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 new offensive scheme allowing Tri-West graduate to become a difference maker for IU offense.

Being ranked No. 1 in the state is old hat at certain places — Warren Central, Carmel and Ben Davis, to name a few. But not Avon.

The Kansas commit threw five touchdown passes against a defense that entered the game allowing just 6.5 points per game.

The 22-year-old rider from Brownsburg became the youngest time trial winner — with the biggest margin — in the history of road cycling's World Championships.

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

Steve Brunes spent nearly four decades coaching Indiana high school basketball with stops at Brownsburg, Cowan, Columbus East, Castle and Alexandria.

Danville senior Ella Collier is Hendricks County's all-time leading scorer. And it didn't happen by accident.

Brownsburg defeats Plainfield, 55-43

The Brownsburg Bulldogs are back on track after three dominant wins in the Hendricks County tournament.

"I feel like, if I get hot, I'm one of the best shooters in the state," said the Brownsburg senior.

Two people have been confirmed dead after they were found in an overturned vehicle in a creek in Brownsburg on Tuesday.

"We all struggled with personal protective equipment in the funeral industry," said Eric Bell, funeral director and owner of David A. Hall Mortuary in Pittsboro, Ind.

"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 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.

Belatedly, I've got round to looking at the Treasury's recent decision to change how it calculates the necessary contributions that have to be made to cover the future costs of unfunded public service pensions.

My interest was sparked by a letter sent to the chancellor by 23 pension experts, organised by the consultant John Ralfe. They argue that the Treasury has made a mistake in its choice of a new so-called discount rate.

If you think this is tedious abstruse stuff that has no relevance to you, think again. The aggregate public-sector net liability for pensions is so huge - perhaps £1 trillion - that it matters to all of us as taxpayers, especially those likely to be paying tax in 10 and 20 years time, that the government has a reliable and accurate valuation of pension promises.

Pensions represent, to coin the phrase, a massive off-balance-sheet debt. And as we've all learned to our cost from the financial crisis of 2007-8, it is a bad idea to carry on blithely pretending off-balance-sheet liabilities don't exist.

So what is this blessed discount rate? Well in the private sector it can be seen as the number used to translate into today's money a commitment to pay £650 a week pension (for example) for 30 years or so to a retired employee (till he or she dies), so that we can see whether there's enough money in the pension fund to pay that employee (and all the other employees) during his or her long retirement.

The point of the discount rate is to assess whether there's enough money in the pension fund - or whether it needs to be topped up.

Which is all very well, except that for most of the public sector, there are no funds or pots of money to pay for future pensions. Most of the pension promises are unfunded, payable out of employees' current contributions and out of general taxation.

That said, since public sector workers are increasingly expected to make a contribution to the costs of their own pensions, it would presumably be sensible for that contribution to be set at a level that is rationally related to the value of promised pensions.

So what is the best way of measuring the cost today of new pension promises?

Well the government has decided to "discount" those promises by the rate at which the economy is expected to grow.

Now there is some logic to that: the growth rate of the economy should determine the growth rate of tax revenues; and the growth rate of tax revenues will have a direct bearing on whether future pension promises will bankrupt us all or not.

But here's the thing. Any private sector chief executive might well be sent to prison if he or she decided to use the equivalent discount rate for a company, which would be the expected growth rate of that company's revenues or profits.

The reason is that although it might be possible to remove subjectivity (or in a worst case, manipulation) from any long-term forecast of the growth of GDP or of a company's turnover, it is not possible to remove considerable uncertainty.

To illustrate, the Treasury has chosen a GDP growth rate of 3% per annum as the discount rate for public sector pensions, which is considerably above the rate at which the UK economy has grown for years or indeed may grow for many years.

If we were growing at 3%, we would in practice be less worried about the off-balance-sheet liabilities of public-sector pensions, because the on-balance-sheet debt of the government would not be growing at an unsustainably fast rate.

To put it another way, in choosing its view of the long term growth rate of GDP as the discount rate, the Treasury is arguably understating the burden of future pensions to a considerable extent.

So what discount rate do companies use?

Well they are obliged to discount the liabilities at the yield or interest rate on AA rated corporate bonds.

