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.

When facts do not support a criminal charge, prosecution is barred regardless of demand.

Consumers could fight back by not shopping on Thanksgiving.

It's only two weeks into the legislative session and the Indiana General Assembly has already hit an ethical speed bump. Who's steering this bus?

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

More than 100 companies and nonprofits have pledged support for the Your Life Matters initiative, created to help the city's most vulnerable residents. That's a great start, but momentum is critical.

The payoffs for such turnarounds can be extraordinary for the residents who live nearby and for the city as a whole.

The BMV's pattern of poor performance hardly inspires confidence in its ability to adequately monitor itself.

At Indianapolis Motor Speedway, even the old and the great must constantly be made new in today's world, and that's happening. The greatness of the Indianapolis 500, and of race weekend, remains.

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

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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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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Syed Shah usually buys and sells stocks and currencies through his Interactive Brokers account, but he couldn't resist trying his hand at some oil trading on April 20, the day prices plunged below zero for the first time ever. The day trader, working from his house in a Toronto suburb, figured he couldn't lose as he spent $2,400 snapping up crude at $3.30 a barrel, and then 50 cents. Then came what looked like the deal of a lifetime: buying 212 futures contracts on West Texas Intermediate for an astonishing penny each. What he didn't know was oil's first trip into negative pricing had broken Interactive Brokers Group Inc. Its software couldn't cope with that pesky minus sign, even though it was always technically possible -- though this was an outlandish idea before the pandemic -- for the crude market to go upside down. Crude was actually around negative $3.70 a barrel when Shah's screen had it at 1 cent. Interactive Brokers never displayed a subzero price to him as oil kept diving to end the day at minus $37.63 a barrel. At midnight, Shah got the devastating news: he owed Interactive Brokers $9 million. He'd started the day with $77,000 in his account. To be clear, investors who were long those oil contracts had a brutal day, regardless of what brokerage they had their account in. What set Interactive Brokers apart, though, is that its customers were flying blind, unable to see that prices had turned negative, or in other cases locked into their investments and blocked from trading. Compounding the problem, and a big reason why Shah lost an unbelievable amount in a few hours, is that the negative numbers also blew up the model Interactive Brokers used to calculate the amount of margin -- aka collateral -- that customers needed to secure their accounts. "It's a $113 million mistake on our part," said Thomas Peterffy, the chairman and founder of Interactive Brokers, in an interview Wednesday. Customers will be made whole, Peterffy said. "We will rebate from our own funds to our customers who were locked in with a long position during the time the price was negative any losses they suffered below zero."

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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.

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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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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: As hospitals were overrun by coronavirus patients in other parts of the world, the Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S., hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country. The endeavor cost more than $660 million, according to an NPR analysis of federal spending records. But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven't treated a single patient. Public health experts said this episode exposes how ill-prepared the U.S. is for a pandemic. They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds, but experts said there wasn't enough planning to make sure these field hospitals could be put to use once they were finished. "It's so painful because what it's showing is that the plans we have in place, they don't work," said Robyn Gershon, a professor at New York University's School of Global Public Health. "We have to go back to the drawing board and redo it." But the nation's governors -- who requested the Army Corps projects and, in some cases, contributed state funding -- said they're relieved these facilities didn't get more use. They said early models predicted a catastrophic shortage of hospital beds, and no one knew for sure when or if stay-at-home orders would reduce the spread of the coronavirus. "All those field hospitals and available beds sit empty today," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said last month. "And that's a very, very good thing." Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said: "These 1,000-bed alternate care sites are not necessary; they're not filled. Thank God." Senior military leaders also said the effort was a success -- even if the beds sit empty.

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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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SpaceX's newest Starship prototype has fired its engine for the first time, potentially paving the way for a test flight in the very near future. Space.com reports: The SN4, the latest test version of SpaceX's Mars-colonizing Starship vehicle, aced a "static fire" Tuesday night (May 5), lighting up its single Raptor engine briefly while remaining on the ground at the company's South Texas facilities. "Starship SN4 passed static fire," SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via Twitter late on Tuesday. [You can see video of the static fire here.] With the static fire in the rearview mirror, SpaceX can begin prepping the SN4 for its next big moment: an uncrewed test flight, which Musk has said will take the vehicle to a target altitude of about 500 feet (150 meters).

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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.

