into the upper echelon of Big Ten football recruiting

Villanueva will fulfill the remaining term after former-Prosecutor Brad Cooper was convicted in a felony domestic violence case in July.

The rural Johnson County town hopes to take advantage of growth while retaining its small-town charm.

McCorkle leads the Class A second-ranked Cougars in scoring (13.7 ppg), rebounding (6.9) and assists (4.2) through 11 games this season.

The Johnson County jail will soon undergo a $23 million expansion to ease overcrowding. The jail could need yet another expansion after that.

The Johnson County jail in Franklin will soon undergo a more than $23 million expansion.

With most stores remaining closed, Greenwood Park Mall reopened to the public on the first day of Phase 2 of Gov. Holcomb's coronavirus pandemic plan.

Two sessions on Sunday at Heritage Christian

MIC all-conference teams for basketball, wrestling and swimming

There are many ways to extend Apache Spark and one of the easiest is with functions that manipulate one of more columns in a DataFrame. When considering different Spark function types, it is important to not ignore the full set … Continue reading →

Treating a sold-out crowd to hit songs in bunches, Imagine Dragons deliver a memorable spectacle on Indianapolis date of the "Evolve" tour.

TV producers are being quizzed over their treatment of up and coming stars. Find out more in this programme.

Some people like to read something more unusual than magazines or books. Take Away English reports.

Two Chinese snooker stars have battled it out at the World Championship in England. But who won?

TV producers are being quizzed over their treatment of up-and-coming stars. Find out more in this programme.

Michael Jordan after his first title on 'The Last Dance': 'At last I fit somewhere in the category of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson'

Indiana Pacers TV announcers Chris Denari and Quinn Buckner are among those up for honors

Mike Storen, the Pacers' first general manager, former ABA commissioner and the father of ESPN broadcaster Hannah Storm, died Thursday. He was 84.

Hear how people are making changes to their lifestyle to adapt to the current economic trend.