Which may not be ideal, but has some advantages: there is a market price for AA corporate bonds, so the yield or discount rate is difficult to manipulate by unscrupulous employers; and it tells the company how much money would need to be in the pension pot, on the basis that all the money were invested in relatively safe investments (AA corporate bonds).

Now Ralfe and his chums believe that the discount rate for public sector promises should be the yield on long-term index linked gilts (gilts are bonds or debts of the British government) - partly because this too has a difficult-to-manipulate market price and because an index-linked government bond is a very similar liability to a public sector pension promise (both are protected against inflation, both are in effect debts of the government).

They point out that gilt interest and principal payments are paid out of future tax revenues, just as future pensions are. So if the value today of future pensions should be discounted at the GDP rate, that's how index linked gilts should be value on the government's balance sheet - which would be bonkers.

Anyway, if you've read this far (and many congratulations to you if you have), you may take the view that it would not be rational to impose a tougher discount rate on the government than on private-sector companies - which is what Ralfe et al seem to want, in that the yield on index linked gilts will always be lower than the yield on AA corporate bonds (because HMG, even with all its debts, is deemed to be more creditworthy than any British business).

But for a government and for a chancellor who have made it a badge of honour to bring transparency and prudence to public-sector finances, prospective GDP growth does look a slightly rum discount rate for valuing those enormous pension liabilities.

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

SONOMA, Calif. – The men and women who pull racing helmets over their heads are a different breed, defying speed and danger mortals cannot imagine.

IndyCar Series driver James Hinchcliffe has asked to sit for this "Dancing With the Stars" interview because his body is too tired – his feet too sore – to stand.

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.

Coffee table picture book tells the 100-year history of the famous race

Jerry Sneva dies at age 69

Indiana University will move to remote teaching after its scheduled spring break over concerns about the spread of the coronavirus.

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

As the first cases of Hoosiers who test positive for COVID-19 are confirmed, schools in central Indiana are continuing to keep families updated.

As national, state and local officials consider ways to slow the spread of COVID-19, many are closing schools.

The school district provided free grab-and-go breakfasts and lunches for students Monday. It will do it again next Monday (March 23).

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

More Indiana schools are using eLearning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here's some advice to make it a success for students, teachers and parents.

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

Indiana schools will be closed until at least May 1, but districts are ensuring employees continue to get paid.

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.

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

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.

At Indiana University, the invincibility of youth and the freedom of college life are shattered by a school year cut short.

During coronavirus, Indiana schools turn to donors to fill gaps in access to devices and home internet as state and federal resources lag behind.

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

Governor Holcomb announced schools will be closed for the rest of the school year, but districts are committed to continue providing meals for kids.

With schools closed, fifth and eighth grade students navigate the transition from elementary to middle school or middle to high school on their own.

Join IndyStar and #ThankATeacher during Teacher Appreciation Week. These are some educators that are making the best of a bad situation.

This Teacher Appreciation Week, IndyStar asked readers to help recognize some of the amazing teachers going above and beyond during these times.

Kim Tae- hoon, de 45 anos, cuida de 10 meninos norte-coreanos que desertaram do regime repressivo de Pyongyang sem seus pais; o mais novo tem apenas 10 anos e o mais velho, 22.

Ciro Gomes (PDT), Kim Kataguiri (DEM), Joice Hasselmann (PSL), Alessandro Molon (PSB) e outros autores de pedidos de impeachment de Bolsonaro avaliam as chances do impedimento prosseguir no Congresso.

Observadores do setor preveem mudanças nos aeroportos e no tráfego de pessoas, além de temer demissões em massa, em meio a uma grande incerteza sobre o futuro próximo.

A experiência do comerciante Ho Song, que vive no Brasil e foi diagnosticado na Coreia do Sul, ajuda a entender como o país asiático se tornou uma referência no combate ao coronavírus.

"I'm pretty sure he's one-and-done. I just want to see how they develop him. What they do for him is key for me."

"Us being from Indiana, you know, going there, we would be taken care of the rest of our life."

Tom Allen and his staff will have positional questions to work whenever they can bring the Hoosiers back together.