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The Boston Herald writes that a "video vigilante faces numerous charges after being arrested outside Massachusetts General Hospital where police say he was recording the emergency ramp at the height of the coronavirus pandemic." schwit1 shares their report: John L. McCullough, 41, was charged with trespassing, disturbing the peace and threats to do bodily harm after police say he refused to stop recording Sunday evening. "I informed him that I could not make him stop filming but I asked him to stop out of respect to patient privacy," the arresting officer wrote in a police report obtained by the Herald through a public records request. The next day the newspaper's senior editor posted a follow-up: John L. McCullough told the Herald Tuesday evening he is a First Amendment crusader who takes videos of police and posts them to YouTube. That's what got him a June 2 arraignment date. "I understand how people may feel, but that doesn't mean I should be locked up," McCullough said... "Did I break the law? No. I may have been rude," he added. "I understand people may feel jittery, but where peoples' feelings start my rights don't stop...." Cambridge civil-rights attorney Harvey Silverglate said McCullough will probably have his case tossed, even if what he was doing is seen as crass. "There's no amendment in the Constitution called the humanity amendment," said Silverglate. "It's a free country and you have a right to be a jerk." But taking video outside a hospital during a pandemic and as people try to social distance — and first responders, including the police, face all-too-real health risks — is "pretty distasteful," Silverglate added. Still, he added the judge will "have to throw it out." He added it's "punishment itself" to go to court in this climate. McCullough, records state, does not have an attorney yet. He did say he's ready to plead his case. "Don't be brainwashed," he added, "and it shouldn't be a problem when a black man has a camera." The Herald suggests one more interesting detail. "McCullough said '20 other cameras' were probably rolling at the same time as he was — alluding to security cameras in the area."

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A new hydroxychloroquine study -- "the largest to date" -- was published Thursday in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded that Covid-19 patients taking the drug "do not fare better than those not receiving the drug," reports Time: Dr. Neil Schluger, chief of the division of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine at Columbia, and his team studied more than 1,300 patients admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia University Irving Medical Center for COVID-19. Some received hydroxychloroquine on an off-label basis, a practice that allows doctors to prescribe a drug that has been approved for one disease to treat another — in this case, COVID-19. About 60% of the patients received hydroxychloroquine for about five days. They did not show any lower rate of needing ventilators or a lower risk of dying during the study period compared to people not getting the drug. "We don't think at this point, given the totality of evidence, that it is reasonable to routinely give this drug to patients," says Schluger. "We don't see the rationale for doing that." While the study did not randomly assign people to receive the drug or placebo and compare their outcomes, the large number of patients involved suggests the findings are solid. Based on the results, Schluger says doctors at his hospital have already changed their advice about using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. "Our guidance early on had suggested giving hydroxychloroquine to hospitalized patients, and we updated that guidance to remove that suggestion," he says. In another study conducted at U.S. veterans hospitals where severely ill patients were given hydroxychloroquine, "the drug was found to be of no use against the disease and potentially harmful when given in high doses," reports the Chicago Tribune. They also report that to firmly establish whether the drug has any effect, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now funding a randomized, controlled trial at six medical institutions of hundreds of people who've tested positive for Covid-19.

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"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.

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Boston dominated for most of four quarters but Indiana briefly took the lead in the final minutes behind Victor Oladipo and inspired defensive play.

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

Romeo Langford reflects on a tough outing Tuesday night and what it was like playing in Indiana again.

According to the news release, the NBA will use this hiatus to determine next steps for moving forward in regard to the coronavirus pandemic.

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

Here's what the Big Ten, NCAA and NBA are doing for fans who bought tickets to upcoming games they now cannot attend.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the league would be on hiatus at least 30 days and it's possible the league will not play again this season

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

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.

Michael Jordan returned from retirement on March 19, 1995, against the Indiana Pacers at Market Square Arena

Indiana Pacers staff had one day to prepare for what suddenly became the world's biggest sporting event

The Pacers final game before the NBA went on hiatus was vs. the Celtics, whose player Marcus Smart has tested positive for the coronavirus

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

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

Friday, the Dunking Dutchman took over the Indiana Pacers' Twitter to do a question and answer session with Pacer fans.

This isn't normal, the way we love Larry Bird all these years later, not even for someone as special at sports as Larry Legend.

Joe Young has been playing in China since his time with the Indiana Pacers ended. He is a Houston native

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

Donnie Walsh has been plopped in the middle of America's most famous infectious disease doctor's basketball claim to fame.

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

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

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.